Putting Shale Issues on the Ballot?

Subject: Whistlse Blower from Cabot Talks about Dimock. PAContent-Type: text/html errors, spills

From: Sierra Club anti-Fracking Team
11-20-11: David Meiser

Content-Type: text/html
DIMOCK TWP. - On a bright fall day in 2008, Scott Ely arrived at the natural gas well a few hundred feet from his home to find work strangely stilled.
His fellow employees of Cabot Oil and Gas Corp.'s drilling subsidiary were watching the only thing moving: a huge plume of gas "like Niagara Falls going upwards" buffeting the drilling rig from below, he remembered.
The gas in the air was sickening.
"They told me they hit a methane pocket," he said. "We're waiting for Cabot to tell us what to do, whether we should try to punch through it or plug it."
They punched through it - a pocket of shallow gas about 1,500 feet down that pumped out the equivalent of 900,000 cubic feet of gas per day, according to a report later commissioned by Cabot.
When drilling was finished, muddy puddles on the pad bubbled with the gas seeping through the gravel.
"Right next to the wellhead it looked like 1,000 Alka-Seltzers going off," he said.
Mr. Ely, a GasSearch Drilling Services employee from spring 2008 until mid-2010, is one of more than a dozen Dimock residents suing the company because of what happened next: his family, including three small children, began to get cramps, rashes and headaches. Months after Mr. Ely noted something was not right with his water and first warned his employer to test it, a company representative asked his family to evacuate to a Tunkhannock hotel because dangerous levels of methane seeped into the home with every shower or load of laundry.
Now, state officials have found that Cabot met the obligations necessary for the driller to stop delivering replacement bottled and bulk water to 19 homes, including Mr. Ely's, where the methane tainting the water has been linked to Cabot's faulty wells.
Cabot, which says the water is safe to drink and use, plans to stop the deliveries in 10 days.
'We're the sacrifice'
Long silent about reckless practices, unreported spills and buried problems he said he witnessed on Cabot's well sites, Mr. Ely said the prospect of losing fresh water twice to drilling forced him to speak out.
"It's terrible that we're the sacrifice," he said. "We're the sludge that comes off and then we're just washed away."
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Mr. Ely outlined allegations he first shared with Cabot officials and state regulators in the month after his attorneys filed a lawsuit against the driller in November 2009.
In the two years since he led the officials on a tour of every failure he witnessed at Cabot's Dimock sites, he said he has received no answers from the company about what they found in the soil and streams.
Cabot officials told the newspaper that a report proving its operations had no negative environmental impact is ready to be released this month, but they would not disclose the findings until the final report is submitted to the Department of Environmental Protection.
According to Mr. Ely:
n Cabot tried to hide, minimize or ignore at least five diesel spills or their impacts between 2008 and 2009. After an 800-gallon diesel spill in June 2008, a drilling supervisor instructed him to move a reference point hay bale away from a spot where lab tests showed persistently contaminated soil after treatment.
"I said, 'So you want them to test where there's no hot dirt?' " he recalled. "He said, 'That's the idea.' "
n Company pits leaked or their plastic liners were carelessly torn before their contents were buried on 13 occasions. The earliest, haphazardly constructed pits were used to catch toxic fluids that flowed out of the wells, but the spray frequently missed the pits or blew out of them.
"In the beginning we would dig a hole and then we'd just throw plastic in it," he said. "That was more or less to make the homeowners feel comfortable about us drilling on their property."
n On at least two occasions, Cabot employees scraped contaminated soil, sand or gravel from a drilling pad then pushed it over the pad's bank.
At one site, Mr. Ely watched a bulldozer operator clear a pad covered in a "big, goopy concoction" of sand and spilled gels and acids by pushing the mess over a bank, he said. State files for the second site show that an inspector from the Department of Environmental Protection discovered an unreported pile of diesel-soaked soil dumped at the edge of a farmer's field.
n Cabot had well-control or casing problems on three wells other than the Gesford 3 site where Mr. Ely saw the plume of shallow gas. A "wild well" specialist from Texas was called to a site on Mr. Ely's father's property in late 2008 after a failed valve made it impossible to shut off the spewing well, forcing the family to evacuate overnight.
Something loose in the well jammed the flow, and workers resorted to dumping buckets of methanol on dry ice stacked around the wellhead to freeze it.
"That well could have let loose at any moment, at any time," he said. "We didn't know what was stopping it from blowing out of there but we knew the well was full of fluids."
Cabot files report
After Mr. Ely described what he saw to Cabot officials, the company contracted the environmental consulting firm URS Corp. to investigate any environmental impacts from the alleged incidents.
A final report of the investigation, which was initially outlined by URS in March 2010, will be submitted to the Department of Environmental Protection by Nov. 30, Cabot spokesman George Stark said.
"We have worked with the past administration and we're working with this administration to demonstrate soundly that none of the areas laid out in the accusations exceeded the cleanup standards or were outside the norms of protective health and safety," he said.
Mr. Stark said the 20-month investigation involved close consultation with the DEP and required a year of groundwater monitoring at one of the suspect sites, but ultimately revealed that "there really wasn't anything there."
The company will not release any data from the report before it is submitted to the department, he said.
A DEP spokeswoman confirmed that the agency has been in "constant contact" with URS about the investigation and is anticipating "a report to see what steps they have taken as far as all of the violations."
"We expect a report shortly as to how they are complying with the recommendations we gave them," spokeswoman Colleen Connolly said.
Mr. Stark would not address many of Mr. Ely's specific allegations, since they are dealt with in the report, but said Cabot "takes environmental stewardship seriously and thoroughly investigates all environmental claims."
Asked if he disputes that the incidents alleged by Mr. Ely ever happened, Mr. Stark said, "Each of them has been investigated and the resulting analysis shows that either there was something to investigate further or nothing to investigate."
He said he would not dispute that shallow gas escaped from the Gesford 3 site, but he challenged Mr. Ely's "visual opinion" of the event.
"I'm not saying it didn't happen," he said. "But, if it did occur, we're not aware of any problems as a result of it."
Spills documented
Many of the spills described by Mr. Ely were also documented during state inspections of the well sites, often after Cabot reported the incidents to regulators. Some of the incidents described by Mr. Ely have already gone through state-reviewed remediation and been cleared, Mr. Stark said.
According to agency records, the DEP issued violations at Cabot sites for at least 51 separate incidents involving spills, seeps or releases between 2008 and 2010, including after a July 2009 inspection found stained sand on the well site where Mr. Ely said the "goopy" concoction was later pushed off site.
In a document compiled for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Cabot reported 19 spills and releases of hazardous substances or wastewater at its Susquehanna County well sites and 14 additional spills "where Cabot does not have sufficient information to confirm that a release of a hazardous substance ... occurred" between June 2008 and May 2011.
The company explicitly did not include instances of methane migration into water supplies in its EPA report because "Cabot disputes the validity of these allegations," the company wrote.
Cabot claims elevated levels of methane reach Dimock water supplies through natural pathways. It has produced data showing detectable amounts of methane naturally occur in 80 percent of the water wells it has tested in Susquehanna County in a geological pattern that mirrors the occurrences in Dimock.
Cabot was forced by the DEP to plug three of its gas wells suspected of allowing methane to taint water supplies, including the Gesford 3 and 9, the twin wells where Mr. Ely saw the methane plume and where Cabot lost a drill bit in unconsolidated rock about 800 feet down.
In correspondence with the DEP in September 2010, Cabot called the three wells "safe, properly constructed and valuable" even though the company proposed earlier the same year to drill a relief water well at the Gesford pad "in an attempt to degas the aquifer," according to DEP documents.
"The department has many reservations concerning this course of action," a regional DEP oil and gas manager wrote.
The last three years in Dimock have been remarkably caustic, with the driller at times pitted against state regulators and neighbors who embrace the company at odds with those suing it.
Mr. Ely has stood at the heart of that division.
A Dimock native whose grandparents' name was given to a creek that runs through town, he is building a new house and raising a family on his father's homestead.
With a speciality in spill prevention and response for gas stations and other petroleum services, he joined GasSearch as a heavy equipment operator and later helped set up the subsidiary's drilling rigs.
He found that the companies working on the drilling sites "had no care for what spilled anywhere. It was the most reckless industry I've ever seen in my life," he said. "I stood up because I couldn't see them just wrecking everybody's properties."
The roles he has been given in the last few years have forced him to split his loyalties: a leaseholder with tainted water, an employee of the company blamed for the contamination, a plaintiff in the case against his employer, a neighbor trying to protect his neighbors and, in return, being accused of blowing their best chance at financial comfort.
"I'm not against the oil industry," he said. "I am not against any of my neighbors extracting the gas from the land to achieve wealth, small or large. I am not here to deprive them at all of that."
In fact, he said, "I know they can do this in a safe manner" and in many ways he has seen that Cabot and others have improved: The driller no longer uses pits and now uses liners and other containments on its well pads to protect against spills reaching the ground.
"Things are different because of what happened at the beginning," he said. "Things are different because we spoke out."
He fears that the state will set a low bar for the Marcellus Shale industry if the DEP does not change course and require Cabot to continue water deliveries - something DEP Secretary Michael Krancer says he will not do because Cabot met the legal obligations outlined in an order drafted during the Rendell Administration.
According to the order, Cabot could stop the deliveries after it offered to install methane-removal systems and funded escrow accounts with twice the tax-assessed value of each affected home. The quality of the residents' drinking water was not a factor in that aspect of the agreement.
"How can they retract all that science?" Mr. Ely said of the DEP's record of Cabot's violations. "They can't go through and say that Cabot's findings clear them of all charges."
On a cold morning last week, he pulled the handle on a spout above his water well and let the water run for half an hour.
Clear and effervescent for more than 20 minutes, the spray of water then turned a milky brown. He caught it in a glass.
"All we want is water," he said, standing outside his soaring, half-finished home that is waiting for its brick walls.
"We are pleading for help. We are on our last straw."

Please elaborate on how the ballot language might read.

It has every 2 years. Its the people we all have put into office on a local, state and federal level. Who allows the gross things that occure from drilling, logging, and every other resource retrieval process. The people you voted in. If you voted for any of the elected officals have sat on any level above county, your to blame for all the messes across our state and nation.

All these elected officals who especially in WV die in office because we keep putting them in office, are the ones who said "yea all the health effecting compounds are an ok end-product" Yea thank you. You suckers who denounce the companies who do the drilling/cutting/digging yet vote for the same back biting career politicans who allow them. And you will continue to vote them in and they will continue to sale you and your future for there own $.

I blame you all. You want safe resource retrevial, QUIT VOTING FOR THE SAME KIND OF PEOPLE. This is why I ignore this subject. Both sides are as clueless as the sheep sitting on the hillside. Our nation's companies can only do what the government OK. So you see pollution, thank the fools you voted in. And vote them OUT.

Now I will leave this site for another few months, until another ignorant person tells me it's the evil corporations who are killing us and forget to include the very government who allow it.

Hydrofracking sure to contaminate water
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2011

As an environmental engineering technician with NYSDEC Region 5, I managed scores of groundwater remediation projects in the 1990s. I’ve reviewed countless hydrogeologic reports and seen thousands of lab results from contaminated wells. I’m familiar with the fate and transport of contaminants in fractured media, and let me be clear:
Hydraulic fracturing as it’s practiced today will contaminate our aquifers.
Not might contaminate our aquifers. Hydraulic fracturing will contaminate New York ’s aquifers. If you were looking for a way to poison the drinking water supply, here in the Northeast you couldn’t find a more chillingly effective and thorough method of doing so than with hydraulic fracturing.
My experience investigating and remediating contaminated groundwater taught me some lessons. There’s no such thing as a perfect well seal. Occasionally sooner, often later, well seals can and do fail, period.
No confining layer is completely competent; all geologic strata leak to some extent. The fact that a less-transmissive layer lies between the drill zone and a well does not protect the well from contamination.
A drinking water well is never in “solid” rock. If it were, it would be a dry hole in the ground. As water moves through joints, fissures and bedding planes into a well, so do contaminants. In fractured media such as shale, water follows preferential pathways, moving fast and far, miles per week in some cases.
In the absence of oxygen (such as under the ground), organic compounds break down infinitesimally slowly. Chemicals injected into the aquifer will persist for many lifetimes.
When contamination occurs—and it will occur— we will all pay for it, regardless of where we live. Proving responsibility for groundwater contamination is difficult, costly and time-consuming, and while corporate lawyers drag out proceedings for years, everyone’s taxes will pay for the subsurface investigations, the whole-house filtration systems, the unending lab analyses.
I’d love to see hundreds more jobs created. But not if it means hundreds of thousands using well water will be at a high risk of contamination. Not if it means every New Yorker will be on the hook for the cost for cleanup and for creating alternate water supplies. If your well goes bad, neither you, nor your children, nor their children will ever be able to get safe, clean water back. That’s too high a price.
Drill for gas, absolutely, but develop safe technologies first.
Paul Hetzler
Canton

And how would you word the question?
Here are but a few choices which shows the dilemma:

1. Do you value clean potable water? Now this question is hardly worth asking as everyone will vote yes.
2. Do you think hydrofacture drilling is a public nuisance? Now lots of public nuisances are tolerated for money. People often put their very lives at risk in dangerous occupations for money.; always believing that the danger will not strike.

That I believe is part of the issue: Belief or rationalization that even if dangerous it will somehow be regulated so the danger doesn/t happen.

1. Do you want the County Commission to engage in litigation and be subject to liability for possible infringements of property rights to advance the protection of water.?

I think if we were truly at risk and people could smell the danger rather than imagine it, there would be greater solidarity of opinion.

Bring one expert who can tell us that drilling is going to come here and I/ll listen carefully. Not one geologist I have talked with says it is likely to happen here. Why is there all this tension over a "problem" that is not coming here?

No Fracking Way:

County Commission would be immune from such a suit. State policy. Curious, is the Utica Shale bed located beneath Pocahontas County? It apparently is deeper than Marcellus.

Are not commissioners responsible for the protection of property? I have read that it is a basic function of government.Elected officials can be charged with malfeasance,fined ,removed .What do you say about damage claims by those whose land would be damaged by horizontal drilling?What is the distinction in "the county" and" the commissioners" where a lawsuit is concerned? Some person would have to be named as the object of the suit:that would be the commissioner (s).

Sure the county can be sued up to the limits of its insurance coverage, which I believe under the Chartis policy is one million. You get counsel and coverage. Individual members are immune.

County Commissioners can be removed but it is an arduous process. Judgment calls on referendums and county ordinances will not be enough to remove a CC unless one could prove that votes in these areas were improperly influenced.

If your land is damaged by negligent operations in drilling you would typically have recourse against the responsible companies SO LONG AS your legislature does not strip away your right to the courthouse. And believe me when I tell you there are legislators who want to do exactly that in the name of job creation, certainty, predictability in the courts or whatever else Frank Luntz can conjure up in his political surveys.

I am impressed. Likert for a prof. Now that is awesome.

Regardless of the sampling strategy, all inclusive -designed to get everyone involved and thinking about it as well developing a common language and set of descriptors for discussion -or sampling, it gives us something that we can do now to constructively use the time we have to generate understanding and knowledge rather than reactionary punching and name calling headed towards collision and winner take all, lawsuits and back stabbing with continuous Charleston Political intrigue.

I think it is a way to go that could be very constructive.

To Higher Ground: West Virginia's acknowledged expert on oil and gas geology, Dr. Tim Carr, said because of the confluence of geology, economics and locality that drilling here would be unlikely. This opinion has been confirmed by every expert I have talked to. It was Dr. Carr, himself, who suggested to me that the worry here about drilling was "a solution looking for a problem". DEP has told me that activities in Monroe are abandoned and results in Nicholas are marginal. Yes, I did say and do say that IF drilling were to come here in the force I saw in Wetzel County it would be a truly sad and game changing day for our county. But then, I had not talked with geologists and others about the reality of our situation "on the ground and under it".
My post about gated communities is an accurate metaphor I think about what we can realistically do about changes that happen in life.
I am thankful that until I hear otherwise I can stop worrying myself sick over drilling here.

Mr. Saffer says that he will quit “worrying himself sick” about drilling until he hears otherwise. But the industry is unlikely to announce their intentions in advance. The way we’ll hear otherwise is by the racket of the wells being drilled and the noise of hundreds of massive trucks smashing our roads to bits.

And by that time it’ll be too late. The only real power the Commission has to control drilling is through the enactment of a well-crafted zoning ordinance. Every other action the Commission might take either exceeds the powers of the Commission or amounts to something that has no enforcement effect.

The law provides that any zoning ordinance must preserve (grandfather) existing uses. A zoning ordinance cannot prohibit activities that are in place at the time of the enactment of the ordinance. When a zoning ordinance is passed those activities that are in place at that time are grandfathered, and will not be prohibited by the ordinance. Wells that are in place when the ordinance is passed cannot be affected by the ordinance.

It takes time to pass a zoning ordinance. A plan must be drawn up, and meetings must be held to allow the public to comment. It’s not a quick process. If we wait till drilling starts before starting the ordinance process, there will be time to drill many wells before the process is done. Those wells will not be affected by the ordinance. And our tourist and second home industry and maybe our water supply will already be damaged. As Neil Young put it, “Gone, gone, the damage done.”

So, if we wait to “hear otherwise” before starting to worry about drilling, worry won’t do much good. There will be nothing to do about it then.

Then we can only grieve.

By the way, the final bill says the following:

§22-6A-20. Local ordinances.
All local ordinances and enactments purporting to regulate gas
operations regulated by this act are hereby preempted and superseded
to the extent the ordinances and enactments regulate the method of
gas operations. Nothing in this act shall affect the traditional
power of local government to regulate zoning and land development
of gas activities as well as other aspects, such as the time and the
place of operations to protect the health, safety and welfare of the
general public through local ordinances and enactments.

The argument “They won't drill here it's not good enough” is bogus. In Richwood they drilled first to see if it was good enough. Then they figured out what to do with gas when they found it. In Richwood the answer was to illegally flare it for months on end. There is no pipeline and none in sight. See the link.

http://www.register-herald.com/todaysfrontpage/x623730749/Illegal-flare-burning-near-Richwood

4,860 cubic feet per second of gas up in smoke. Is that good planning on the gas company's part? Is the lessee getting paid for his gas? The drilling company got paid; so did the frackers and truckers. All the outside workers who came in to work got paid but nobody is collecting for that burning gas. The company is probably going to get fined but that is the price of doing business.
Why would anyone drill for gas hoping to strike it rich and not have a way to move the product when it came out of the ground? Answer: it was a financial boondoggle and they did not expect to hit gas. Millions of dollars where changing hands and gas coming out of the pipe was a mistake.
What is to keep this from happening here in Pocahontas? Lack of infrastructure? They didn't have that in Richwood. No pipeline is there so they just burn the gas as it comes out of the ground and pollute the air.
A ban on Marcellus shale drilling would make Pocahontas County attractive to business and tourism, and less attractive to the gas industry. Those people who settled here, adding talent and money to the good of the County will stay. For the gas industry, why fight a ban here in exchange for a money scam like Richwood when they could go elsewhere?

While some have their heads buried in the sand believing that "it won't happen here", the gas companies continue to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into securing leases for gas rights to now over 50 percent of Pocahontas County. This "money" talks, while the "BS" about it not happening here walks. That's the reality folks.

I personally think that Martin has arrived at a common sense attitude and refuses to be obsessed with a "Chicken Little complex"
Martin has repeatedly stated that he opposes gas drilling, enough said!

Now for all the radicals who hate anyone that refuses to march in lock step with them and their opinions, your efforts are counter productive. Whether pro or con on gas drilling radicals on either side only serve to reinforce the opposition’s resolve.

In our present day society it is clear to see that we are only concerned about ourselves and it that situation, at the end of the day, money always wins.

Those who wish to protect our clean water from the ravages of the shale frackers are quite unselfish:they are thinking of all of us .I do not see them as "Chicken Little" or lock steppers and certainly not radicals.Tthey are well versed in relevant information; they are aware of the callused, indifference displayed by industrialists and politicians, sadly ,towards West Virginia. I wish that there were many more of them.

Egad
I never put you any catagory, radical or otherwise, then who is putting words in the other's mouth?
You are the one who decided you could be considered radical, and yes a radical is someone who refuses to consider any other opinion other their own.