‘We will oppose this’: Truss fracking plans met with anger and dismay in Lancashire
Chris Holliday, 60, recalls the exact moment a 2.9-magnitude earth tremor brought a halt to fracking in the UK. It was 8.30am on August bank holiday Monday in 2019 and Holliday, a retired IT consultant, was with his wife, Susan, in their neat kitchen when all of a sudden the cups and saucers began to shake.
“The crockery and glasses were rattling. The windows were rattling,” he said on Thursday.
“It was frightening,” said Susan. “I personally felt seven or eight of these earth tremors and it’s quite a scary situation to live in – and to think that could start off all over the country.”
The Holliday’s retirement home is barely 300 metres from Britain’s fracking frontier at Preston New Road in Lancashire. Cuadrilla was forced to stop drilling at the site in November 2019 when the government announced a temporary moratorium after repeated earth tremors above the 0.5-magnitude limit set by regulators.
The site, set among acres of farmland on the Lancashire coast, is the only fracking operation in the UK in which horizontal wells have been drilled and hydraulically fractured into shale rock.
Locals said on Thursday they feared it puts them back on the frontline after Liz Truss, just 48 hours into her premiership, lifted the moratorium on fracking, aiming to get gas flowing in six months.
“It’s just dismay,” said Chris Holliday. “The drilling itself is very intrusive. The earth tremors put you on edge the whole time. You can’t really relax at all.”
It was not just those who live nearby who felt the 2.9-magnitude tremor in August 2019. Nearly 200 properties, including some several miles away, reported damage, according to data collected by the British Geological Survey.
Cuadrilla, which offered people “goodwill payments” of hundreds
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