By Russell Gold and Tom McGinty | The Wall Street Journal
More than 15 million Americans now live within one mile of a fracking well. The shale boom is creating conflicts between those who are profiting from the wells and those who aren’t. Photo: Benjamin Rasmussen for The Wall Street Journal
Over the summer, something sprang up in the view from Dorsey Johnson’s back deck north of Denver, where she watches sunsets over Colorado’s front range.
It was a noisy, towering rig, drilling a new oil well.
“There was clanking. There were trucks going by,” she says. All she wanted was for the rig to go away.
Across the U.S., new oil and gas wells have turned millions of people into the petroleum industry’s neighbors. For many, the oil and gas companies are welcome newcomers bearing checks. Others consider the new arrivals loud, smelly and disruptive. The drilling boom is firing up resentment in some communities when one person’s financial windfall means their neighbors abut a working well.
