SUNDAY SPOTLIGHT
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Scientist who lost leg in Haiti perseveres as climber Page C-1
House Dems elect Egolf as minority leader Page C-1
A guide to the holidays in Northern New Mexico Inside ho lid ay eve nts • sto
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Feliz Navidad
Giving
the season of
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Sunday, November 23, 2014
rio us mu sic
TAMALADA
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Oil boom brings spills, leaks, fires North Dakota sees downside of drilling By Deborah Sontag and Robert Gebeloff The New York Times
WILLISTON, N.D. — In early August 2013, Arlene Skurupey of Blacksburg, Va., received an animated call from the normally taciturn farmer who rents her family land in Billings County, N.D. There had been an accident at the Skurupey 1-9H oil well. “Oh, my gosh, the gold is blowing,” she said he told her. “Bakken gold.” It was the 11th blowout since 2006 at a North Dakota well operated by Continental Resources, the most prolific producer in the booming Bakken oil patch. Spewing some 173,250 gallons of potential pollutants, the eruption, undisclosed at the time, was serious enough to bring the Oklahoma-based company’s chairman and chief executive, Harold G. Hamm, to the remote scene. It was not the first or most catastrophic blowout visited by Hamm, a sharecropper’s son who became the wealthiest oilman in America and energy adviser to Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign. Two years earlier, a towering
By Lydia DePillis
The Washington Post
Consider a box of donated food placed out for workers to help colleagues put a festive meal on the table at Thanksgiving, which happened recently at Wal-Marts in Frankfort, Ind., and Oklahoma City. Is that touching charity for the less fortunate? Or evidence of an employer so stingy that its employees don’t make enough to provide for themselves? It depends on whether you’re asking Wal-Mart or the campaigners trying to raise awareness about the retailer’s low pay. In advance of coordinated strikes at Wal-Marts across the country on the day after Thanksgiving, a labor union-backed group is accusing the world’s biggest retailer of driving its associates into starvation — and Wal-Mart is fighting back harder
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than ever, saying it’s just providing low-cost groceries to the masses. Why is Wal-Mart specifically under seige, rather than Best Buy or Target? Other retailers pay low wages too, of course — recent research found that the average cashier at Starbucks makes $8.80 per hour, only a few nickles more than the average Wal-Mart cashier. Wal-Mart says it pays an average hourly wage, excluding managers, of $11.81 — slightly more than the $11.39 national mean for retail workers. But Wal-Mart always has been a target because, at 1.3 million employees, it’s the biggest retailer of all of them, and any change has the potential to affect the most people. This is the third year in which Making Change at Walmart, a campaign financed and run by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union — which represents employees at Wal-Mart’s competitors, like Safeway and Giant — will have staged protests on Black Friday. In 2012, the company downplayed the protesters as a disgruntled
Pasapick
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Holiday book fair, presentation and silent auction With author Rudolfo Anaya and illustrator Nicolas Otero (collaborators on the book How Chile Came to New Mexico), 1-4 p.m.; silent auction of signed issues of the book to benefit Friends of the Santa Fe Library Santa Fe Public Library, Santa Fe Public Library Community Room, Main Branch, 145 Washington Ave. More events in Calendar, A-2 and Fridays in Pasatiempo
Obituaries
Today
Arthur F. Lucero, 78, Santa Fe, Nov. 19 Jose (Joe) Manuel Sanchez, 75, Nov. 18 Rudy G. Vigil, Nov. 19
Some sun. High 45, low 14.
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Index
Death on DIABLO RIDGE
derrick in Golden Valley County had erupted into flames and toppled, leaving three workers badly burned. “I was a human torch,” said the driller, Andrew J. Rohr. Blowouts represent the riskiest failure in the oil business. Yet, despite these serious injuries and some 115,000 gallons spilled in those first 10 blowouts, the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which regulates the drilling and production of oil and gas, did not penalize Continental until the 11th. The commission — the governor, attorney general and agriculture commissioner — imposed a $75,000 penalty. Earlier this year, though, the commission, as it often does, suspended 90 percent of the fine, settling for $7,500 after Continental blamed “an irresponsible supervisor” — just as it had blamed Rohr and his crew, contract workers, for the blowout that left them traumatized. Since 2006, when advances in hydraulic fracturing — fracking — and horizontal drilling began unlocking a trove of sweet crude oil in the Bakken shale formation, North Dakota has shed its identity as an agricultural state in decline to become an oil powerhouse second only to Texas.
Wal-Mart, workers spar ahead of Black Friday Labor group, company dispute employee pay, hunger; strikes planned
On March 4, Colin Sutton, a Wolf Creek ski patrolman who grew up in Santa Fe, was killed in a massive avalanche miles from the Colorado basin. Why Wolf Creek’s owner sent him there raises questions as resorts try to meet the growing demand for adventure skiing.
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A view of Diablo Ridge, near Conejos Peak, after the March 4 avalanche. The avalanche path can be seen in the gully on the left. The peak is located 16 air miles southeast of Wolf Creek Ski Area. Photo illustration/Courtesy Colorado Avalanche Information Center
T
he headlines in Colorado papers last February were scary. One warned that avalanche danger was “at an all-time high.” The snow slides were the kind seen every 30 years or so, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Six people had already been killed in the state when Colin Sutton, 38, a longtime Wolf Creek Ski Area patrolman who had grown up in Santa Fe, was buried by a monster slide March 4 about a mile west of Conejos Peak in the San Juan Mountains. He had been testing snow conditions well outside the ski area’s boundary. Sutton was an EMT and a highly qualified avalanche technician, as well as a licensed blaster, trained to use explosives. But none of that expertise could save him when a wall of snow released and carried him 1,500 feet down a steep gully and buried him head forward under 5 feet of debris. Sutton had no pulse when rescuers reached him, and he was pronounced dead at a hospital in Durango four hours later. At first it seemed like just another in a growing number of avalanche deaths as more and more skiers and snowboarders search for virgin powder and ski basins try to accommodate them. Before 1990, it was rare to have more than 15 people die in avalanches in a season. Since 2000, an average of 39 die a year. Ski patrol deaths in avalanches, however, are rare. And it turned out that Davey Pitcher, the 52-year-old owner of the Wolf Creek Ski Area, did not have a permit for his ski patrol team to work in the area where Sutton died. Pitcher’s temporary special-use permit to conduct heli-ski surveys in the Rio Grande National Forest had expired nearly three years earlier.
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Colin Sutton, pictured with his black Lab, Boca, was buried by a monster slide March 4 about a mile west of Conejos Peak in Colorado. Courtesy photo
Now Sutton’s family members and friends are questioning whether the ski basin, in its push to attract more backcountry adventurers, put Sutton in harm’s way. Albert Durand, Sutton’s stepfather, called the unauthorized patrol mission “a whole cowboy operation, totally mismanaged.” Sending the patrollers into the backcountry by helicopter that day was “gross recklessness,” he said. Pitcher, who was part of the team that went to the site to rescue Colin, has pleaded not guilty to five federal citations for conducting work activity using a helicopter in the Rio Grande National Forest without written authorization and for using explosives without a permit. A trial date is set for December. He also faces thousands of dollars in fines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Pitcher declined to comment on the
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citations or his plea. But he said, “I lost a close friend with Colin.”
A taste for powder Sutton’s death was the second involving a member of Wolf Creek’s professional ski patrol in the last five years. In November 2010, Scott Kay, the head of the patrol, was caught in a snow slide inside the ski area boundary while performing avalanche mitigation. He was working on his own, a violation of standard operating procedure, which specifies that work be conducted in groups. He died from asphyxiation. Sutton was on the crew that extracted him. They were among only three ski patrol members who have died by avalanche since 2010. The other was at Alpine Meadows in California, according to the American Avalanche
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Six sections, 46 pages 165th year, No. 327 Publication No. 596-440