36 Trucks in 20 Minutes in Troy

On Saturday I headed south of the border with a friend - we wanted to see some of the Marcellus effects first hand. We headed to Troy, a small, historic borough of about 1500 smack-dab in the heartland of Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains.

It's a lovely old town, with a castle for a bank and wonderful brick buildings lining Main Street. Lively, too, as two separate Girl Scout troops vied for customers to purchase Thin Mints and Lemon cookies.

We stopped for subs at Vinnies Pizzaria, and were lucky to find a free table. Within the first fifteen seconds of sitting down, three trucks hauling residual waste passed by.

For the next twenty minutes we kept a tally of trucks heading through the center of town. We counted 36, most hauling drilling waste fluids. A few hauled fresh water and some were transporting pipe to well sites. We didn't count pick-ups; there were too many.

If you grab a calculator you'll see that 36 trucks in 20 minutes is close to two trucks a minute. And they go like this all day long, said the locals who were eating lunch next to us.

Two trucks a minute may not sound like a lot of traffic, but they do raise a dust cloud. And they did have a tight squeeze around the corner.