Dateline: 17 January 2012
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| Heavy Truck Traffic on Rural Roads In Bradford County Pennsylvania (Photo Link with some firsthand perspective) |
I know at least three people in Sempronius who assert that everything is going great down in Pennsylvania where hydrofracking is going on. They say the region is experiencing an economic boom, and any problems we hear about hydrofracking up here are blown way out of proportion by chicken-little environmentalists.
These people have either driven through the area and been impressed with the prosperity they see, or they know people down that way who say that the gas drilling has been a good thing for the area.
I don’t doubt for a minute that prosperity comes to some people and some areas for a season when gas drilling is going on. And, likewise, I don’t doubt that there are people in areas where hydrofracking is happening who think it’s a great thing.
However, what I doubt very much is that no harm is being done, and that everyone in the communities where hydrofracking is happening are very happy with the state of affairs. No, I don’t believe that at all. And the reason I don’t believe it is that there is a tremendous amount of evidence to the contrary.
One need only read recent news reports from areas where hydrofracking is going on to see that all is not well. Take, for example, this January 18, 2012 news article in the Scranton Pennsylvania Times-Tribune newspaper...
Driller fined $565,000 for three releases to Northern Tier waterways
State environmental regulators have fined Chesapeake Appalachia $565,000 for three incidents at Northern Tier natural gas well sites, including an April 2011 wellhead failure in Bradford County that released thousands of gallons of wastewater into a nearby stream.
The company paid $190,000 for the failure during hydraulic fracturing of the Atgas well in Leroy Twp. as part of an agreement with the Department of Environmental Protection announced Thursday.
The April incident took six days to fully control and caused the company to suspend its Pennsylvania fracking operations for three weeks, regulators said. It drew national attention and raised concerns about the safety of the gas extraction process.
The penalties announced Thursday also include $160,000 in fines for building a North Towanda Twp. well pad with "extremely high, steep slopes" in a wetland without permission, DEP said. Heavy rains in October 2010 caused part of the pad's slope to fail, sending sediment into Sugar Creek and other small streams and wetlands.
Chesapeake also paid $215,000 for a March 2011 incident in Potter County, where sediment from an access road and well site ran off into a high-quality stream during heavy rain. The sediment clogged the water-treatment filters at the Galeton Borough water supply plant downstream, requiring $190,000 in repairs and upgrades that were paid for by Chesapeake,
Chesapeake was fined a record $1.1 million by state regulators in May for a series of water contamination incidents and a well-site fire that injured three workers in 2010 and 2011
Such accidents are not unusual at all, as was made clear in the Pro-Fracking Manhattan Institute Report that I reported on at THIS LINK. Based on three years of statistics, we know that 1 out of 14 wells drilled in Pennsylvania experience serious environmental accidents. And, of course, serious environmental accidents endanger the community where they occur.
Oh, and by the way, Cheesapeake is held up as the shining example of hydrofracking responsibility by those who favor fracking in New York. Actions speak louder than words.
Here’s another recent news report from the same paper...
DEP halts Carrizo fracking at Susquehanna County site after gas well failure
An out-of-control Susquehanna County natural gas well released waste fluids to a Forest Lake Twp. well pad early last week, leading state regulators to halt all activity at the site.
Two valves failed during fracking at Carrizo Marcellus' Baker 4H well during the afternoon of Jan. 30, according to a Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman and a violation report issued by the agency.
The company was in the fifth stage of hydraulically fracturing the well, a process that generally involves injecting chemically treated water and sand at high pressure underground to free gas from rock. Company representatives told regulators at the site that they were injecting water and sand without chemical additives at the time of the failure.
Regulators asked again later if additives were used in the well, and the answer is "pending," DEP spokeswoman Colleen Connolly said.
Another thing that I’ve heard from people who want to allow fracking in Sempronius is that the gas companies are maintaining the roads down there for towns where they are working—that heavy road traffic from all the big trucks is therefore not any problem and not an added expense to the towns.
Such comments are actually kind of funny when you read a news story LIKE THIS from Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, where the supervisor in a small rural town felled a dozen trees onto a town road to block truck traffic. He was a little frustrated (to say the least) because town roads were being ruined and the gas company was not doing anything to keep them in good shape.
I think I could probably spend a lot of time posting nothing but news stories from Pennsylvania about the troubles that hydrofracking has brought to that region, but these few will suffice to make my point, which is that along with prosperity for some, come problems that affect entire communities. Hydrofracking is, after all, a heavy industrial activity and it profoundly affects every community where it is allowed.
Am I in favor of a moratorium on fracking in Sempronius? You better believe it!
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