Boom Town
The FRONTLINE Dispatch
GBH
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2017
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2016, a 5.0 magnitude earthquake hit the small town of Cushing, Oklahoma, severely damaging the town. Cushing isn’t the type of place that’s supposed to have such a problem with earthquakes. Until about 2009, they only had one or two a year. But in the last few years, tied to an increased use of wastewater disposal (a by-product of the oil industry) the number of earthquakes has risen dramatically, and now Cushing, along with much of Oklahoma, shakes hundreds of times a year.
Cushing is a major hub of American oil — known as “the pipeline crossroads of the world,” the Keystone pipeline and many other major pipelines run beneath it, and above ground, the town stores tens of millions of barrels of oil in its tank farms. Oil is the town’s economic lifeblood, and so the big quake, and the question of who to hold responsible for it, caused real division between neighbors.
In this episode of The FRONTLINE Dispatch, reporter Sandy Tolan goes to Cushing to find out how the earthquakes impact a town built on oil.
This story was produced by Jamie York and Sophie McKibben.
Find us on the web at pbs.org/frontlinedispatch
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rainey Aronson, executive producer of the PBS investigative series Frontline, and you're listening to the frontline |
| 0:11.0 | this time Boomtown. |
| 0:15.0 | The Front Line Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation Journalism Initiative, |
| 0:20.0 | committed to excellence. |
| 0:22.0 | The Front Line Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation committed to excellence |
| 0:26.6 | in journalism and by the Frontline Journalism Fund with major support from John and Joanne |
| 0:32.0 | Hagler. |
| 0:33.0 | Support for Frontline Dispatch comes from the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center |
| 0:37.1 | dedicated to providing compassionate care and cancer specialists who are experienced in the |
| 0:41.1 | cancer you have. |
| 0:42.0 | When you hear the word cancer, their team is ready. |
| 0:44.6 | Learn more at mass general.org |
| 0:47.1 | slash cancer. |
| 0:49.3 | We went two weeks of constant earthquakes just rumbling rumbling rumbling |
| 0:59.2 | rumbling rumbling rumbling |
| 0:59.8 | rumbling we counted we counted |
| 1:07.0 | thirty four minutes We counted 19 earthquakes in about 34 minutes, but over and over and over. It makes you want to move out of your town. |
| 1:12.0 | To say that Cushing, Oklahoma is an oil town is putting it mildly. |
| 1:17.0 | Even though it's small, only about 8,000 people live there, |
| 1:21.0 | its giant tank farms store millions of barrels of oil. |
| 1:25.9 | So much oil that the Department of Homeland Security says if anything were to happen there, |
| 1:31.6 | it would have a debilitating effect on national security. |
... |
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