Hydrofracking: Unacceptable Risk: Redefining "Toxic Assets"

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Redefining "Toxic Assets"

SULLIVAN COUNTY — Wayne County, Pa. resident Michael Uretsky, a member of the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance [said]... “There is still a land-paper game going on. Capture whatever you can.... Notice that I am not saying anything about extraction. The exploration companies make money by selling leases and by using them to commoditize public and private financing deals – not unlike the process that the banks followed with home mortgages.”
Letter Rescinds Offers; Locals Say It's a 'Ploy', Dan Hust, Sullivan County Democrat, 9/19/09

SULLIVAN COUNTY — Natural gas drilling leases continue to be filed in the Sullivan County Clerk’s Office. Whether or not drilling will actually occur remains uncertain, as the leases simply permit, not mandate, gas companies to drill. Required permits still must be obtained from the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which has yet to receive a single application in Sullivan County. Plus, the companies may sell the leases to other companies that would do the actual drilling (known as “flipping” the lease).

Who's Leasing Now?, Dan Hust, Sullivan County Democrat, 9/19/09

BROOM COUNTY — Things are just getting started here in the Marcellus play. As we all know, over the last couple years, landmen exploited uninformed landowners that had never heard of Marcellus Shale. Many owners signed leases for $50 or $100 an acre. Now, with more New Yorkers informed, landmen are taking advantage of The Great Recession and targeting the desperate. But just as soon as the ink dries, these shameless sharks are flipping the mineral rights to bigger corporations for massive profits...."

Broome County Gas Lease Deal is a Disaster: Threatens Parks, Individual
Freedoms, and Our Common Wealth, SUNY-Binghamton, 7/16/10
http://www.newschannel34.com/content/developingnews/story/Broome-County-Gas-Lease-Deal-is-a-Disaster/NJzFD9g3r06zG993y-H-6w.cspx

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Why a blog dedicated to the love of pure water v. the risks of hydraulic fracturing?

My first thought is that the place is occupied. It feels like it has been invaded.

During my recent trip to Dimock and Springville in far northeastern PA, I intend to witness the development of the means to extract natural gas from shale that is several thousand feet below ground level. I know that hydraulic fracturing is already underway here.

Still, expecting mostly a pleasant drive in rolling rural Pennsylvania, the drive becomes a nightmare of roads pounded apart; countless enormous dump trucks, too wide and going too fast; jake brakes; new hardened roads across farm fields, and huge flat white pads the size of city blocks, made of crusher rock that leaves white dust on everything; a men's world of pickups, yellow and orange vests, blue reflective sunglasses; PENNDOT trucks; electric company trucks; no resident on the rural streets or in yards; abandoned homes and farms, fallow fields; no American flags nor protest yard signs nor cows anywhere in sight.

Another thought: is this a National Sacrifice Area?

The dust gives a ghostly pallor to everything it touches.

I am a Central New Yorker. I live at the northern edge of Marcellus shale.

Hydraulic fracturing is headed this way, and fast.

Marcellus shale rises up out of the ground close to here in Marcellus NY, and runs underground all the way to West Virginia.

There is no way that the introduction of hydrofracking into a region, a town or village, or into farmland, is not going to be a disaster. It has turned this area of northeastern PA into a monoculture of giant hungry industry that is eating economic stability, jobs, rural lands, the natural world, mental and physical health, and any sense of place or community.

Mistakes have already started to pile up: the spills, the infiltration of poisons into the water table, the huge payouts to the people to give up every land right to industry and get out of town, the slow inexorable death of a way of life.