The plight of the small land owner...and everyone else later

here is an email i got which tells the story of those too small to lease and the consequences for all leasing or not

Dear Mr. Martin Saffer,
We are landowners in Pocahontas County. However, no one has yet approached us to sign a gas well lease. This could be because we only own half an acre on which our home sits. Unfortunately, our little oasis is surrounded on all sides by land leased to gas companies.
We have a 2 year old and another baby due this year. As a family living in such a rural place, many factors affect our decision to stay or go. The opportunity to make a living, the quality of education available to our children, the recreational and aesthetic offerings of the natural environment, and the cultural richness of an area are weighed in a complicated lifestyle equation that has, for the past five years, kept us at home in our beautiful valley in southern Pocahontas County.
Nothing has made us consider pulling up stakes and leaving the county more than this threat of a drilling operation coming to the neighborhood. We feel like it is a gamble to not move now, while our little bit of property still has some value to it, but it is a risk we've decided to take for the time being. After visiting a gas well in PA this summer, there is no chance we will choose to live next to one here.
Located down a small winding road, across from a beautiful mountain pond, and among rolling pastureland stood a noisy, smelly abomination. The scale of the vehicles and equipment at work on the site dwarfed the restored white farmhouse and its silo just down the road. We stopped for awhile on the road and watched a large front-end loader repeatedly scoop up a full bucket of black liquid from one area of the pad and dump it to another area. Our view was obscured from seeing exactly where the liquid was coming from and where it was being dumped, but we saw plenty of it slosh out over the sides wherever it was going. What was that black stuff? And, really, is that the best way to move it around?
An article was published in the Gazette two days ago about a tragic fatal crash of a truck carrying waste from a gas well. It didn't make us feel any better about the diligence of this industry to deal responsibly with the waste they produce: the truck was headed for the Wetzel County landfill. Police aren't sure what was in the tank because the paperwork was not specific. Fire Chief Noel Clarke says officials are trying to identify the liquid that leaked from the truck before they haul it out. The full article can accessed here http://wvgazette.com/News/201108080835 )
Do want this unidentified liquid going into our landfill, even if it makes it there safely?
We have done some research about the natural gas industry and how effective regulations have been to hold it accountable for the environmental and human health issues attendant with hydraulic water fracturing. This industry just doesn't seem to play fair aggressively attacking the reputation of officials, researchers, and advocates that stand in the way of their corporate mission, and buying the support they need from those that can be bought.
We do not think it will be easy to keep them from having their way with our county if they decide they want what we are sitting on. However, our family is counting on your leadership to be strong enough to stand up for the things that keep people here. A Pocahontas County with fouled trout streams, contaminated aquifers and wells, noise pollution, and bad air doesn't sound much like Nature's Mountain Playground or anywhere we'd want to raise a family.
Sincerely, Paolo and Erica Marks

Who sells and installs solar panels in Pocahontas Co.?

Who manufactures anything in Pokey?A g glass panel with copper wires attached can act as a solar panel. They leave a wastestream of heavy metal? Could that be a bit hyperbolic? By the way: coal burned in the county is mined someplace else also. A gas company engineer told some that it would be cheaper to pipe in gas from Randolph than to drill in Pocahontas. Another bubble in my stream of thought:The bottled gas used in Pokey is also prepared and shipped in from elsewhere.

Here's your list! A lot of toxic materials that go into the production of the solar cells including cadmium, selenium, silicon tetrachloride and sulfur hexafluoride. As for hyperbolic,
Let me know how that glass panel and a few copper wires work out for you.

Passive solar hot water isn't reliable where winters get extremely cold. There's an active solar-electric water heater would be a cost-effective replacement when your old electric heater quits.

A 'trombe' wall is heated by the sun during the day and releases the heat at night -- like a heat battery.

Some of the stuff that goes into solar panels would be a problem if it got into the environment, but it generally does not. The panels will work for 20 to 30 years, so there's little waste.

When it comes to permanent contamination of our water supply there has never been a threat greater than that posed by deep drilling of Marcellus shale. Added to all its other problems, Marcellus shale contains radioactive isotopes. Geologists call it "Black Radioactive Shale". -- Rich

Another letter to the Commission:
August 14, 2011

Dear Commissioner David Fleming,

We recently moved into Pocahontas County to live permanently. We have travelled extensively nationally and internationally and we believe that this county has by far the most beautiful land and pristine environment in the world.

Our concern is that hydraulic fracking is being considered in Pocahontas County, a county in West Virginia with the most state and national park land, providing a safe environment for natural game and wildlife, including the Cheat Mountain Salamander, an endangered species.

Perhaps you have seen the film “Gasland”. It premièred at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won the Documentary Special Jury prize. Josh Fox directed the film because the natural gas drilling industry offered him money to lease his land in Pennsylvania and this aroused his curiosity. After an extensive investigation he found that every fracking drilling site and community that he visited had sick and dying animals, contaminated water and chronically ill residents. (1) Hydraulic fracking has a detrimental impact on the health of people and animals. We do not want this in Pocahontas County.

Hydraulic fracking uses on average 4.5 million gallons of water per operation. We recently had a well put in and clean water is very precious to us. There are neighbors in our area without water, because their wells ran dry. What would be the implications of this amount of water usage on our current water reserves?

Conglomerations of toxic chemicals are used in hydraulic fracking. For every 4.5 million gallons of fracking liquid, about 22,500 gallons of these are chemicals. These chemicals are listed as “petroleum distillates” which can include benzene, etc. What impact do these chemicals have on ground water? We and most people in Pocahontas County depend on well water for drinking and we cannot take the unnecessary risk of chemical contamination.

Fracking has inherent safety risks. In a rural Pennsylvania town in Bradford County, a natural gas well “blew out” spilling thousands of gallons of chemical-laced water, contaminating a stream and forcing the evacuation of seven families from their homes. (2) It has been well documented that fracking has not been a safe process in other locations as well. We do not want hydraulic fracking here in Pocahontas County.

Hydraulic fracking is not only a vertical drilling process but a horizontal one as well, with high pressure water and chemicals forced into the earth which effects the stability of the ground itself. In Britain, Cuadrilla Resources, a British fracking company postponed its operations because the British Geological Survey recorded an earthquake at a depth of 1.25 miles with a magnitude of 1.5 while it was exploring for gas shale formations. (3) What is the impact of hydraulic fracking on seismic activity, and how does this effect the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the surrounding area?

Pocahontas County must be protected from the hazards presented by hydraulic fracking. We urge you, our county commissioners, to refrain from issuing permits to any fracking company so that the air , water and land in Pocahontas County be preserved and not poisoned. Please do not sacrifice rural West Virginia. Natural beauty and the limited clean water supply that is found in this county are becoming very, very rare. Pocahontas County is one of the most beautiful areas in America, let’s keep it that way.

“Don’t Frack with Pocahontas County!”

Kindest regards,

Charlie & Michelle Bubnis
Marlinton, West Virginia

Sources:

(1) Denton. Tru. “Fracking, Drilling and Human Health” The Human Ecologist, Spring 2011.
(2) “Gas Wells Spew Polluted Water”. The New York Times, April 21, 2011.
(3) Jolly, David “British Company Suspends Use of Fracturing at Gas Well”. The New York Times, June 2, 2011.

Me too!

Also, just for perspective, the gas companies (the corporations) are not even "people" and they certainly are not "natives" and the legislature, which you might hope would step up to the plate, is showing such lack of concern it might as well be on Mars as Charleston. Imagine this....the drought as bad as it is now and the water so scarce that streams are barely pools and gardens dry up and die and on top of that....and the water left in your well perhaps ruined. We can not afford to make mistakes. We can only act with a full appreciation of the consequences. An "OPPS!" later wont do it.

I ran into my friend Allen Johnson at Dunmore Daze and had a nice conversation about fracking. He had a friend there I didn't know and she was quite shocked to discover the department of highways uses fracking brine as deicer on our highways under and agreement from the DEP. The logical conclusion (howbeit, wrong) is that if it is safe to be put on our highways, it is safe 5,000 feet under the ground. You can see the tank up at the Slatyfork salt shed. It merely reinforces the notion that DEP is a mere handmaiden of the corporations. I have been fighting DEP over the Howe's mess for years and know personally that they are not here to protect our water supply They have done nothing but hide the truth about hexavalent chromium and the buried transformers there. They won't test for that because they know what they would find.

Secondly, what about the DEP's approval of land application of human sewage on the Green Bank farm. That has deadly possibilities. I took pictures of the newly buried tanks beside the concrete plant. You will see that there are signs restricting anyone from getting close to see what and why those tanks are buried so close to Deer Creek.

Deer Creek is under major assault at this point. Who cares? Not DEP!

These are our regulatory protectors but they won't do the job. Why do we think that adding more regulations will make DEP a better agency. They won't! Can't we find some other way other than a government regulation to halt fracking? A regulation is only as good as its enforcement. I believe that we need to enforce the current regulations before we had any more burdens to our future. Let's get Howes cleaned up, stop putting fracking flue on our highways, and stop placing dead human sewage on our farmland. Then we can deal with the fracking problem underground.

I stand for property rights, the right of an individual to develop his property without government interference. Stopping someone from drilling on his/her property for natural gas requires that the owner be compensated for those valuable resources. The constitution allows for the protection of society from hazardous situations. It allows for property to be taken by the government for the benefit of the community. But it requires compensation.

Hundreds of folks in Pocahontas County had their property seized (condemned) by the government in the thirties. We are benefiting from that "taking" today with the vast national forest. But all of those folks were compensated for their property. When Walt Helmick had property lying beneath the national forest (coal) he was compensated for the loss of that property. That was the right thing to do; it was the constitutional thing to do. He is not to be condemned for expecting and, in fact, requiring it to be do.

A fracking ordinance attempts to inhibit a process for obtaining the "mining" of a natural resource. It would do so without compensation to the landowner. I know that a moratorium will not stand up in court short of compensation. I am scared about fracking, myself, but I am concerned that the landowners will be cheated out of their property rights. Let's be careful to have a "balance" between the two.

Using fracking fluid on the highways is a disaster in the making. Our government upholds this practice. Putting raw human sewage on our farms may kill some of us. Let's put our money behind our method. Let's be consistent. If fracking fluid is harmful, let's stop it being used on the highways, THEN we can have a dialogue about what it does 5,000 feet underground. I feel like I am by myself in voicing this concern but I choose to do so.