Dateline: 3 March 2012
The following letter excerpt is from a Skaneateles resident with family in Bradford County, PA and comes from This Web Page. The most disturbing aspect of this letter is the first sentence of the third paragraph, which I have highlighted red.
My parents both grew up in Bradford County, PA, which is the epicenter of hydrofracking in the US. I still have lots of relatives there, who are vocal on the issue. One of my widowed aunts, who owns many hundreds of acres, formerly her family dairy farm, leased her land for fracking. Although she receives over $100,000 per MONTH for the lease as long as they continue to extract gas from her land, she is not as happy as she thought she would be.
Her land, in addition to being stripped in areas and contaminated in large sections, subsequent to the drilling operations will be virtually worthless, unsightly, contaminated by heavy traffic, erosion, and chemical contamination.
Also, many friends, relatives, and neighbors of hers, who do not share in the payments for use of her land, do have a significant share in the destruction and degradation of their communities. One of my cousins counts 40 heavy trucks per HOUR 24 hours a day going past his house. They are noisy and smelly and dirty, and the drivers seem to feel that they have the right-of-way wherever they are traveling.
Also, the tankers leak….the whole village of Troy’s roads and streets are covered in inches of slime from leaking trucks. We’ve been told the trucks don’t leak. The citizens of Troy show their ruined shoes as evidence. You can’t cross a street in Troy without encountering this corrosive slime…. Also, a part of the process involves continuous explosions deep under ground. Most people are not bothered by the small noise and vibration – but local HORSES are! There are numerous incidents of horses running through fences and knocking down walls and being injured or killed in their efforts to escape the terrifying noise and vibrations.
People have noticed behavioral and physical changes also in their dogs! In addition to the constant irritation of the drilling operations, there ARE spills. I saw on the Internet some time ago that there had been a spill from one well in Canton, near Troy , spreading the fluids over several fields and into a STREAM! Even far downstream of the spill, the water was contaminated and unsafe for humans or livestock to drink. The dairy farm through which this stream passes had to fence off the stream so the cattle could no longer use it as their source of water in the pasture. Also, the lands contaminated with the spill were so contaminated that they can no longer be used either for grazing cattle or for tilling for crops…. Those are just some of the issues raised by my relatives in Troy and surrounds…
Make no mistake about it— if the hydrofracking industry comes to Sempronius, this community will be changed in very significant ways. Some landowners will make a lot of money, but everyone will pay a price. People who have no desire to be involved in the impact will be involved and impacted. And there is plenty of evidence to indicate that the health, safety and general welfare of innocent people in our community will be impacted in a very negative way.