A natural gas site near Dawson Creek, B.C., damaged by a blast on December 3, 2008. Photo credit: RCMP.

The RCMP’s recent decision to raise the temperature in this region by officially describing the gas well blasts as “terrorism” is unlikely to improve the relationship between the investigators and area residents. “This is not the work of eco-terrorists, for God’s sakes,” Andrew Nikiforuk, the author of the 2002 book, “Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil,” said in a particularly prescient October 2008 interview. “This is the work of a pissed-off landowner who’s probably a property-rights advocate, who doesn’t like the fact that either his health has been damaged, or his property has been devalued by sour-gas developments.” In that same interview, Nikiforuk rejected the idea that the intent of the person(s) behind the bombing was to injure people. “Whoever did this wanted to make the headlines, they didn’t want to kill people. If you want to kill people up there with sour gas, it would be very easy to do. There are thousands and thousands of pipelines, wells, and scores of sour-gas plants up there,” he said. “Whoever did this planned it very well, picked the locations very carefully, and seems to have been either skilfully adept at not rupturing a pipeline, or skilfully inept at not rupturing a pipeline — and I suspect there are signs here of skilful adeptness.”

Letter from the bomber that preceded the first blast at an EnCana facility. Courtesy RCMP.

The original letter, above, that preceded the first bombing some nine months ago identified the unregulated and unrestricted growth of the oil and gas industry and its effects on the health and security of local residents as the source of the author’s anger. Blair Lekstrom, the MLA for Peace River South and the Minister of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources, believes that the government has made progress on that front. “We have acted on a number of things,” Lekstrom said in an interview with the Dawson Creek Daily News recently. “The setbacks and the flaring we’re working on right now as I committed to. There have been numerous issues raised that we have moved on in the last six-months, and I’m quite proud of what we have been able to do.” These issues include introducing a code of conduct for the land agents who interact with local homeowners on behalf of the oil and gas companies, the opening of an Oil and Gas Commission in Dawson Creek and Fort Nelson, and the creation of a farmer’s advocate.

For the bomber, though, that doesn’t appear to be enough, judging by the two most recent bombings. In time, whether because of a misstep on the bomber’s part, a tip from the public, or just good old-fashioned detective work, the RCMP will break the case and make an arrest, but that will only be the end of the beginning of this story. The rest of the story will turn on whether local officials continue to insist that the person responsible for the bombings was an isolated lunatic, a dangerous idiot with an unreasonable vendetta against local industry. If they do, another disgruntled individual willing to take the law into his own hands will materialize in time, just as Wiebo Ludwig did a decade earlier. Violence, after all, is a perfectly logical way of expressing political dissent in a part of the country whose culture is informed in equal parts of anti-government prairie populism and stubborn, gun-at-the-hip, can-do northern individualism, and more effective than any facebook petition, political rally, or other form of civilized political disagreement could ever hope to be.

The bigger challenge facing local officials, from Liberal MLA Blair Lekstrom, who conveniently enough is also the Minister of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources, all the way down to the mayors of towns like Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Pouce Coupe, and even little Tomslake, where this all began nine months ago, is to recognize that the public’s silence throughout this investigation represents a form of protest of its own. Nobody up here wanted to see anyone hurt or injured while doing their job, but neither do they want to have to see their quality of life sacrificed to the development of the gas industry, or live with the long-term consequences of being so close to such a dangerous substance. It’s time for someone to find a middle ground between these two equally toxic alternatives.

Monday: Why no leads? Yesterday: Everyone’s a suspect. Today: Will the bombings change anything?

Max Fawcett is the editor of the Chetwynd Echo, a weekly newspaper serving the community of Chetwynd, B.C., and a contributing editor at Dooneyscafe.com.

Site of two bombings of EnCana natural gas facilities near Dawson Creek, B.C., one on July 1, 2009, the second on July 4. Police are still seeking a suspect. Photo credit: RCMP.

If the gas that was coming out the ground in Northern B.C.  smelled like rose petals, it might not be such a big deal. The well sites, after all, are relatively small and inconspicuous compared to those required to extract oil from the ground, and it’s not like people up here are short on land. But sour gas doesn’t smell like rose petals, and its effect on the health of those who are unfortunate enough to live near the source of its extraction is no prettier. Sour gas, a form of natural gas that contains significant amounts of hydrogen sulfide, is unpopular among the ranchers, farmers, and other rural residents who are forced to count the well sites as neighbours.

The gas, exposure to which can lead to everything from memory loss, headaches, and dizziness at lower levels to reproductive disorders such as miscarriages, birth defects and even death at higher concentrations, is routinely released into the air by companies that would rather flare it on site—quite literally, burn it off—than transport it to a refinery where the hydrogen sulfide could be removed more safely. While these wells used to be sunk deep into the bush, away from populated areas, the sheer number of them being drilled, combined with the savings associated with using local transport and energy infrastructure, means that the wells are now frequently placed no further than 100 metres away from the property limits of homeowners. Governor General Award winning author Andrew Nikiforuk describes living near a sour gas as being “like having a child molester in your neighbourhood. You never know when it’s going to go off; when there’s going to be a problem. So it introduces to agricultural communities a level of risk and hazard that was never there before.”

Some of these homeowners have fought back, most famously the infamous Wiebo Ludwig, who waged a decade-long war against EnCana that ultimately resulted in convictions on five charges related to bombings, and other forms of vandalism against the company’s installations, that landed him in prison for 28 months. Despite the presence of a local culture that holds personal independence and a facility with firearms in roughly equal esteem, many residents in the Peace are more reticent than Ludwig was to get into a confrontation with the oil and gas companies in the area. In a March 23, 2004 piece published by The Tyee, journalist Shefa Siegel tried, without success, to get residents affected by their proximity to sour gas wells to go on the record. “I don’t know what it’s going to take for people to wake up to what’s happening here,” one local who wished to remain anonymous told him. “We’re even scared to grow a garden because we don’t want to eat food from our land. We don’t have any idea what’s in the soil.” Another, he writes, ”sought me out to discuss burns on their bodies suffered after what they believed was an unpublicized leak at a nearby well. I met a number of other families who claimed their lives are in ruin because of sour wells perched in view of their kitchen windows. I made notes on their health woes, their trouble getting physicians to take them seriously, and their feelings of abandonment. But none of these sources would agree to be identified by name.”

The reason why so many won’t talk is because they know what the penalty associated with doing so looks like. The big companies, Siegel wrote, might offer modest cash settlements in exchange for non-disclosure agreements, but they’re just as likely to engage them in a court battle in which their exceptionally deep pockets give them a nearly insurmountable advantage.

As one frustrated resident told Siegel, “Look, I want to talk to you, but I’ve been shouting about this for five years, and no good has come of it. I can’t afford to pay a lawyer if it comes to that. I just want to sell my land and get my family out of here.”

Local, provincial, and federal politicians aren’t of much help, either, given the fact that the extraction of natural gas is increasingly the only business of consequence in the Peace Region. In 2008-09, the revenues from the sale of oil and gas land rights hit a record $2.4 billion, a figure that was double the previous record of $1.2 set in 2007-08, and four times the $625.7 million the province took in just five years earlier in 2003-04. Despite lagging global commodity markets the natural gas exploration boom doesn’t look like it’s going to stop, with all the big players exploring new plays in the region from Tumbler Ridge in the south up to Fort Nelson. That boom, which has already created 34,000 new jobs since 2001, is welcome in a region that has seen just as many jobs in the forest industry disappear with little hope of them ever returning.

But while the natural gas industry is a big hit in northern communities like Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, at the corporate headquarters in Vancouver, and the government offices in Victoria, the people who have to live in close proximity to the thousands of well sites that pockmark the Peace are less enthusiastic. That disaffection helps to explain why the public in the Peace appears to have elected to sit on their collective hands when it comes to the RCMP’s investigation. In an unintentionally ironic statement, the RCMP announced on January 13th that they were offering a $500,000 for anyone who provided information that led directly to the arrest of those responsible for the bombings, and noted that their investigators “are being thwarted by uncooperative residents in the area who are opposed to sour gas exploration.” Right now, that definition could include just about everybody living within a kilometre of a sour gas well, which is, well, just about everybody.

Yesterday: Why no leads? Today: Everyone’s a suspect. Wednesday: Will the bombings change anything?

Max Fawcett is the editor of the Chetwynd Echo, a weekly newspaper serving the community of Chetwynd, B.C., and a contributing editor at Dooneyscafe.com.

A natural gas well head near Dawson Creek, B.C., site of a deliberate blast that partially destroyed the well's metering shed on January 4, 2009. Photo source: RCMP.

[Editor’s note: this series of blog posts on the bombings of natural gas wells in Northern B.C. will run over three days, starting today. Look for part two on Tuesday morning and the final part on Wednesday.]

When I agreed to take a job as the editor of a small newspaper in Chetwynd, B.C., I didn’t expect to find myself in the middle of an ongoing national story. I learned about the first bombing of an EnCana pipeline as I listened to CBC radio while driving across the country, stuck somewhere between Ignace, Ont., and Theodore, Sask., and I didn’t expect the story to last the two days it would take me to get to Dawson Creek, B.C, the major city closest to where the bombing took place. Yet almost nine months after I arrived in the Peace Region the campaign of bombings continues, while the person(s) responsible for them continue to elude the RCMP. The bomber celebrated Canada Day with a personalized fireworks display, launching another attack on an EnCana installation that was just a few kilometres from Dawson Creek. As RCMP investigators were collecting evidence from that incident, the bomber struck again on the fourth of July.

For those who don’t live up here, this campaign of bombings must be more than a little confusing. How, you must wonder, can the RCMP—with the assistance of INSET, the integrated national security enforcement team—have made so little progress in finding the person or persons responsible for six separate bombings in a pair of communities, Pouce Coupe and Tomslake, that together barely exceed the population of the average Toronto-area high school? Forget looking for a needle in a haystack; for trained law enforcement officers working with $500,000 in reward money, this should be like looking for a needle inside an empty manila envelope.

Yet in more than eight months, during which time the RCMP has moved from chiding the public for their lack of co-operation to virtually begging them for their assistance, they have been unable to produce a suspect. A series of surveillance photographs taken by a security-camera in the Shoppers Drug Mart in Dawson Creek, where the RCMP believes the initial letter threatening EnCana was sent from, yielded nothing. Likewise, the $500,000 reward has failed to lubricate the local tongues that the RCMP believes hold information that’s vital to the case. The locals, it seems, aren’t particularly interested in helping the RCMP catch the person or persons responsible for the bombings.

There’s a good reason for that, and it smells like rotten eggs. While one would be hard pressed to find anybody who would express support for the bomber’s methods on the record, it might be even more difficult to find somebody who doesn’t sympathize with the motives behind his actions. Virtually everyone who owns land in the Peace Region has had to come to terms with a legal technicality that dictates that while they might own the land on which their home, their farm, or their ranch sits, they don’t own the rights to what lies beneath it. In a region rich with oil and gas deposits and an international commodity market increasing desperate for each, that’s a recipe for conflict.

Today: Why no leads? Tomorrow: Everyone’s a suspect. Wednesday: Will the bombings change anything?

Max Fawcett is the editor of the Chetwynd Echo, a weekly newspaper serving the community of Chetwynd, B.C., and a contributing editor at Dooneyscafe.com.