Loyalsock Creek Ruined by Pipeline Installation

Drilling "Accident" on Loyalsock Creek east of Worlds End State Park in Central Pa. Thank you Gov. Corbett, DEP, DCNR and the inept and Criminally Negligent Williams Co. and it's Contractors for fouling this pristine stream on Labor Day Weekend 2012!

PA Resident Speaks To New Yorkers About the Natural Gas Industry

Vera Scroggins of Susquehanna County, PA, tells her personal story about how she got involved in the fight for public health and saving the beautiful land where she and her family settled years ago.  She speaks from the heart and knows her stuff.  She knows what she is talking about because she is living it every day.  She wants New York to be saved from the hell PA is experiencing. In this video, she is speaking to New Yorkers who live in Schoharie County.

 

Listen to Vera!  She speaks the truth!

 

 

DEP= Don't Expect Protection

Kids Stop the Frack Attack

The Sky Is Pink: Josh Fox's New Movie For NY

Dear Friends,

I know I don’t have to tell any of you what a vulnerable moment this is for New York and all New Yorkers. The New York Times has reported that Governor Andrew Cuomo will soon announce that drilling will be permitted in parts of the following five New York Counties: Broome, Chemung, Chenango, Steuben and Tioga in the Southern Tier. The Governor’s office has made no official announcement as yet, but all indications suggest that the counties listed above will be the first to be sacrificed and that drilling may be permitted as early as this summer. We’ve made a new short film, The Sky is Pink, which has just been released at Rolling Stone Magazine online. The Sky Is Pink details the shocking campaign of misinformation perpetuated by the gas industry, their flagrant disregard for the health and safety of the communities they ravage, and the historic decision that Governor Cuomo is about to make. We’re telling Governor Cuomo that there are no expendable counties or communities in New York State and that we are not willing to allow the gas industry to exploit or endanger any of our fellow citizens. Governor Cuomo and his administration must be held to their promise to make decisions on behalf of New Yorkers based on sound science and they must provide the people of New York with a full Health Impact Assessment. We demand that no weak compromises or deals are cut that send New York down the slippery slope toward a full-scale assault by the gas industry. I’m asking you to help us make sure this film reaches far and wide. Clearly the 60,000 comments received by New York’s Department of Environmental Protection have been ignored. Clearly, we’re going to need to be even louder this time if we are going to be heard. We need to tell Governor that hydraulic fracturing is not safe, not now, not ever and not in New York State.

Read Jeff Goodell's article at Rolling Stone Magazine here: You`can also watch the full film here:
 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/new-anti-fracking-film-by-gaslands-josh-fox-targets-cuomo-governor-what-color-will-the-sky-be-over-new-york-20120620

 Please, send it to everyone you know. Post it everywhere you can.

Love, Josh

Our Dear Susquehanna: Please Protect Her

One of the longest rivers in America, the Susquehanna River provides over half of the freshwater to the Chesapeake Bay and drinking water to millions of people. Communities and businesses depend on the river for drinking water, commerce, hydropower generation, and recreational boating. Now this resource is at risk of contamination. Take action here.

Music: Fanfare For the Common Man by Aaron Copeland

This YouTube video was featured on the blog Susquehanna River Sentinel. 

The Susquehanna River was America's most endangered river in 2011.

My Dear Susquehanna: French Azilum, PA

I know this landscape very well.  It is French Azilum in Bradford County.  If you look carefully, you can see the effects of the gas drilling industry. Well pads, water impoundments, frac water treatment facility.  They are all there in this snapshot.  And this is all just getting started.  What a sad story...one of the most precious places on earth for me is being invaded, yes, raped, by people who want the money.  My family summer home is being contaminated slowly but surely.  That's the Susquehanna River winding through this picture.  It is the most polluted river on the east coast already.

A family song we have been singing for decades goes like this:

Old Frenchtown, how we love the dear old name!

There's no other place can ever be to us the same.

Through this world we may wander up and down,

But always, we'll be coming back again to old Frenchtown.

Camp Hutchinson, French Azilum, PA
My sacred spot





Sandra Steingraber: "I feel like we're old friends."

Dr. Sandra Steingraber speaks at Albany Rally January 23rd

 

Albany rally speech, 1/23/12 “Fracking Abolition” - Sandra Steingraber

by Raising Elijah by Sandra Steingraber on Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Hi, everybody. After three years of fighting fracking together, I feel like we’re old friends.

You know my story:

How I grew up in a heavily industrialized river valley in Illinois just downwind and downstream from the state’s biggest pollutors—dirty coal, ethanol distilleries, aluminum smelters.

How my hometown drinking water wells were contaminated.

How I developed bladder cancer at the age of twenty.

How, years later, as a biologist, I learned that I was just one data point in a cluster of cancers in the zipcode that I call home.

You know that when I became a mother—the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me—I moved my children to upstate New York to get away from all that, only to find myself in the crosshairs of the world’s largest and most polluting industry, with 40 percent of the land in my county already leased for the carcinogen-depended process of fracking.

And, as if that were not enough irony for English professors, hear this: The riverside bluffs of Illinois are now going to be strip-mined for frack sand. So the remains of the beloved landscapes of my childhood can be carted off and —absent our intervention—shoved into the fractured landscape of my children’s childhood.

Beautiful grains of Illinois River sand forced into fissures of shale, forced to prop open the shattered bedrock of New York so that all manner of explosive vapors and carcinogenic materials—arsenic, radium, uranium, benzene—can come flying out like bats out of Pandora’s box.

Exposing the people I grew up with in Illinois to carcinogenic silica dust. Exposing my children here to smog and radon.

Today, friends, let’s speak plainly.

Fracking is wrong.

Fracking is unmitigatable. Sooner or later, steel and concrete disintegrates. Sooner or later, gas wells open portals of contamination between drinking water aquifers and the toxic materials held in the bedrock below. Doing fracking “right” simply means building time bombs with longer fuses.

There are no places in New York and no children in New York that we are willing to sacrifice to the fracking gods.

So. Withdraw the sGEIS fig leaf and start the hell over.

Over the past three years, we have spoken many clear and beautiful words, in testimonies, in speeches, at hearings, on the banks of the Delaware River, and as far as I can see, there is just one word left to say. I offer it to you as a torch to carry with you into all your meetings today.

It’s the answer to the riddle, “What do Harriet Tubman and the Bulgarian Parliament have in common?”

And the answer is: ABOLITION

Harriet Tubman. Citizen of Auburn, New York. The most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad.

Harriet Tubman did not advocate for state of the art slavery or for promulgating 1500 pages of regulations about slavery or for allowing a few showcase plantations in the Southern Tier to demonstrate how slavery could be done right.

Harriet Tubman settled for nothing less than a total ban, on the grounds that slave labor—however useful to the economy—is a homicidal abomination.

Last week, Bulgaria announced a total ban on fracking. The ban covers the whole nation and it is permanent and unlimited. Permits to frack, held by Chevron, have been revoked. Bulgaria has abolished fracking. The Bulgarians are fracking abolitionists.

How did they do that?

The Bulgarians marched in the streets of twelve cities. The Bulgarians blew whistles and banged on drums and played fight songs on bagpipes. The Bulgarians employed giant, winged stilt-walkers, edgy street theater, and very cool public service announcements.

And when their parliament said, “Okay, fine, here’s a temporary moratorium, the Bulgarian people said, “Not good enough! We’ll settle for nothing short of abolition,” and they marched in the streets again until their parliament voted 166 to 6 for permanent ban.

So, New York, are we meeker than the Bulgarians?

Are we more frightened?

Are we more resigned to a toxic future?

Here is a loaf of bread from a bakery in my own village of Trumansburg, New York.

You’ve seen me hold this bread before. You’ve seen me carry it into the state assembly chambers and submit it as testimony. You’ve heard me say that the flour that makes up this bread is ground at a local mill and that the heirloom wheat that makes up this flour is grown in local fields. And that the flour in this bread makes up the bodies of my children.

Well, today, we’ve brought more than a hundred loaves of this bread, a symbol of the bounty of New York, and we’re going to bring them to our governor, with the message, “Break bread! Not shale!” To tell you about this plan, I would now like to introduce to you the baker of this bread, my hero, Stefan Senders, of the Wide Awake Bakery.

Wide Awake Bakery, 4361 Buck Hill Road, S., Trumansburg, New York 14886
The millers, Greg Mol and Neil Johnston, and the farmers,
Erick Smith and Thor Oeschner, make up Farmer Ground Flour of Trumansburg.

BREAK BREAD, NOT SHALE!

A Trip To Dimock, PA, Part Two

A video by Scott Cannon On January 10, 2012.  I drove to Dimock Pennsylvania to find out what's going on with the DEP and the EPA's investigation on the water well contamination alleged by Cabot Oil & Gas.

Methane in three private water wells in Lenox Twp. seeped there from a flawed natural gas well drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., state environmental regulators have found.

An investigation by the Department of Environmental Protection determined that the gas migrated from at least one of three Marcellus Shale wells on the Stalter well pad about a half-mile west of Interstate 81 in Susquehanna County.

The gas was found seeping into three water supplies in August. A fourth water well for a hunting cabin is still being evaluated, DEP spokesman Daniel Spadoni said.

Video from inside one of Cabot's gas wells showed that a string of steel casing meant to seal off the aquifer from contaminants was improperly constructed, according to a notice of violation sent by DEP in September.

Methane was also found between the cemented strings of casing in all three gas wells on the Stalter pad, a sign state regulators view as evidence of flaws in a well's construction.

The dissolved methane in one nearby water supply jumped from 0.3 milligrams per liter before drilling began to 49 milligrams per liter on Aug. 16 and 57 milligrams per liter on Aug. 18, according to the violation notice.

Cabot installed methane detection alarms in three homes and vented the three affected water wells to keep the methane from accumulating and creating an explosion risk. The company is also delivering replacement drinking water to two of the homes, Mr. Spadoni said. The methane in the third water well has decreased so the home does not require an alternate water supply, he said.

Cabot spokesman George Stark said Friday that the company submitted a detailed response to the DEP and is working with regulators on the issue.

"Cabot is committed to safe and responsible operations and takes matters like this very seriously," he said. "We believe in fact-based, scientific research to guide any necessary corrective actions."

Department regulators sent Cabot a violation notice on Sept. 19, but neither the department's public eFACTS compliance database nor its monthly oil and gas violations report noted the inspection or violations until last week, when a Times-Tribune reporter asked about the investigation.

DEP policy requires the oil and gas program to update the eFACTS database within 10 working days of completing an inspection or mailing a notice of violations.

Mr. Spadoni said the missing information was "an oversight."

Part One here.

EPA To Dimock Residents: Water Is On the Way- NOT!

This weekend Dimock residents were under the impression that the EPA planned to deliver emergency water to them.  But the decision was reversed, and the reason is unclear.  The affected families literally have no water with which to cook, bathe, wash clothes, and flush toilets.  This is just wrong.
Read more.

Truck Accident in Pennsylvania Results In Spill of Frack Fluid

Only a tiny article in the Star-Gazette mentioned this accident involving two trucks, tractor-trailers, and resulted in a toxic spill into a creek. The accident occurred early Monday afternoon, December 28, on Route 287 in Mifflin Township, PA. Accidents like this happen and will continue to happen over and over again. The natural gas industry is too dangerous to continue to grow and expand all over the country and the world.  It must be stopped.

Read the short article here.

SRBC Testimony: Will you be good Germans?

Rabbi Mordechi Liebling testified recently at the SRBC hearing in Wikes-Barre, PA. His impassioned remarks were totally ignored by the commission.

Here are more details about the hearing:

A powerful public comment was ignored at the SRBC meeting in Wilkes-Barre on December 15, 2011.

The manager of project review for the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, Dehoff - with the help of his staff - is responsible for recommending to the commission whether to approve water withdrawals from the basin. That includes suggesting whether the commission should allow natural gas companies to withdraw water used for the controversial drilling and hydraulic fracturing of gas wells.

In front of more than 50 people at the commission's meeting Thursday morning at the East Mountain Inn just outside of Wilkes-Barre, Dehoff made it about halfway through his recommendations before the cacophony of boos and chanting forced commission Chairwoman Kelly Heffner to threaten to clear the room, hastily adopt all of Dehoff's recommendations and adjourn the meeting early.

Gas Drilling Gone Bad: This just in from West Virginia....

A well pad in West Virginia, the Marshall pad, has been shut down by the state's DEP.  Violations include chemical releases into adjacent streams.  Read the whole sordid story here.

Is high-volume, slick water hydrofracking constitutional in PA?

Article I, section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution

Sec. 27. Natural Resources and the Public Estate

The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.

This amendment, which was adopted in 1972, encompasses two basic principles. First, Pennsylvanians have a right to a decent environment, and second, Pennsylvania government has a trusteeship responsibility to protect that environment on behalf of future generations.

Is hydrofracking constitutional in PA?

Methane Still Bubbling in Susquehanna at Sugar Run, PA: Day 444

Today it will be 444 days since methane began bubbling up in the Susquehanna River at Sugar Run in Bradford County. Still no resolution to the problem. Where is it coming from? When will it be stopped? Unanswered questions.

And another video:
 

From the Wyoming County Press Examiner, CLICK HERE.

And from Don Williams, filmed on July 17, 2011:

VIDEO

When will we get this problem resolved?

Natural Gas Drilling: The Ironic News Report

David Rovics Performs His Song "No Fracking Way"

From Garden-concert at Alværn, Nesoddden by the Oslofjord August 8. 2011.

More about David Rovics here.

I just came home from a concert by David Rovics in Rochester, NY.   If you haven't experienced a Rovics concert,  you must try to catch up with him.  His songs are riveting, intense, and show a thorough knowledge and understanding of world events, both current and in history.  David Rovics is a class act.

Transition Lancaster Visits PA Gasland

Concerned citizens from Lancaster, PA, trek up to Northern PA to witness natural gas rigs, well pads, storage facilities, and transport trucks in action. They visit with fellow Pennsylvanian land owners effected by the drilling and subsequent contamination of local waterways and diminishing air quality; who are standing up for their constitutional and human rights to clean air and clean water.

Spraying roads in Terry Township Route 187
Photo: Carol Manuel

So when we see a gas truck labeled brine or fresh water, do we really know what is in that vehicle?  I don't trust the markings on those trucks.

What is Transition Lancaster? Click here.

Retirement Ruined: Personal Story of Truman Burnett (2009)

Mr. Burnett's simple story of how his beautiful property was ruined forever by gas drilling spills nearby speaks for itself. The gas corporation that is responsible for this tragedy? Chesapeake Energy. Our good neighbors.

PA Sierra Club Worried About Frack Fluids in Flood Water

Bridge in Wyalusing, PA

For Immediate Release

September 9, 2011

Contact:

Jeff Schmidt, Sierra Club - Pennsylvania Chapter, 717-602-5431

Tracy Carluccio, Delaware River Network, 215-692-2329



Pennsylvania Groups Express Concerns over Fracking Fluids in Flood Water

Demand Disclosure of Chemicals and Number of Well Pads in Floodplains

Harrisburg, PA-As tropical storm Lee continues to dump massive amounts of rain throughout Pennsylvania, concerns are growing over natural gas drilling pits overflowing and spilling their toxic contents into flooded creeks, streams and rivers.

There are no currently safeguards in place by the State of Pennsylvania to prevent natural gas drilling and the placing of open pits containing toxic fracking fluids in flood plains.

The groups call on the DEP to immediately disclose to the public and emergency response professionals how many wells are located within the floodplain, how many may have potentially leaked into our waterways, and what types of chemicals residents and emergency responders may have come in contact with.

Pennsylvania Environmental groups released the following statements in reaction to the heavy rainfall and potential for contaminated flood regions:

"Given the significant flooding over the past several days, there is much concern over how many well pads, open pits and chemical storage tank fields have been inundated with toxic chemicals washing into our waterways and flooded communities," states Jeff Schmidt, Director with the Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter. "It is imperative that the PA DEP not allow natural gas wells and infrastructure to be located in floodplains."

"The human devastation experienced by flooding is largely the result of bad decision making - building in the wrong place and the wrong way," said Maya van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper. "Because we have once again put the priorities of industry above the health, safety and protection of people, which includes protecting the environment that feeds and sustains them. We have created a catastrophic situation - and the damage we see here will far surpass what we are able to see with our eyes, the chemical slurry of the drillers will spread its poison, becoming an insidious and unseen threat that will cause sickness and harm for years to come."

"We can only assume that the runoff from gas well sites during this terrible flooding is a toxic flood," said Tracy Carluccio, Deputy Director of DRN. "PA should shut down all drilling now and must immediately revise its regulations to prohibit any gas well development within the floodplains adjacent riparian areas, for the sake of public health and safety."

B. Arrindell, Director of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, said, "We have verified that there is a spreading oil slick in the Wyalusing area along the flooding Susquehanna River. This is indicative of not just oils, but also all the chemicals being used and released materials brought to the surface by the drilling that are now being spread everywhere the flood waters travel. This has profound ongoing health implications for everyone living, working, farming or visiting the area. Pennsylvanians are being denied their constitutional right to a clean environment."

"While the industry mouths rhetoric about 'safe and responsible' drilling, they do the absolute opposite in fact, storing hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic flowback fluid in open frack pits, now flowing into floodwaters," said Iris Marie Bloom, director of Protecting Our Waters. "Fracking fluid chemicals, and even worse, the radioactive materials, arsenic and other deadly contaminants brought up from the deep shale, should never come into contact with air, water or earth. But here they are flowing with flood waters irreversibly into our ecosystem. This is a public health disaster in the making. Not one more fracking permit should be issued. All open frack pits must be permanently abolished and life-cycle cumulative impact studies done."

Nature Abounds President Melinda Hughes-Wert commented on the situation, "Prior to the epic flooding, we already knew that toxic water from the wells was seeping into our waterways through inefficient containment ponds placed in mountainous topography. Now with the epic flooding, we have even more toxic chemicals in our ground and surface waters. This is truly a significant problem for the commonwealth and it should be addressed by our officials with urgency. Anything less, is an insult to the intelligence of the citizens of Pennsylvania."

"The devastating flooding occurring in Pennsylvania is just another chilling reminder that we are all downstream of poorly regulated, poorly understood, and inherently dangerous natural gas drilling operations. Natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania needs to stop," said Karen Feridun, Founder of Berks Gas Truth.

Is Your Water at Risk from Fracking?

From Food and Water Watch, a clever, entertaining video that lasts 2½ minutes!

Food and Water Watch Mission Statement:

Our Mission

Food & Water Watch works to ensure the food, water and fish we consume is safe, accessible and sustainably produced. So we can all enjoy and trust in what we eat and drink, we help people take charge of where their food comes from, keep clean, affordable, public tap water flowing freely to our homes, protect the environmental quality of oceans, force government to do its job protecting citizens, and educate about the importance of keeping the global commons — our shared resources — under public control.

For more information, click here.