How to Insert Drilling into Slumbering Rural Towns

Last month, Candor Town Supervisor Bob Riggs told our town planning board to revise the town's Comprehensive Plan. Because, as he stated to the local reporter, "... about two years ago we voted on [and passed] the resolution about natural gas development in the town and in my opinion if you read what we approved alongside the comprehensive plan, it’s in conflict. Those two things ought to be consistent." 

His solution? If a mostly pro-drilling town board passes a resolution crafted by outsiders (Joint Landowners Coalition) and pushed by board members who have leased their land for gas drilling (conflict of interest), then of course the planning board should change the Comprehensive Plan to align with this "new reality".

At issue: the planning board didn't write the Comprehensive Plan all by itself. It was a community effort that took more than a year and involved town-wide meetings. Also at issue: at the core of the Comprehensive Plan is the people's desire for a small town environment. A survey of the residents showed that they like open space; that they moved to Candor for the beauty and privacy it affords. 

So when the planning board and community members met and drew up a comprehensive strategy, these were the goals they included in this document that would guide town planning into the new century: 

• to protect public health, safety, welfare and morals 
• to preserve open spaces 
• to preserve and enhance small town/rural qualities and values 
• to encourage and promote the development of new employment opportunities especially in enterprises that enhance and do not compromise the rural, small town nature

They prefaced the entire document with a mission statement that concludes, "... we are committed to being stewards of our children and the elderly and of the precious finite resources that must be shared with future generations." After a decade the plan was updated, and new goals added that included protecting the aquifer, open spaces, land use patterns, rural character, soils and agricultural land.

But with the recent Court decision upholding a town's right to determine where and whether drilling may occur within town limits, there's renewed pressure on rural, un-zoned towns to declare that they are willing to be fracked. Big towns, too, as Tom Wilber points out in his recent post. 

So last month a couple of us attended the Candor Planning Board's workshop meeting to see what their process would entail. We asked whether they would do a community survey. Their response: why? They suggested that industrialized unconventional drilling would fit under "light industry". Given the freedom to revise, without community input, the majority of the members on Candor's planning board would toss the Comprehensive Plan under the fracking bus.

What they don't see on their drives to Pennsylvania, and what they aren't hearing from folks who are getting royalty payments, is that drilling is a Large Industrial Activity. It is not compatible with beauty and privacy, clean water, fresh air, and the sound of sweet birds singing. 

• Unconventional industrialized gas drilling contaminates drinking water. At least four states confirm this. 
• Unconventional industrialized gas drilling can make the earth shake beneath your feet. Just last weekend Oklahoma had 11 earthquakes caused by injecting drilling wastewater into disposal wells. As any NY geologist will tell you, we've got faults beneath our feet.
• Unconventional industrialized gas drilling is dangerous. Wells explode. Compressors explode. Pipelines explode. Methane leaks into homes and fields.

Somehow these things don't jive with the "peaceful rural living" that brings residents to our town.

Books from GasLand - The End of Country

The End of Country

By Seamus McGraw

Random House, 2011

Some folks drill into the shale for gas, others for stories. Seamus McGraw, a Dimock lad, recently published a book about how drilling has impacted his neck of the woods. But The End of Country is about more than drilling. McGraw mixes memoir and documentary to reveal the character of those most impacted by drilling: Victoria Switzer, a retired school teacher who moved to Dimock to build her dream home; Ken Ely who quarries bluestone from his farm just uphill of Switzer; Rosemarie Greenwood, an aging dairy farmer who apologized for not baking muffins because her oven stopped working years ago.

When Ely tells him that the land is resilient, McGraw understands that he’s referring to past years of timbering, dairy farming, coal mining and, now, gas drilling. “Sure, you could kill it if you took too much,” Ely says. People need to understand that the land doesn’t owe them a fortune, just a living.

So why did people sign gas leases? For Rosemarie it was a way to keep the cows fed and the grain bills paid for one more year. For Ken it was another way to work his land. For Victoria it was an ambivalent faith that drilling might provide energy security to the region and the nation. The leases are less about money than about hope for a better future, one in which young men and women are not sent off to war to secure access to foreign oil fields.

A lot of the problems with drilling and gas distribution have mechanical solutions, McGraw says. Gas lost through leaky valves and pipes, referred to as “fugitive emissions” represents a loss of money for the energy corporations. “They could fix the problem but they don’t because they are too concerned about their production rates,” he says. What people need to understand is that public policy that forces the companies to address these issues not only protects the environment but is also in the best interest of the companies.

One question McGraw has for the gas companies is why they continue to power their industrial extraction efforts with expensive diesel. “Here we are sitting on top of the second – or third – largest reservoir of natural gas in the world,” he said, “yet how are they running the rigs? Diesel!” Drillers could be using gas to power everything from drilling rigs to their fleets to the generators that power the fracking operations.

Sure, Marcellus drilling has changed the countryside, McGraw says. “We can compare what it is now to what it was like 15 years ago, but the more important question is where are we going to be 5 or 10 years from now?”

Regardless of your thoughts on drilling or leasing, The End of Country makes for compelling reading

Another Earth Day, Another Blowout

Last year it was a BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico. This year it was a Chesapeake well in Bradford County, PA. April 20 is becoming a dangerous time for people living in the drill zone; let's hope it doesn't become an annual tradition.

photo by Frank Finan

Late Tuesday night a well near Canton, PA blew out during a fracking operation. Thousands of gallons of frack fluid poured out of the well, across a farmer's field and into Towanda Creek, which eventually spills into the Susquehanna River. The PA Department of Environmental Protection wasn't notified until the wee hours of Wednesday morning (April 20) and no one bothered to notify the cattle - or the farmer - until later in the day, though a crew did put up some barbed-wire fence in a hurry. Still, there's no telling cattle to stay away from the salty toxic waste....

Farming in the drill zone is tough. Just ask Carol French and Carolyn Knapp, two Bradford County dairy farmers who recently traveled to Brooktondale to talk about the rural impacts of industrialized drilling. One farmer had to sell his cattle after drillers sited a well behind the barn, cutting off access to his fields. His return on the drilling investment: $400/month in royalties and contaminated water.

Then there's the matter of forking over a few more pennies per hundredweight so the milk haulers won't bail out to drive trucks for the gas companies. And it's not just PA - NY dairy farmers are being hit by the added expense as well. And sawdust .... French says that with drillers buying up all the local supplies of sawdust (they mix it with drill cuttings before sending them to a landfill) she's resorted to grinding feed for bedding.

"Industrialized drilling affects everything," Knapp said.The shale shale play is huge and, gas companies point out, they expect to be producing gas for the next 30 to 50 years. Given the impacts on agriculture, both women wonder how long they can keep on farming.

"Not a day goes by that we don't discuss when we'll have to leave the farm," Knapp said.