A peripatetic seismologist and son of McCamey has been hired to figure out whether oil and gas drilling is causing earthquakes in Texas. No matter what he says, some people will not believe him.
David Craig Pearson remembers the first time he felt the earth tremble beneath his feet. Mother Nature wasn’t to blame. The U.S. military was.
Pearson stood on the White Sands Missile Range, a sprawling base in south-central New Mexico, on that day some three decades ago. Federal Department of Defense workers fired off a weapons test. Pearson, then a wide-eyed doctoral student, recorded the earthquake it triggered.
“Since then, I was hooked,” he said in an interview.
Pearson went on to a ground-shaking career. His resume reflects 13 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which sent him many places where experts were blowing things up: Nevada (nuclear and chemical weapons tests), Wyoming and Indiana (coal mines), Kazakhstan (decommissioning a former Soviet nuclear test site), to name a few. He interpreted valuable information about how the ground moved.
In 2008 and 2009, a series of three earthquakes shook the Dallas-Fort Worth area with magnitudes as high as 3.3. Researchers at Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Austin concluded that local disposal wells were a “plausible" cause, though they found it “puzzling” that the tremors were concentrated in just one or two locations in a region that had more than 200 disposal wells.
In a study published in August 2012, Cliff Frohlich, a UT-Austin seismologist, found that most reliably located earthquakes in the Barnett Shale occur within two miles of one or more injection wells.
The explanation isn’t good enough for some agency critics, who won't buy any assessment that comes out of an agency that so reluctantly responded to the problem. That includes Zac Trahan, the statewide program director at Texas Campaign for the Environment, who said believes the agency hired Pearson simply to “paper over” the quake issue – pretending to act while doing little.
Editor's Note: A previous version of this story cited Pearson's job application, which said he made $130,000 per month as a ranch manager. That document contained incorrect information. He made $130,000 per year at the job.
Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune. Southern Methodist University was a sponsor in 2013. A complete list of Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.