From a follow-up interview conducted by e-mail and used with permission:
Hi David,
Thanks for coming up to Ithaca on Friday.
On a separate note, would you mind if I share your experience with fracking with people in Ithaca? If it’s okay with you for me to do so, I’d also like to confirm what you told me:
1. Pollution of your well (two wells?). How did this show up?
Bohlander: We have two wells on the farm (190 acres). We had a detailed baseline water testing done on both before any of the gas activity happened in our area. We subsequently have had another 6 or so tests done on these wells. It is crucial to have certified baseline testing done prior to any activity by gas companies or they will claim there is no proof they are the cause and argue it was a pre-existing condition. We also retained a very competent hydrologist (who has the gas company clients) who was the plaintiffs hydrologist in the Dimock, PA contamination (highlighted in the movie Gasland). The well for the barn/and original farmhouse was so contaminated with methane they thought it would explode so the well pump was disconnected for six months and water was trucked in by the gas companies for the animals, and spring water for the humans!
2. The operations end up being more extensive than anticipated. The “pads” are large, and end up being used for other operations.
Bohlander: Gas companies are major deceivers. They do this many ways. One is using land agents that are not their employees so that they can claim “we never said that ..they did”
Most all the neighbors were told that the gas wells would be drilled, it would take 3 months or so, and then land would be restored to earlier state. In reality this is what happens. They excavate a pad obliterating the natural terrain, hauling in 100’s of trucks of stone, gravel, etc. Once the pad is completed, they only drill 2-4 actual gas wells of what ultimately are likely going to be 12 or so on that pad. They may not frack the drilled wells immediately, but wait sometimes a year. The intention is to refrack over and over the same drilled wells. They are now claiming there is 60 years of gas here. Simultaneously, although not on all pads, they use the pads for other things such as equipment storage, frack water storage, and the worst: frack water recycling which we have three in our neighborhood and 2 are 10 year permits (one is in the review process, 9 days to go). These are REGIONAL frack water recycling operations bringing in dirty radioactive brine from 15 miles away or more, operating 24/7 with extensive noise, lights and traffic. DEP is way behind on enforcement. The neighbors are the enforcers, but it is David vs. Goliath (the gas companies). After four years now, I have not seen one well pad restored back to the original state. The stated plan by the gas companies is that there will be one well pad every 50 acres. If the well pad is 10 acres, 20% of our surface land area will be a perpetual well pad.
3. Extensive light pollution due to 24/7 operation.
Bohlander: Re frack water recycling: They power huge lights that light of the pads for the whole night. They don’t use street electric but generators which contribute to the noise. The trucks have large pumps that due to the volume of 5200 gallons per truck are large motors, the trucks endlessly are using their backup safety beepers, horns for instructions to the ground crew, etc. The three sites in our neighborhood will generate 800 trucks a day, 1600 with return trip passes.
The gas drilling when it goes on makes it almost impossible to sleep. 24/7, 7 days a week.
4. Extensive trucking.
Bohlander: The gas companies make new roads over smaller older roads to accommodate their extensive traffic. The state allows them to exceed the weight limit of the road by paying some fee or posting a bond. The small country road in front of our farm is now elevated 3 feet in the air from normal ground level. Certain roads are used as main arterial roads after they have been rebuilt –this happened to ours. The trucks are hauling huge amounts of gravel, fill, fresh water for fracking and the dirty brine water out, as well as all the equipment for the drilling process. Each well on the pad uses 5 million gallons of water. 60% flows back and is recycled, but removed from the site. Our road was destroyed initially and impassible. The gas companies then closed 10 mile stretches of the road for months at a time as they began rebuilding it. One landowner could only get to and from his property with a four wheeler.
5. Feel free to add any other relevant details.
Bohlander: The gas companies have a very systematic playbook from the years of operating and polluting Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, etc. They have two sides: a friendly neighborly “give $35K to the fire company” and then a ruthless no-holds-barred side. Three times they threatened that in 24 hours they were going to stop trucking in water for the cows in our barn unless we agreed to things. These things include non-disclosure agreements, consent not to sue, etc. Read the book Collateral Damage. A lot of good environmental activist groups with websites and a lot of info. Many have been to our house. We were one of the first contaminated sites in this region from the drilling.
The public does not have any idea how bad the permanent environmental contamination is going to be. There has been major barium and radiation poisoning with some already. One not far from us is a 13-year- old girl with barium poisoning. One of our immediate neighbors’ daughters is having clumps of hair fall out and his dog got sick and parakeet died from drinking his well water. He abuts one of the frack water recycling sites.
Air pollution is the sleeping giant. Each well pad on an ongoing basis emits things into the air (like toluene) as the gas goes through a preliminary filtering process at the well pad. The absolutely worst are the gas compression stations for both noise and air pollution.
As you may know, the gas drilling is exempt from the Clean Water Act — we actually are more apt to be fined if manure is spread on the road, than these major infractions the gas company are doing. The environmental enforcement agencies only slap their wrists with fines. Cost of doing business to gas companies –easier to just pay the fine.
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Tags: ai, compressor station, contamination, lies, PA, roads
Acknowledgments: Via Angela Fox > Alice Zinnes.
In its Executive Summary of the revised SGEIS released yesterday, the DEC states clearly that groundwater is at sufficient risk from gas drilling to restrict gas drilling to protect those drinking groundwater. But they only afford that protection to those drinking from primary aquifers. The DEC leaves the great majority of drinkers of groundwater in the Marcellus unprotected. They have some explaining to do.
I’m looking forward to hearing the DEC’s logic and science—their risk assessment strategy— used to assess that only some drinkers of contaminated groundwater need protection.
Primary aquifers are used as drinking water for some municipalities.
The list is on on page 5: http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/water_pdf/togs213.pdf
The list includes about 300,000 people in those municipalities drinking water from these primary aquifers in counties in the Marcellus shale. (see attached spreadsheet and chart at bottom.)
Page 18 of the new DEC doc describes the exclusion of primary aquifers. It’s pasted below, bold face added.
No HVHF Operations on Primary Aquifers
Although not subject to Filtration Avoidance Determinations, 18 other aquifers in the State of New York have been identified by the New York State Department of Health as highly productive aquifers presently utilized as sources of water supply by major municipal water supply systems and are designated as “primary aquifers.” Because these aquifers are the primary source of drinking water for many public drinking water supplies, the Department recommends in this dSGEIS that site disturbance relating to HVHF operations should not be permitted there either or in a protective 500-foot buffer area around them. Horizontal extraction of gas resources underneath Primary Aquifers from well pads located outside this area would not significantly impact this valuable water resource.
- http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/administration_pdf/execsumsgeis072011.pdfAs the DEC says, this is in addition to the exclusion of drilling in the watersheds of NYC and Syracuse.
Now, one can make an argument, as the DEC has, that the exclusion of drilling in the NYC and Syracuse water supplies is based on their being unfiltered surface water (as opposed to ground water), with a risk of “turbidity” from surface drilling activity. And because there have been rules in place for years restricting industry and development in unfiltered surface watersheds to avoid having to build super-expensive filtration plants, as for NYC. A more clear eyed assessment of carving out the NYC watershed is that the DEC wants to excise the political opposition of NYC, which could easily create a critical mass of opposition in the state. But they do have the surface water “turbidity” argument to fall back on to explain this preferential exclusion, even if politics is the underlying reason.
But when you are dealing with groundwater sources, how can you rationally and scientifically exclude some aquifers and not others? Again, the actual rationale appears overtly political, rather than based on the science or risk. The DEC is trying to carve out the opposition of the municipalities drinking from primary aquifers—including Jamestown, Elmira, Cortland, Binghamton, Corning, Salamanca. After all, these municipalities are really organized entities of people…….. who would otherwise likely oppose drilling.
Problem is, there are at least 1,140,000 people drinking groundwater in the Marcellus shale. What’s up, DEC? You’ve determined that groundwater is at risk. You’re going to protect 300,000 people from ground water pollution, but not the other 840,000.
Who are those people? Hello, it’s us, the people of rural NY State who will be drinking from polluted wells. It’s us, people who will not be receiving equal protection against the very threats that the DEC assesses are too risky for the people of upstate municipalities.
I think I’m going to call my lawyer.
Ken Jaffe, MD
Slope Farms
Meredith, NY
www.slopefarms.com
county percent of population drinking groundwater county population population drinking groundwater population drinking groundwater from primary aquifer population drinking groundwater not from primary aquifer name of primary aquifer Cortland 100 49,336 49,336 39,000 10,336 Cortland-
Homer-
PrebleChenango 95 50,477 47,953 47,953 Tioga 90 51,125 46,013 46,013 Waverly-
OwegoCattaraugus 90 80,317 72,285 72,285 Salamanca Allegany 85 48,946 41,604 41,604 Steuben 80 98,990 79,192 49,000 30,192 Corning-Cohocton Broome 80 200,600 160,480 110,000 50,480 Endicott-
Johnson
CitySchuyler 80 18,343 14,674 14,674 Madison 75 73,442 55,082 55,082 Otsego 75 62,259 46,694 46,694 Chemung 70 88,830 62,181 50,000 12,181 Elmira Yates 60 25,348 15,209 15,209 Genesee 60 60,079 36,047 36,047 Wyoming 55 42,155 23,185 23,185 Chautauqua 50 134,905 67,453 52,000 15,453 Jamestown Seneca 30 35,251 10,575 10,575 Ontario 25 107,931 26,983 26,983 Cayuga 25 80,026 20,007 20,007 Albany 20 304,204 60,841 60,841 Tompkins 15 101,564 15,235 15,235 Onondaga 15 467,026 70,054 70,054 Monroe 10 744,344 74,434 74,434 Erie 5 919,040 45,952 45,952 Totals 3,844,538 1,141,468 300,000 841,468
Source material
http://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/36164.html
http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/water_pdf/305bgrndw10.pdf
http://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/46381.html
http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/water_pdf/togs213.pdf
notes
- incomplete DEC data on primary aquifer in Cattaraugus and Tioga Counties may underestimate those drinking from primary aquifer by up to 50,000; this could raise the total using primary aquifers to about 350,000
- incomplete DEC data on total users of ground water does not include Delaware and Sullivan Counties; this could raise the total users of unprotected groundwater to about 950,000
Tags: aquifer, primary aquifer, revised SGEIS, unequal protection
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…b u t. . r e m e m b e r. . w h o. . w i n s. . i n. .t h e. . e n d .
Gas Drilling in Beautiful Susquehanna County, PA from VeccVideography on Vimeo.
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Tags: flaring, fracking, Pennsylvania, Susquehanna County
From “The Spill Seekers,” Outside Magazine, November 2010
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While I was in Louisiana, there was an event at the Cajundome, in Lafayette, called the Rally for Economic Survival: 11,000 people packed the place to hear the governor, the lieutenant governor, and, of all people, the executive director of the Louisiana Seafood Marketing and Promotion Board rail against the Obama administration for stealing their jobs by imposing a six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling.
“Enough is enough!” raged the lieutenant governor, Scott Angelle, in his thick Cajun accent. “Louisiana has a long and strong, distinguished history of fueling America, and we proudly do what few other states are willing to do. …America is not yet ready to get all of its fuel from the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees!”
True, but of the six billion to seven billion barrels of oil consumed by the U.S. each year, only about 10 percent comes from federal Gulf of Mexico waters; we get the same amount from both the Persian Gulf and Canada. Louisiana is no longer a significant source of crude, on- or off-shore. What it does supply is cheap labor and a pliant local government. In this, it’s eerily reminiscent of Third World places ruined by oil. The BPs of the world would have you believe oil brings prosperity to the countries where it’s discovered, but it brings misery so dependably that economists have a name for the phenomenon: the resource curse.
Ecuador, Venezuela, Iraq: Bad things happen to countries “blessed” with oil. The Niger Delta is the Mississippi River Delta’s separated-at-birth twin, offering the scariest cautionary tale of all. This tropical river delta held some of the greatest wetlands on earth, with abundant shellfish, crabs, and shrimp, the foundation of the economy and culture, but it also harbored vast oil reserves. In the past 50 years, Shell has grown preposterously wealthy off that oil, while Nigeria, with the tenth-largest oil reserves in the world, has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Almost three times as much oil has spilled into the Niger River Delta as was spilled by the Deepwater Horizon: 546 million gallons and counting. The creeks are black, and the crabs and shrimp are dead. There are always leaking, corroded wellheads and pipelines. Gangs of rebels and oil thieves roam the jungle. Flaring rigs fill the air with mercury, arsenic, and carcinogens. Disease is rampant. The government is cardboard.
Southern Louisiana is no Nigeria, but it’s also no longer quite recognizable as the United States. The trailer homes on pilings, the dearth of education, the chronic disease, the fat parish chiefs – I know the Third World when I see it. Cajuns haven’t grown rich on crude; Houston has. And when the oil runs out, there’s nothing left to fall back on.
I bet Angelle would simply argue that oil is worth billions more than seafood. But that’s only because we aren’t sophisticated enough to put a value on all the multifarious “ecosystem services” the gulf provides: benefits of the natural world, resources and processes we all too often take for granted. If we were to add these things to the ledger – all that gulf seafood and the health savings from it, the hurricane protection and wildlife habitat in all those marshes, to name only a few – and apply the calculus of their self-perpetuating sustainability, the astronomical value would blow your mind. It leaves petroleum in the pit. … How much are all those acres of disappearing land worth? What price the mental anxiety of a culture watching its homeland disintegrate? How much added value do you assign oyster reefs because they’ve never, ever blown up and killed anyone? It’s only ignorance – an inability to tally all the gains and losses – that makes oil look good.
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Do yourself a favor: pick up a copy at your favorite newstand and read the whole piece. And say thanks to Outside Magazine.
Tags: the resource curse
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We knew it happens; here’s proof:
Wetzel County Action Group photo used with permission
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Tanker dumping fluid onto public road
see also Sootypaws Journal – Fracture Waste
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Tags: dumping
Dispatch from Dimock:
The activity has really picked up here and over toward Elk Lake. Truck and tanker activity is steadily increasing. Water / whatever trucks running all night long. A dump truck roared by while I was along the road and it reeked of an oily smell – what was he hauling? Dirt roads are being widened and built up. Watched Brown Tree employees cut giant trees along a road that I considered one of the most beautiful walks in Dimock. The well site at Rayias has a pit. Thought pits were out? The Lathrop Compressor is just the beginning – it will be expanded as more wells come on line. Pipeline paths everywhere. After some optimism last few weeks I am sad to inform you – the destruction is in full swing, it does not look like we will get any help here in Susquehanna County. Heard a Cabot worker bought the bar a round at a local bar, dropped $600.00 on the crowd. Business is good…
- Victoria Switzer
Tags: Dimock, industrialization, PA
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