Tompkins County Legislature Deliberates Law to Protect Roads

Tonight and tomorrow the Tompkins County legislators are holding a pair of meetings on the proposed road law. Tonight’s an information meeting and tomorrow night is the public hearing.

Up for discussion: an extension of the county code that would require non-permanent commercial and industrial activity generating heavy truck traffic on county roads to obtain permits for the roads they will use, and post bonds for potential damage.

Legislators emphasize that the new law won’t have an impact on local contractors and businesses. The purpose is to regulate the kinds of heavy road use that has the potential to damage roads, such as large-scale construction projects, logging or gas drilling.

They define high-impact truck traffic as more than 10 truck trips a day to or from a single project site, for more than three days in any given week. It also includes trucks with a gross weight that exceeds 20 tons. Local farmers won’t have to worry about milk shipments and feed deliveries because the law specifically excludes agricultural activities.

Under the new law, managers of temporary projects would have to apply for permits that would designate their travel routes and any restrictions. The companies generating the traffic would have to submit documentation about the condition of roads before obtaining their permit, and they would have to post a bond.

You can read a copy of the local law by going to the legislature's page and clicking on “Lla-11” (it’s a PDF). You can read a longer article on this issue in the January 31 issue of Tompkins Weekly.

The information meeting is tonight, 7 pm in the first-floor conference room of the County’s Old Jail office building on 125 E. Court Street in Ithaca.

The public hearing is tomorrow, February 1 at 5:30 pm in the Legislative Chambers of the Tompkins County Courthouse at 320 North Tioga Street in Ithaca.

Superbowl Sunday: Pulteney 400* - Chesapeake 0

On Superbowl Sunday close to 400* people crowded into the Pulteney Fire Hall to protest Chesapeake’s plans for converting a natural gas well into a disposal well for frackwater and brine. People vied for leaning-space against the wall and unlucky late-comers lined up four-deep in the lobby, just beyond the notice warning “maximum occupancy 278 persons”.

They were there for a two-hour forum on fracking, geology, and disposal wells. And it was pretty clear that no one was in favor of becoming the dumping site for Marcellus frackwater and brine.

It took a few days but Chesapeake finally responded. In a one-line e-mail to the Corning Leader, Matt Sheppard, Chesapeake’s senior director of corporate development wrote, “Our enhanced water re-use techniques have greatly diminished the need for us to dispose of produced water, therefore, we have no intention of pursuing the injection well in Pulteney, N.Y."

Sounds great until you realize that Chesapeake has not said they will withdraw their application for an underground injection well. So it's still on the table.....

At issue: conversion of a natural gas well into a disposal well for Chesapeake to dump wastewater from their Marcellus and other gas wells in NY and PA. The well in question is the Bergstresser well, drilled 6700 feet into the Trenton-Black River formation about 13 years ago. It's not producing natural gas anymore, but it is deep enough that it would make an ideal place for disposal of brine and frack water.

Only one problem: the good people of Pulteney, NY don't want it. The tiny town of Pulteney overlooks the most western shore of Keuka Lake; it's a scenic area best known for its wineries and summer tourists. And as far as the residents are concerned, the heart of wine country is not a good place for toxic waste disposal.

Not only that, the county road is twisty and turny and steep in places. The folks who drive those roads are concerned that the increased truck traffic will damage their roads. If Chesapeake's numbers are any indication, there will be plenty of trucks traveling the rural roads. 

According to their application, Chesapeake plans to inject up to 181,440 gallons of wastewater a day into the well. They haven't done any actual testing - but are basing this figure on data from injection wells in other locations.

Given that the average brine-tankers hold close to 5,000 gallons, that means 35 or more trucks will drive the country roads hauling that wastewater -  70 truck trips in and out of the disposal facility every day for the next ten years. 

But wait! There's more! To handle that amount of wastewater, Chesapeake plans to build six concrete unloading bays. Trucks will dock at the bays and pump wastewater into one of six 1,000-barrel (42,000 gallon) above-ground storage tanks. Pipes will connect the tanks to a filtration vessel, and from there the wastewater will be pumped into the injection well.

In addition, Chesapeake noted that they may need to add corrosion inhibitors and biocides to the wastewater. So they will store chemicals on site as well. But if Chesapeake hopes to drive those trucks up Route 76 to Pulteney, they'll have a few roadblocks.

One of those roadblocks is junior Congressman Eric Massa who expressed outrage at the idea of placing a drilling wastewater disposal well so close to a lake. They're not going to frack wells in the NYC watershed, Massa said. "What does NYC have that we don't?"

Massa promised to do everything in his power to stop the project. Including, he said, laying down on the road in front of the trucks.

For now it looks like Massa won't need to get his suitcoat dirty, though, because Chesapeake seems to be cowed by the intensity of the protest against the project. At least for now, the folks of Pulteney are the winning team.

* as of 2/12/2010: organizers of the event estimate there may have been as many as 540 at the Fire Hall last Sunday.

Overweight Trucks fuel Road Rage

In the space of a week, give or take a dozen hours, five drivers received citations for overweight trucks hauling loads to gas drilling sites.

On Tuesday, January 26, Kevin Parsons parked his truck on Covered Bridge Road in Burlington Township, Bradford County, PA. He was driving a truck for Hodges Trucking Company, out of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, a company that is listed by Chesapeake Energy lists as a subsidiary on its Web site. Had Parsons read the road signs he would have known that Covered Bridge Road is posted for a weight limit of 10 tons, and he might have chosen a less conspicuous place to park.

You see, the state police noticed the truck because it was parked illegally. They thought it looked a bit heavy, so they hauled out their handy-dandy scale and discovered that Parsons' truck weighed more than 51 tons. Not only was that 41-plus tons over the posted weight limit, but that's a lot of extra tonnage to be hauling around on two-lane gravel-and-oil country roads.

The police also found a whole bunch of permit violations and fined Parsons $25,000.

Then, just yesterday the state police fined four more drivers of gas industry service trucks for hauling illegal oversize loads. The guys, driving in a convoy, were stopped on US Route 6 in North Towanda. They were employed by T.K. Stanley Inc., an energy industry services company based in Waynesboro, Mississippi, a company that provides everything from roustabouts to preparing drilling sites to trucking in the drill rigs and equipment. Their fines ranged from $1440 to $6600. Unfortunately, the truckers couldn't post bail and were sent to the hoosegow to cool their heels.

Ask people what they're concerned about with drilling and somewhere near the top of the list is "truck traffic". People worry that overweight trucks will put undue wear and tear on the road. They worry that the increased amount of traffic will put additional wear and tear on the roads. They worry that speeding truckers may run into school buses (this has also happened recently; thankfully no one was hurt). They worry that truckers from Oklahoma and Alabama may not know how to drive on steep icy mountain roads. Well, maybe after this winter the good folks in Oklahoma will have mastered the art of steering into a skid, but still, these concerns are valid.

But what really galls most people is the idea that the gas companies will tear up the roads, extract the natural gas, and skip town leaving the taxpayers to cover the costs of repairing the roads. People are outraged at the idea that the public will be subsidizing the profits of wealthy multinational corporations - and a few lucky landowners who happen to strike it rich.

How to protect Bridges and Roads once Gas Drilling begins?

That's the question that town board members and highway superintendents have been puzzling out for the past few months. Highway superintendents from towns across our county have been meeting with town and county attorneys to discuss everything from crafting road laws to developing road use agreements.

The problem: once the NY Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) adopts their rules for drilling in Marcellus and other shales, the drilling rigs will begin to move into NY in earnest. While no one knows how many wells to expect - the estimates range from 2,000 to 4,000 - there are 10 permit applications pending in my town alone. And we expect more..... lots more.

The concern is that the truck traffic associated with construction of the well pad and the drilling operations will damage local roads, leaving the taxpayer stuck with the bill. It's happened in other towns - one town is coping with over $300,000 in damages and another a mere $80,000 or so - and our town has experienced some road damage already. So now, before the heavy trucks come, is the time to hammer out the details.

Which is why earlier this week our town highway supervisor sat down with a group of town council members, planning board members, and citizens to go over language for a potential "road use agreement". The idea behind a road use agreement is that drilling companies and municipalities agree on truck routes prior to any well pad construction or drilling activity. It also lays out expectations for maintenance and reimbursement for road damage.

The DEC suggests in their supplementary Generic Environmental Impact Statement - the draft of the rules for drilling in Marcellus - that gas companies ought to consider local road use agreements. They don't require it.

But maybe they should. According to the DEC's own document it could take as many as 8900 truck trips to construct the drilling site and drill and frack a multi-well pad with 8 wells. These aren't pick-up trucks either; they're 18-wheelers weighted down with tons of equipment, chemicals or water.

Our highway super would like to give each gas company a list of acceptable truck routes. After all, who knows more about the roads than the guy who patches them and plows them? He also suggested that gas companies should complete a survey of all roads they will use prior to any activities.

One point he stressed is that gravel and seasonal roads cannot withstand the structural and functional damage that would result from heavy vehicle use.So if the gas companies are going to be driving out in the boonies - which pretty much describes most of the area around here - they will need to make improvements to the roads so their heavy trucks won't get bogged down. (Go to any talk on drilling in these parts and there's the obligatory slide of the bulldozer pulling an 18-wheeler up a very muddy, rutted rural road.)

Bridges and culverts are also an issue. Our town has 10 bridges that are large enough to be inspected by the state and, according to one town councilman (who served as highway superintendent years ago), it would take a minimum of  $1 million to repair one of those bridges.

“It’s not the weight," he says. Rather, it's the combination of weight and frequency of trips that damage a bridges. His solution: have drilling companies build truck by-passes. "That's a relatively inexpensive and quick solution,” he said. 

Just how many truck trips does it take to build a well?   

  

In chapter 6 of the SGEIS (section 11) DEC estimates the number of truck trips required for a multi-well pad ( 8-wells) in the Marcellus:

Drill pad & road construction equipment   10 – 45 trucks

Drilling rig                                                 60 trucks

Drilling fluid & materials                             200 – 400 trucks

Drilling equipment (casing, etc)                  200 – 400 trucks

Completion rig                                          30 trucks

Completion fluids & materials                    80 – 160 trucks

Completion equipment (pipe, wellhead)    10 trucks

Hydraulic fracture equipment                    300 – 400 trucks

Hydraulic fracture water                           3200 – 4800 tankers

Hydraulic fracture sand                             160 – 200 trucks

Flowback water removal                          1600 – 2400 tankers