Louisa Delpy is a project manager and a critic of the fracking process. She lives in Balcombe with her husband and two young children. She spoke against Cuadrilla’s recent planning application at a meeting of West Sussex County Council’s planning committee.

The past year

When I decided to start researching on fracking my husband said “You’ve got to realise that this is a marathon, it’s not a sprint, Louisa”.

It’s been so true. It can just all encompass you. It’s not like being at work where you can come home and you’re still looking at the Blackberry but it doesn’t really matter. This does really matter and you do really want to know about it. It’s an addiction and you want to see it through and you’re never quite going to see it through because we’re up against so many different things.

There’s always something and there’s never really that much of a break in between. I’ve got two small children. I’ve been managing a massive building project. I’ve been trying to work.

Thank God I get up at 5 o’clock because I basically have to squeeze another three hours into every single day.

My children are still waking in the night. I was potty training while on the phone to Cuadrilla. I’ve had to become this kind of multi-tasking woman.

The worst thing is that I’ve learnt to ignore my children’s bleating, which I don’t think is a good thing, and therefore I am starting to step back and trying to really give my children me again because they’re saying “You’re always on the computer”.

There’s been a very steep learning curve. We’ve dedicated ourselves. We’ve given hours and hours to become full-time researchers and admin people and planning experts.

The breadth of what we’ve done is really amazing.

Politicians

I thought they were do-gooders, whose children had moved away, who had time on their hands, furthering community things. But they are not that at all. They are vested people creeping their way up the political ladder.

Bill Acraman [the county councillor for Balcombe] wrote an email saying: “The reason some of your people were crying after the planning meeting was fear of the unknown”.

It just made me so cross.It’s not fear of the unknown. It’s fear of the known.

Fracking

I wasn’t even really opposed to fracking. That first poll that Balcombe Parish Council did, I didn’t even bother to fill it in. I didn’t go to that January meeting in the Victory Hall. I was actually thinking that fracking was quite a good answer. I just thought, “Oh there’ll be some issues, I just want to check a few things, around it”, still sort of convinced that it was still ok.

Having run projects myself, my concern was that there were so many agencies involved, all doing different things, and that is when things go wrong. I thought from a project management perspective I can’t see this project running well, I can see the inefficiencies in it, I just want to understand the gaps.

And then the more I looked at it, the more gaps there were and the more concerned I became.

And so I changed completely, although my family are still quite pro-fracking. It does seem to me that the people who spent time researching and informing themselves are anti-fracking and the people who have just read a headline and done two minutes research are pro-fracking.

The regulators

I feel that we try so hard and no one listens. I go round in this stupid circle all the time, thinking “Oh the Environment Agency will listen to us on the Mining Waste Permit.” And then they didn’t. “Oh the county council will listen to us on the objection”.

Every time you give them the benefit of the doubt and then you come crashing down.

They are just so blinkered in their vision and what they see as in their terms of reference. All these agencies involved are all in their tunnelled little view, checking their box saying this is ok but the whole view makes me feel very pessimistic.

The campaign

I say I am pessimistic but I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t optimistic. I would have just given up and be resuming my normal life. I think you can’t not be involved, now you’re involved.

I think it attracts conscientious people who can’t let it go. It attracts people who are completers who like to see it through to the end.

Cuadrilla and trust

Cuadrilla contracts everything out and those contractors contract everything out and, as I’ve seen here in my own building project, my builders contracted everything out to contractors. So we get Geoff putting his sledge hammer into the wrong wall because the control project management structure isn’t there. That was one of my initial issues with fracking.

How can I trust Geoff with his sledge hammer down at Cuadrilla’s site to do the right thing? And I have since found out that I seriously can’t trust them – and that’s what is so shocking.

Even under the media spotlight last summer some mistakes happened and there were a lot of mistakes that were probably made that we don’t even know about.