When Buffi Jacobs saw the towering flame, she first thought her neighbor’s house was ablaze.

DRC/Al Key

The flame from the burn-off of a gas well is seen Monday from the top of Bauer Street, which is due west of the well. The process continued for four days, ending Tuesday.

A closer look revealed the true source: a gas well site across the street.

For four days ending Tuesday, homeowners near North Lakes Park in Den­ton couldn’t ignore the flame shooting skyward as high as 60 feet, as workers for Fort Worth-based Range Re­sources burned off gas to complete two wells.

Not to mention the noise — a constant roar that disrupted daily routines.

“It’s gotten so bad our dogs won’t go outside,” nearby resident Amy McCoy said Tuesday, before the flaring stopped. “It’s kind of like an amusement park at night, it’s so loud.”

And homeowners’ loss — of sleep and peace of mind — could be the city’s gain.

Some of the drilling royalties will go to the city because it owns mineral rights in the area, according to officials and public records.

That could be a potential conflict of interest, said Ann Lee, who lives several streets away from the well site and still heard the flaring.

“That certainly could have affected their decision as to whether or not that [drilling] permit was issued,” Lee said. “The problem, to me, was that this was issued in a residential area in the first place.”

Mayor Perry McNeill said self-interest didn’t play a role in the city’s decision.

“The reason we permitted them to drill there is because they met our city ordinance,” he said.

The 206-acre site, at the northwest corner of North Bonnie Brae Street and Windsor Drive, includes two wells. The gas well site is not on city property but operators will drill horizontally under North Lakes Park, city officials said.

Denton Fire Marshal Rick Jones said Range Resources obtained drilling permits and placed wells far enough from homes to comply with city rules. City inspectors also routinely tested noise levels at the site and didn’t discover code violations, Jones said.

But the city received so many complaints that Jones said he told company officials to stop all flaring at the site by 8 p.m. Tuesday. Company officials said they finished the process by that time.

Although drillers usually consider the gas too valuable to burn off, they will sometimes vent (leak) or flare (burn) gas at a site to clean up the well. Texas Railroad Commission rules permit operators to flare and/or vent for up to 10 days after a new well is finished.

The practice is more common when there aren’t yet transmission lines built to help separate the gas from the water and other materials that come up with it, commission officials say.

However, both flaring and venting release compounds into the air, including hydrocarbons, hydrogen sulfide and other volatile organic compounds, according to health officials who have studied drilling emissions.

These compounds are known to aggravate asthma and other breathing difficulties. In higher concentrations, they also can affect the nervous and reproductive systems, or trigger blood disorders and cancer.

Rodney Waller, senior vice president of Range Resources, said the environmental impact of the gas flaring would be minimal.

“Natural gas is the cleanest-burning fuel we have,” Waller said.

The company had to flare or vent the gas to separate it from water before the well could be tied into pipelines, he said.

Waller said officials decided to use the flaring method because it’s safer and quieter for urban settings. They also shot the flame higher than they normally do in an effort to reduce the noise at ground level for nearby homes, he said.

Quentin Hix, former gas well inspector for the city of Denton, said flaring is helpful in testing the flow of gas before a well is tied into a gathering line.

“It’s a pretty well established procedure with safety guidelines,” Hix said. “The two problems are it’s noisy and it’s more of a visual nuisance than anything else.”

DRC/Al Key

The flame shooting from the pipe of this gas well Monday at Windsor Drive and Bonnie Brae Street is part of a process in which impurities are burned off before the well is linked to pipelines. Area residents complained about the noise, before the process was shut down Tuesday night, and about the well’s proximity to homes.

The process seems wasteful to Tonya Harrison Mueller, who lives near the Range Resources well site.

“We recycle methane at the landfill,” she said. “Here they’re just burning it up. That’s the part that gets me the most — the waste.”

Other area homeowners, such as Jacobs, complained that no one notified them about what was going on at the flaring well, which some neighbors dubbed “The Torch.”

Waller said the company didn’t hold a neighborhood meeting but worked closely with city officials since drilling started in February.

After the wells are tied into pipelines, they are expected to produce for 15 to 20 years, said Mark Whitley, another Range Resources senior vice president.

Denton is allowing drilling under North Lakes Park’s 353 acres in exchange for 21 percent of the royalty interest, city budget coordinator Antonio Puente said.

Denton already receives proceeds from gas drilling on or under other city property, including royalties from three wells at Denton Municipal Airport. The money goes into two separate funds, which had a combined balance of nearly $2.6 million as of April 30, Puente said.

The City Council hasn’t yet earmarked most of the money for a particular purpose, Puente said.

Staff writer Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe contributed to this report.

LOWELL BROWN can be reached at 940-566-6882. His e-mail address is lmbrown@dentonrc.com