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Today, two maps to ponder. Tomorrow, why.
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Tags: DEC, hydraulic fracturing, Marcellus, SGEIS, statewide ban, watershed
Report from Seneca Daily Journal, Seneca, South Carolina:
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By Andrew Moore (Contact / Staff Bio)
July 8, 2009
ANDERSON — “United States District Judge G. Ross Anderson Jr. has instructed Schlumberger Technology Corporation attorney John Hanson to formally submit a design plan for removing two dams on Twelve Mile River by the end of August, putting a serious alteration on the company’s own timelines of providing the final design by November.
“A public hearing on Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Anderson highlighted Judge Anderson’s disdain for Schlumberger’s failure to remove the dams along with polychlorinated biphenyl-contaminated sediment more than three years after he instructed the company to do so in a 2006 consent decree.
“For more than two decades, a manufacturing facility on the river pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PCBs into the river’s tributaries. The river feeds into Lake Hartwell, the bottom of which is covered by PCB-contaminated sediment from the river’s toxic flow. Removing hundreds of yards of sediment from the river, coupled with eliminating two of the three old dams there, would allow fresh sediment to naturally flow and settle on top of the toxic sediments at the bottom of Hartwell, which has a ban on eating fish caught there.
“Anderson has given Schlumberger until July 2010 to remove the dams, and is also demanding the company turn over all quarterly progress reports on the project to him so that he may in turn immediately release them to the media and general public.
“Anderson said he would assume full control of the project after Schlumberger’s apparent circumventing of his 2006 order.
“’I’m not an engineer,’ he said. ‘But this is what you get into when you stoop to fooling a federal court.’
“Brad Wyche, executive director of conservation group Upstate Forever, told Anderson he also believed the delays in the project were intentional.
“’I think it’s clear what’s been going on,’ Wyche said.
“At the heart of the delays were a series of changes in project managers as well as contractors for the job. Joe Carroll of Restoration Systems, the contractor initially tapped for the project, told Anderson the contract was terminated when he was reluctant to sign an 85-page amendment to an originally 15-page agreement.
“’They may live to regret that,’ Anderson said of Schlumberger’s departure from the plan consistent with his consent decree.
“Lawrence Dyck, a retired Clemson University science professor and Twelve Mile River resident, said he was skeptical about the supposed progress Schlumberger had made.
“’We’re no closer to removing those dams than when you signed those decrees in 2006,’ Dyck said. ‘We’re maybe farther away.’
“Anderson emphasized at the end of the hearing that there was no more time to “fool around” with his order, and that he was taking the reins of the project himself.
“’Frankly, I don’t trust you,’ he said, as he looked toward Schlumberger’s legal team.”
Source:
http://www.upstateforever.org/newsviews_ufnews.html
http://www.upstateforever.org/newsviews_ufnews/UFN_2009/ufn090708SDJ_JudgeTakesReinsInRiverPollutionSaga.pdf
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Tags: Horseheads, hydraulic fracturing, Marcellus, Schlumberger
Horseheads High School, 7pm
401 Fletcher St.
Horseheads, NY 14845
Contributed:
“The time to make a difference is tonight, 7PM at Horseheads High School.
“For the village of Horseheads, as lead agency, to have the ability to allow a huge corporation like Schlumberger to build a giant facility serving a 300-mile gas drilling radius with EXPLOSIVES, RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL AND CONCENTRATED TOXIC CHEMICALS across the street from a school , without requiring a full EIS is appalling. The truck traffic has been estimated in THE HUNDREDS of trucks from the site to and from the facility PER DAY. This three hundred mile radius includes most, if not all of us, but we have absolutely no voice.
“THE VILLAGE OF HORSEHEADS IS NOT REQUIRING AN ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT.
“All for a few hundred “jobs”, most of them dangerous and unpleasant. Is NYS’s economy so bad we are reduced to allowing rapacious businesses to flagrantly abuse the most vulnerable of us all? If natural gas extraction by unconventional means must occur as part of a well-thought out and soberly constructed NYS energy plan, then LET US DO IT METHODICALLY AND CAREFULLY.
“Instead, these companies have used highly financed, stealthy, and forceful techniques to get their way, from their cronies at the top to the landmen sharks who coerced landowner-victims into signing leases they had no context of understanding.
“The world is upside down. We don’t cherish our agricultural areas, our forests, our fresh water supplies in this country or this state anymore. And now, we see that many people are OKAY WITH NOT CHERISHING THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OUR CHILDREN, EITHER.
“From a Horseheads area resident and friend: “Even if people don’t want to speak, they need to attend in order to help fill the room and to hear what others say. But those who are willing to just make one simple point of their choice (especially about immediate air pollution and health hazards from Diesel exhaust and later water contamination) should be strongly encouraged to do so. Call some friends. Arrange car pools. The press will be there because it’s been announced repeatedly in both papers, and TV should be there, too. This is the only chance to speak publicly on this topic before the joint board workshop on Sept. 15. Then they will probably sometime afterwards in private make their decision of a positive or negative declaration of environmental impact (with subsequent automatic requirement of EIS or not) and the Village Board of Trustees hold its official vote on it at its next regular meeting (Sept 24).”
“So please show up, and show that you care about the runaway railroad train that is the oil and gas drilling industry moving into NYS without appropriate impact studies, oversight and transparency..”
Tags: Horseheads, hydraulic fracturing, Marcellus, Schlumberger
Published: September 9, 2009
BY JAMES LOEWENSTEIN
TOWANDA – Gas drilling activity is resulting in an increase in crime
in the borough, the borough police chief said on Monday.
The issue came up at Monday’s Towanda Borough Council meeting, when
borough council member Bob McLinko asked Police Chief Mitch Osman
whether the “extracurricular activity in the borough, along with
population increase, has resulted in problems.”
By extracurricular activity, McLinko was apparently referring to
drinking at the bars in Towanda.
Osman replied that police calls have gone up as workers in the gas
drilling industry have moved into the county, “especially the severity
of the calls.”
In the past, you could probably predict which nights would be quiet in
town, the police chief said.
“We can’t do that any more,” he said. “It’s definitely busy.”
. . . . .
Osman said…that he could use two additional police officers.
Complete story:
http://www.thedailyreview.com/news/police_chief_gas_drilling_causing_increase_in_crime_locally
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Tags: crime, gas drilling, Marcellus, PA, Pennsylvania, Towanda
This isn’t “misinformation. ”
It’s not “misrepresenting the facts”
about “responsible gas exploration.”
It’s just what’s already actually happening in and to Wetzel County, WestVirginia.
The following post is copied with permission from
http://sootypaws.livejournal.com/15049.html
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Wetzel County
We’ve seen and heard a presentation by Ray Renaud of the Wetzel County Action Group about what’s happening in north Wetzel County in northern West Virginia (just below the panhandle) where there’s a tremendous amount of drilling activity taking place. Right now the wells being drilled are for Marcellus shale but other companies are getting ready to move in including CNX which is an operator specializing in coalbed methane.
This is a very rural area with only a few roads and those are narrow, about 10 feet wide. Because of all the drilling there is a lot of traffic as equipment and materials are hauled to and from sites. Twenty-four hours a day, as many as 47 trucks an hour.
The well sites are huge with pads covering acres and pits just about as large. Multiple horizontal wells are being drilled and fractured on each pad before the operator moves to a new site. Fracturing requires large amounts of water and sand.
The scale of everything and its effect on the community and environment is hard to imagine. A copy of the presentation as a PowerPoint document is available online but it is a large download, almost 50 MB. http://www.sendspace.com/file/hlpich
Ray said we could use some of the photos from the presentation.
The roads are narrow and wind up and down steep hills. Most of the equipment is much heavier than the roads were designed and built
for — cars and light trucks. This is a holding structure for sand used in
fracturing a well. There will be a large number of these tanks on the pad.
. Because of all the traffic there’s a lot of accidents. This truck has rolled over, its cab partially crushed on the guard rail.
We wrote a post a while back about
injuries and accidents in the oil and gas industry. About 25% of deaths are caused by road accidents.
. Traffic jams can last for hours and hours. These trucks are parked in front of the volunteer fire department, blocking fire trucks if there were to be an emergency.
The scale of everything is either huge, large or enormous. In the foreground on the right is a three-story barn. In the middle ground is a large volume pit holding fracture fluid. Operators “dewater” rivers and streams for all the water used in drilling and fracturing, turning good water into waste.
. This is a photo taken at night showing just a portion of a pad during drilling a horizontal well. Drilling goes on day and night. Once two wells are drilled on this pad the equipment will be moved to another pad to drill two more wells. Eventually there will be 6 wells on this pad.
. The EPA waived sedimentation control requirements for the oil and gas industry. This means that oil and gas sites don’t need to use silt fencing or other control to protect streams, rivers and lakes. The rivers in Wetzel County are now running thick slurry instead of clear water.
Our own gas well study has focused on problems at well sites and older ones at that. What’s happening in Wetzel County, West Virginia, and in parts of Pennsylvania, Texas and Arkansas and a host of other places is the future writ large as the oil and gas industry converts rural America into an industrial wasteland.
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Visit original post at:
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Tags: accidents, drilling, exploration, extraction, Marcellus, natural gas, traffic, trucks, Wetzel County, WV
…You wonder if they wondered why.
Smells like… astroturf, don’t you think?
___________________Credit all photos Cecile A Lawrence (c)____________________
Tags: astroturfing, Bainbridge, coalition, Marcellus, our rights our land our future, rally
It’s a media miracle.
Like water into wine, like the loaves and fishes, somehow there were more people at the rally than arrived or left – even resorting to adding those 2 figures together. This handful of people who attended a coalition rally in Bainbridge on August 23 were, through the magic of reporting, turned into “two thousand.”
These pictures were taken at the height of the attendance, not early in the day.
On the evidence, it could easily be concluded that most of the people there were family members of organizers – or selling something. Look at all the company and bank reps standing around with no one to peddle their wares to.
It’s hard to conclude that in real terms, this thing was anything other than a bust. But when you can get the media to report that 2000 people showed up, and then you can take the newspaper article with the bloated figures to your politicians to pressure them to betray the majority population of their constituencies, suddenly, the sow’s ear becomes a silk purse.
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Kudos to the voice of caution – who evidently wasn’t standing alone on the fringe of the field, as reported by the media.
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___________________Credit all photos Cecile A Lawrence (c)____________________
Tags: astroturfing, Bainbridge, coalition, Marcellus, our rights our land our future, rally
The Bradford Era reports:Thursday, September 3, 2009 4:05 AM EDTDEP gets tough questions Wednesday night
By ADAM VOSLER, Era Reporter
Hedgehog Lane residents made it clear to Department of Environmental Protection officials Wednesday that their water and quality-of-life problems due to recent oil drilling are far from solved.
About 20 residents and Bradford Township Supervisors Chairman Don Cummins gathered at the Lions Club community building to ask tough questions of four DEP representatives who made the trip to provide an update on the issues and answer concerns. State Rep. Martin Causer, R-Turtlepoint, also attended the meeting, the second of its kind in recent weeks.
“I’m sure this has dragged on longer than you would’ve liked it to,” Regional Director Kelly Burch said of the problems, for which DEP issued violation notices to Schreiner Oil and Gas for four overpressured oil wells and contamination to seven water wells.
“Gas migration cases are very difficult.”
Schreiner drilled nearly two dozen wells last fall. Since then, residents have complained of everything from poor water quality to odor, noise, oil lease access road runoff onto Hedgehog, and other issues.
“We think most of the problems are corrected,” Burch said.
Several residents took exception to that claim. Many of them said their water still has foul odor and abnormal taste, while DEP countered that the water passes the agency’s 18 parameters for safe drinking.
“The source of the gas has been abated,” said Craig Lobins, regional manager of DEP’s Oil & Gas Management Program.
The other top complaint of residents has been a stripper plant located off Hedgehog Lane. [http://un-naturalgas.org/weblog/?p=457]
The plant strips unwanted gas out of the gas product that is coming out of wells. The structures, residents say, are a hazard because of its propane tanks that were placed only a few hundred feet from homes; also, the compressor station is noisy and produces an odor.
So the residents were likely not happy to hear that DEP granted New Century Pipeline a permit for the plant a few weeks ago — months after the structure was already built without permission.
That company, which is under Schreiner partner Aiello Bros. Oil & Gas, is facing a yet-unscheduled Bradford Township Zoning Board hearing on grounds that it never filed for a zoning permit. The matter could end up in McKean County Court if the company appeals the zoning officer’s findings.
“We are obliged by law to issue the permit if they meet our standards,” said DEP Air Quality Coordinator John Guth.
Cummins complained that the permit shouldn’t have been issued if the plant was in violation of township zoning laws. New Century has also faced DEP fines because it never informed the agency of its building plans, either.
“They have been noncompliant since the day they started operating,” Burch acknowledged.
Hedgehog natives wondered aloud why their neighborhood has been slow to receive help and why repeated offenses by Schreiner have been tolerated.
“When people are acting like this over and over and over, that’s where my frustration lies,” one Hedgehog resident said.
“Why is it up to us to try and stop somebody else who’s obviously breaking the rules?” asked another resident.
Schreiner’s permits for the several remaining wells to be fractured are valid until spring. DEP would not deny him that right, but Lobins said the wells are nearly worthless at this point because they’ve been open for so long.
“I don’t know if (Schreiner’s) going to drill any more of those,” Lobins said.
DEP had ordered Schreiner to stop further oil and gas drilling on Hedgehog until the water supplies were “restored or replaced,” which they have done by supplying bottled water and redrilling water wells. Of course, that matters little to the residents who say their water is still coming up bad.
. . . . .
Overall, it’s clear the residents are tiring of the water situation and what they believe is DEP’s negligence of obvious problems with its drinkability.
“I’ve lived there 21 years, and my water in the last year, it’s gone to crap,” said a man who identified himself as a resident of 177 Hedgehog Lane. Several residents cited the water as tasting “musty” and “old.”
A few visitors even questioned DEP reports they found online, saying the reports twisted what agents and residents said about their water’s poor odor and taste during recent visits.
Burch was swift in defending his staff.
“Many of my employees have a private well just like many of you … I know they wouldn’t tolerate it.”
After nearly two hours of back-and-forth between Cummins’ constituents and DEP officials, the supervisor boiled it down to one simple question.
“How do we get their water back to the way it was?” Cummins asked Burch.
As of today, the DEP does not seem to have an answer.
Full story athttp://bradfordera.com/articles/2009/09/03/news/doc4a9f350208adc444487486.txt
Tags: Bradford Township, Burch, DEP, hazardous fluids, leaks, Marcellus, McKean County, PA, Pennsylvania, propane, Schreiner, stripper, VOCs, water, water wells, zoning
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