The colourful demonstration was organised by environmental action group Reclaim the Power as the finale of a month of “rolling resistance”. 

On Preston New Road, a busy through-way between the Northwestern cities of Preston and Blackpool, a farmer named Allan Wensley has leased land to energy company Cuadrilla in an extremely contentious move, paving the way for fracking to take place in the area. 

That was the plan anyway. Since the British company began work on the site on 4 January, local people, with support from activists outside the area, have done all they can to thwart Cuadrilla’s activities.

People power and direct actions involving blockading the road in ‘lock-ons’ so vehicles cannot enter the site and ‘surfing’ lorries to prevent them from delivering supplies means that business has not been as usual for the fracking company. 

In a fight that began in 2011, Lancashire residents have been saying ‘no’, a lot. In 2015, they convinced Lancashire County Council that they should refuse planning permission to Cuadrilla.

But while last year’s results of the EU referendum saw democracy strictly adhered to, the council’s decision was overturned in October by communities secretary Sajid Javid, after an appeal from the company. 

More than 300 people joined the carnival last week. Any more than 100 pedestrians in the road and the gates to the site must be closed. The road has been reduced to a single lane. Most drivers honk and wave their support. 

Unease at the school gates

Keith Butcher is one of a number of people wearing a bright yellow t-shirt with the words ‘Respect existence or expect resistance’. On his back is printed ‘The Desolate North’, referring to a group whose original aim was to transform an old gate-house in Scotland into an eco-living community.

Those plans got put on hold when Cuadrilla came to Preston New Road. Now the group donates money and offers support to the struggle in Lancashire instead. 

“Maddison goes to the local school, St Nicks. It’s less than a mile down the road”, says Keith, a local business man who owns a tattoo parlour and fancy dress shop in the area. Maddison is seven-years-old.  

Keith and his family live a mile and a half away from the site and he has been coming to Preston New Road for five years, since Maddison was a toddler.

“She’s heard us talk about fracking and we watch coverage on the news, but when I ask teachers at school about it, they say they’ve been told not to discuss it with the children”. He doesn’t know who has given this order.

“I asked the headmaster if they’d done any health and safety checks related to the fracking site. When they do anything in schools, they’re supposed to do health and safety checks, aren’t they? He told me that it’s not in his remit”.

Keith has spoken to parents online over the past few weeks to try to get a group together, urging the local schools to make plans to protect their children. He says about six parents at Maddison’s school are involved but he doesn’t want to push people.

“There’s another school in Kirkham which is even closer than St Nicks, about half or three quarters of a mile away from here. The wind mostly comes in from the sea, so it’ll be blowing chemicals from the site towards the schools. It’s a big issue.”

Six or seven years ago, when Keith first started looking into fracking, he considered getting a job in the industry. Now though, things couldn’t be more different. 

“I’ve been here all my life, born and bred in Blackpool, but I’ll be honest with you, we’re considering moving up to that gate-house.”

In between the circus tricks, the pedal-powered sound system, the face-paints, the speeches and the world record attempt at the longest conga – eight miles from Blackpool Promenade to the festival – are many stories like Keith Butcher’s.

Local people who have been on the roadside and in the courts fighting central government and the greed of multinational companies for the past six years, for the sake of their health and their children’s, for the local environment and for the communities around the world affected by climate change.

Cuadrilla, the risk taker

Several people tell me they are worried about what will happen after July, when Reclaim the Power end their month of actions; the recent surge in numbers has boosted energy, morale and publicity.

But one member of Frack Free Lancashire tells me that there are 48 anti-fracking groups in the county alone. And she’s hopeful that many groups and individuals who have come during the last few weeks will pledge their support for the months ahead. 

The final week of July has brought both good and bad news. In an underhanded tactic that has been widely reported, a drilling rig was delivered to the Cuadrilla’s site early on 27 July via a convoy of 30 lorries.

The delivery, at 4.45am, was in clear breach of planning permission regulations that state that no vehicles should enter the site outside of working hours. As a result, Lancashire council is considering action against the company.

On 25 July, three lorries carrying supplies to the site were stopped outside Maple Farm by campaigners sitting in front of the them and blockading the road before ‘lorry surfers’ scaled the vehicles between 8-11am.

Some 72 hours later, one of the haulage companies affected, L & M Transport, released a statement saying that they would “never knowingly work for Cuadrilla or any agents involved with Cuadrilla or the fracking industry again”. 

Cuadrilla operated at a £3.4 million loss in 2016 and continues to lose money as contractors pull out and work is delayed. 

“Cuadrilla are high risk takers – with people’s health and safety and now they’re risking their money too”, says Barbara Kneale, a consultant in occupational medicine who lives in Leicestershire and has travelled to join the resistance for the weekend. 

“I have taken an oath to protect people’s health, but for this site there have been no reports into how public health is going to be affected. If you have robust regulations, then fine, but there are none. You’ve got to take action, haven’t you?”

This Author

Lydia Noon is a freelance journalist and has written for New Internationalist and openDemocracy. You can follow her on Twitter at @lydia_noon.

I grew up one kilometre from the edge of a brown coal mine and surrounded by many others. I remember staring in awe and fear at this massive hole, scared of getting too close after hearing stories of people buried alive because they walked along the unstable mine walls.

My family lives in the Lausitz region of Germany once home to 30 brown coal mines. Situated between Berlin and Dresden, the region has been shaped by this industry for over 100 years. It was the German Democratic Republic’s energy powerhouse – its Latrobe Valley – with coal mining the largest source of jobs.

That changed with Germany’s reunification, when the economy restructured to a market approach and most of the mines were closed. The only major industry was gone, leaving the countryside punctured with massive holes, and the community with big questions about how to make the region viable again.

The Latrobe Valley in Victoria, Australia, is starting to face similar changes. Hazelwood power station and mine shut down a few months ago and the world is moving away from fossil fuels. People are asking the same questions we did in Germany 15 years ago: how do we transition to a more diverse and sustainable economy, while continuing to provide jobs for local workers? What do we do with the dangerous pits left behind?

The same solutions are put forward too. Engie, the owner of Hazelwood, is proposing to fill all or part of the mine pit to become a lake and recreation area. The inspiration comes from the Lausitz, but some of the key challenges of this solution seem not to be given enough attention.

In my early teens, as I watched these massive mines around our house fill with water, I got excited about the prospect of living in an area renamed ‘Neuseenland’, meaning the land of new lakes. But while I was able to enjoy summer days swimming in some of these flooded mines, the process of filling them with water has been very slow. Many have already been filling up for 10 or 20 years, and are still a long way from being safe.

This is in a region of Germany with plenty of water. The huge pits could be filled with combinations of diverted waterways, groundwater access, rainfall and large amounts of reprocessed mining water, transferred from other nearby operating mines.

These water sources are not available to the same extent in the Latrobe Valley. To give a sense of scale, it would take more water than is in all of Sydney Harbour just to fill one of the brown coal mines. Where will all this come from? What are the downstream impacts of taking this much water? Would a lake be safe for the public to use? The Hazelwood inquiry into mine rehabilitation identified these looming challenges, and the Victorian government has created a rehabilitation commissioner and an advisory committee to start finding answers, but right now we just don’t know.

Then there’s the environmental contamination. In the Lausitz, mining had already polluted the waterways with high amounts of iron hydroxides, calcium and sulphates. Flooding the mine pits spread this pollution even further, degrading local ecosystems. Increasingly salty waterways now threaten drinking water supplies to Berlin and surrounds and make water management more expensive. Mining companies are the biggest users of water but don’t even have to pay for it.

For local communities, other major consequences include rising groundwater flooding basements, cracking building structures and shifting the ground.

Landslides are a real worry. In the Lausitz in 2009, a 350-metre wide strip of land – including buildings, a road and a viewing platform – slid into the adjacent pit lake, burying three people. In 2010, in an area where the former mine surrounding was regarded as very stable and settled, 27 hectares of forests sank into the earth. This will come as no surprise to people of the Latrobe Valley, where the Princes Highway was closed for eight months in 2011 due to landslides related to the adjacent Hazelwood mine.

There have been many more such incidents in the Lausitz, and the risk prevents whole areas from being accessed, which were used for farmland, wind farms, industry or forests. Yet when the Lausitz is promoted as the poster child of mine rehabilitation through flooding, many of these challenges aren’t mentioned.

Community consultations on the future of the Hazelwood mine will begin in September. So far, the community has expressed many ideas other than filling the mine pit with water but these remain ignored. Engie is unwilling to release the full list of rehabilitation concepts they considered before settling on the pit lake solution. This makes it difficult for the community to understand the recommendation and weigh it up against alternatives.

Before more planning proceeds on the assumption that a pit lake is the only option, the lessons learned from the experience in the Lausitz should be aired and discussed in the Latrobe Valley. It’s important to avoid the potential negative consequences of flooding mine pits as best as possible from the beginning, and to make sure the mine owners pay for the precious water they are taking, like everybody else does.

Most of all, the community needs to have a bigger say in what happens to retired mine pits. Like me, the children of Morwell, Moe and Traralgon in Victoria will grow up surrounded by massive, dangerous holes in the ground. Their families have the most at stake in what happens, so they should have the loudest voice in shaping the region’s future, not the corporate mine owners who shaped its past.