SILT —A critic of the gas drilling industry believes the Bill Barrett Corp. is polluting the air here with ongoing well-flaring activities not far from town.
“The stuff is just hanging there,” said Peggy Tibbetts, who lives in Silt and writes an Internet blog titled From the Styx. “It sinks into the river valley and just sits,” causing health difficulties for her and her husband.
Town officials do not necessarily agree with Tibbetts, but Mayor Pro-Tem Rick Aluise said he might go along with paying for air quality monitoring to see if things have gotten worse since previous testing.
“I told them that, while I do not experience any health problems that I believe are related to oil and gas activity, I would support using a small amount of our mineral lease and severance money to establish a monitoring system in town,” Aluise wrote in an email to the Post Independent.
A spokesman for Bill Barrett Corp. said on Thursday that his company already is “operating to the highest public health standards” by burning off gasses being vented into the atmosphere.
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