Excess Land Use by Encana

The lease document spells out the payment that the lessee is required to make for the right to use the land. In addition to compensation for actual crop losses lessee is required to pay a specified dollar amount per acre for the land used. This per acre payment is to cover a two year period of time reguardless of the amount of damages sustained.

Encana as the lessee has so far been unwilling to pay for the land that they used during the drilling operations other than the actual drilling pad site. The other land used included roadways, frac pond sites and equipment parking and staging areas.

This picture shows drilling operations in the background at the Washmon site. The grassy area in the foreground is pasture land outside the drilling pad. The red car, blue pickup and two other vehicles are parked on the pasture land as well as the flatbed trailer in the foreground. The grass has been completely trampled down by truck and machinery traffic turning here.




This shot taken after a rain shows a few of the ruts created as equipment came off the roadway into the grassy pasture land at the very bottom of the picture.




This is some of the equipment stored on the pastureland located east of the driveway entrance.


This location was used as a staging area for trucks and other equipment and is completely outside the land designated for use by the drilling operations.



This closeup shot of some of the heavy equipment while parked on the pasture shows that the grass has been completely trampled down.




The following pictures were taken at the Pipes site. This first shot shows some of the heavy equipment that used the pasture land for parking. Other trucks (not pictured) delivering equipment also used this area for turning and unloading. Heavy traffic in this area during wet weather and muddy conditions caused considerable compaction and rutting of the land.



This photo shows two red pickup trucks parked on pasture land north of the construction site. These are east of where the camper vehicles and travel trailer parked.



Here in the background of this photo you can see a travel trailer parked in the pasture just to the left of the operations offices. Workers often parked on the grass east of this travel trailer.







This is a shot of the bulldozer as it destroys a barn during the construction of the frac water pond on the Pipes site.



The following two pictures show the extensive area disturbed by construction of the frac water pond for the Washmon well.