Tracking the Environment

HETF has a meeting with NYSDEC on Friday, October 30, 2009 to discuss the impacts Hydro-fracking will have to the Haudenosaunee and the natural world. Here is an article that will enlighten the people about the impacts Hydro-fracking will have when it comes to New York State. Will we be prepared?

In August of 2009, the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force and the Onondaga Nation’s environmental team visited Bradford, PA to talk to neighbors there and witness first-hand the impacts of hydrofracking.

I was getting a headache. We’d only been there for ten minutes, but the periodic strong whiffs of propane gas were already getting to me. “It was worse two days ago,” Yvonne Shafer explained to me, “the whole outside and inside of the house would smell like that, about every half hour. At its worst, I spent two hours in the basement because it was the only place I could breathe.”

Such was our introduction to the domestic nightmare that the residents of Hedgehog Lane in Bradford, P A have to live through daily. This residential road winds up a valley outside of town, surrounded by forested hillsides. “We moved here because it was perfect,” Yvonne explained. “You couldn’t see the neighbors, there was lots of wildlife, clean air to breathe and clean water in the wells.” This all changed when about a year ago, when a company called Aiello began hydrofracking on the hillside above them.

Explanation of Hydrofracking

Hydrofracking (more accurately, slick-water horizontal hydrofracking) is a gas drilling method that allows gas companies to access the natural gas trapped in small pockets of the Marcellus and Utica shales, 500-11,000 feet below ground. A well is drilled deep into the earth to the appropriate layer, and then drilled sideways through the shale. A slurry of water, sand, and proprietary chemicals is pumped into the well at high pressures to fracture the shale and theoretically allow the trapped natural gas to flow upwards through the well. But not all of the 8 million gallons of water return, and it’s impossible to know what effect the fracturing deep below the ground has had. Voids and other anomalies underground compromise the effectiveness of the “casings” which supposedly protect groundwater from the fracking fluids.

This form of hydrofracking is happening in Pennsylvania, but not yet in New York. We know, however, that it is coming. The gas industry’s land men have been coercing landowners throughout the Southern Tier and Central New York to sign leases allowing the potential for gas drilling on their property. As many areas have not seen the impacts, many people are just trusting what the land men are telling them and signing, for as little as $50/acre.

They don’t see the risks, however. This was why we had come to Bradford; to see for ourselves what impacts hydrofracking has on a community.

Bradford, Pennsylvania

We visited Yvonne’s house first. It’s a cozy little camp tucked onto a hillside, surrounded by forest. Marring the secluded bliss, however, was the infernal drone of a generator nearby, which runs 24/7. Walking around to one side of the house, you could see the 40’ wide swath of forest that had been cut down for the steep, eroding road up the hillside to the 19,000 gallon propane tank that sits within a stone’s throw and easy view of their property.

Climbing the hill behind their house, we would occasionally be overwhelmed by a cloud of propane gas wafting past. About 600 feet uphill of their house, a road had been cut, traversing the hillside. Matt showed us a pumping station on the pipeline that ran through there, which was leaking propane from a faulty seal, and the “stripping plant” (which separates propane from the wells from the natural gas). It was easily viewable from the edge of his property - an open air industrial site with a maze of pipes and a co-generator to run it.

A solitary worker on the site noticed us and came up the road to “see if there was a problem”. The following discourse proved very educational, as he denied that there was any problem with the noise, fumes, or water issues in the surrounding homes. “Would you light a match around here?” Dan Hill, the Cayuga HETF representative asked, thinking of the pipeline monitoring station we’d seen only moments earlier that was clearly leaking propane through a faulty seal. “Oh yeah, it’s perfectly safe.”

The neighbors across the street at the bottom of the hill have been told differently, and for good reason. I watched one of them fill a bottle of water out of his hose, shake it up and let it sit for a minute, then light the air in the bottle on fire. This is even with the new well that had been dug, because the first one became so contaminated. He didn’t dare demonstrate this inside his house. Running the clothes washer still sets off the methane detector at their house.

The neighbors explained to us that the environmental regulations regarding well drilling were unprotective and barely enforced. The drilling industry is expected to self-report accidents and errors. In the case of the wells that destroyed their water, a driller mentioned to them after the fact that the casing around the well was clearly inadequate. However, it wasn’t reported or addressed until it impacted neighbors’ drinking water. They’ve had a hard time finding out whether or not the wells were fixed; again, the drillers were left to self-report. Supposedly they have been fixed; but these neighbors still have polluted water coming out of their taps.

We spoke to many more neighbors over the course of the day. Many had had their drinking water impacted, if not directly from gas well drilling and hydrofracking then by the ruining of their natural springs by the building of the access roads which criss-cross the hillside. The noise and smells were a common theme, and a general sense of fear; what would happen next? What would be the next catastrophe?

In all of our tour, we did not see the 5 acre drill pads like I saw in Dimock, P A, or that are slated for Central New York. Most of this area was developed with 1 acre drill pads, and all that sat on the pads now were relatively small well pumps. I found this much more frightening; if all of these impacts are felt with relatively small-scale drilling, what will the large-scale hydrofracking in New York look like? What damage will it cause to people, and the environment to which we belong and on which we depend?

Drill site in Dimock, PA. May 2009.

In all of our tour, we did not see the 5 acre drill pads like I saw in Dimock, P A, or that are slated for Central New York. Most of this area was developed with 1 acre drill pads, and all that sat on the pads now were relatively small well pumps. I found this much more frightening; if all of these impacts are felt with relatively small-scale drilling, what will the large-scale hydrofracking in New York look like? What damage will it cause to people, and the environment to which we belong and on which we depend?