WV Senate Bill #508 is a Kick in the Face to Local Residents
FrackcheckWV
WV Senate Bill #508 is a Kick in the Face to Local Residents
There is Now a Dangerous Bill in the WV Legislature
Essay by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV
Senate Bill 508, now in the Committees on the Judiciary of the West Virginia Legislature, introduced February 4, is a real stinker. It attempts to limit the common law definition of nuisance suit to fit the needs of the extraction industries.
Coal is a walking corpse, producing lots of money for a very few and a few jobs, is on the way down. Its waste condemns it to “least desirable” position among familiar fuels, and, in spite of what little regulation the State forces on it, converts thousands of acres of West Virginia to wasteland each year. At least three major coal companies are bankrupt.
Unconventional gas and oil drilling are wobbling like a drunken sailor. At best it is a “transition fuel” to renewable sources of energy, and money has been spent, and continues to be spent, like the sailor did while becoming drunk. People in the discovery and production end of the business enjoy bright hope, but have high cost of production, transportation and liquefaction, and ignore huge supplies near the big markets, Europe and China.
It is clear some of the state legislators want to reduce cost of extraction by transferring damage done by frackers and strippers to the rural folks living in and near these sacrifice zones. They can’t conceive of any way to improve life in West Virginia other than knuckling down to coal, oil and gas interests, and this new initiative is about the only advantage they can confer, since laws and enforcement are already so favorable to those interests.
That is the background for SB 508. What it does is to revise the definition of nuisance suit about out of existence. If you can meet the requirements of this bill, you would be able to make an ordinary damage suit, in most cases. The bill reads, in part “No person may bring an action for private nuisance unless proper evidence of physical property damage or bodily injury caused by the substantial and unreasonable interference exists.” So, witnesses don’t count. (You hillbillies aren’t reliable, even to judge your neighbor’s loss.)
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