"Completely and utterly false:" The media gets it wrong again

Audrey Hudson writes a piece about how the media jumped on lies about oil and gas spills in Colorado during the recent floods.

Stories of massive oil spills and fracking fluid saturating the raging floodwaters that devastated Colorado are now seeping into national media accounts of the disaster and painting pictures of environmental destruction.

The problem is, it’s not true, said Doug Flanders, director of policy and external affairs for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.

There were no hydraulic fracturing operations functioning when the floods hit the region, no fracking equipment at the well sites, no fracking chemicals on any site, Flanders said.

There were no wellbore incidents, 1,900 oil and gas wells were shut-in, or capped in real time, and the integrity of tanks remained intact. The 12 notable oil spills that did occur could fill five percent of an Olympic size swimming pool and were the result of cracks in flowlines that connected to equipment, Flanders said.

“So, the fact people were saying we were having this fracking disaster is just completely and utterly false,” Flanders said.

Rep. Jared Polis added his voice Friday to the anti-fracking narrative by calling for a congressional hearing on the oil leaks from Colorado’s historic flooding.

Salon, CNN, The Denver Post, television stations, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, were among the media outlets who got the story completely wrong. But, hey, it fit the narrative, right?

A front page Denver Post story with the headline “Oil spilling into mix” featured a dramatic photo of an “oil spill,” only the scene it depicted was not actually an oil spill. Flanders asked for a correction, which took the paper seven days to issue after it was published on Sept. 20, and stated that the substance was standing water left behind after the floodwaters receded.

However, the flood waters did contain pollution from millions of gallons of sewage from septic systems, damaged sewer lines, and flooded waste treatment plants, and E. coli was discovered in the city of Lyon’s drinking water.