“To me, the water is the story,” said Tom Shepherd, an organic farmer in
Santa Barbara County’s
Santa Ynez Valley. “Here we are, in the midst of a drought, and you’re not concerned about your water and fracking? The aquifers have been drawn down. The rain we’ve had has been absorbed by the ground. The creeks don’t run.”
Used for decades
Oil companies consider fracking safe, saying they’ve used it in California for decades without a single documented case of groundwater contamination.