Contributed:

Yesterday I went to the gas fields in Bradford County PA to see first hand what was going on. What you see first is an unbelievable amount of trucks. Gas company trucks literally by the thousands. People seemed willing to talk about the gas biz.  It sounds like there are a very few winners in this deal and the rest are all scrambling to get the leftover crumbs. The wellpads are not everywhere you look, many are not in sight of the roads but the ones I did see were huge. Really, like walmart parkinglot size. The story you get is that if you get one of these monsters on your property you get rich, like multi-millionaire rich, of course everyone else just has to deal with an industrial operation on a level never seen in this area. There is no containing this beast once it gets in the door. It totally consumed the area. Anyone not involved in the gas business seemed oddly out of place.

So then I headed north and crossed the New York border and it all just stopped.  All of it, the good, the bad, the ugly. No army of gas company support services, no shellshocked locals, just good old here.

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