Gas Boom Dominates Bradford County

by Pete Comstock



Mike Lovegreen has no ax to grind. He just tells it like he sees it. And see it he has. A Bradford County (PA) Conservation District staffer doing his job day after day for over 25 years, Lovegreen has become intimately familiar with every acre of the rolling hills, forests, and abundant dairy farms some 60 miles northwest of Scranton. With thick mustache, mutton chops, and unruly hair, he does not look the part of someone charged as District Manager with stewarding the natural resources of Pennsylvania’s second largest county—and the one with the first and most numerous natural gas wells using hydro-fracturing in the state.

I met him last week tagging along on this newspaper’s fact finding journey up the Susquehanna River. In our six hours and endless miles touring with him, Lovegreen guided us through the good, the bad, and the ugly of gas drilling with little editorializing and few hints of emotion.

The good: We saw booming restaurants, motels, and retail stores; met farmers and landowners now out of debt; and observed restored gas line rights-of-way. The bad: We heard about the huge influx of workers, a big increase in 911 calls, and about skyrocketing rents forcing people on fixed incomes to leave the area. We crawled through traffic jams in Troy, PA, population 1,457; and we witnessed paved state roads that had been reduced to mud by gas production activity. (“Expect bad roads for the next fifty years,” said Lovegreen. “That comes from a gas official, not me.”)

As for the ugly: We learned that the local residents should anticipate an average of 3000 tanker truck trips per drill pad meaning some 8-9 million truck trips over the duration of the gas play in that region alone. We toured a scenic countryside now blanketed with a spider web of gas lines, access roads and a patchwork of 4-5 acre drilling pads and 2 acre containment ponds (full of fresh water for the fracking process). We rode past crop after abundant crop of survey ribbons sprouting in virtually every field signaling the drilling to come.




“Eighty five, probably 90% of the land in this county has been leased to the gas companies,” said Lovegreen. “The DEP is so busy now, all they have time for is administrative approval in an office somewhere—just so long as the gas company’s engineer has stamped the papers. Some wells have never had an inspection.”

Reflecting upon his day-to-day job, Lovegreen said, “I feel bad making some little guy jump through hoops for six months or more just to put a tiny pond behind the house. The gas companies can apply for a 2-3 acre containment pond on one day and have it built 12 days later.”

Terry Lutz, Supervisor of Troy, met up with us for lunch at the Edgewood Family Restaurant on Elmira Street. Business was brisk for a Wednesday. “There’s only 200 wells now and we got nonstop truck traffic and beat up roads,” he said, “but just wait until all the main lines and connecting lines are in place. There will be thousands (of wells) and these guys are going to be here in a big way for a long, long time.”

Lutz cited the 17 year life of a well which can then be refracked. He also rattled off the names of gas bearing shales deeper than the Marcellus—the Oriskany, the Utica, and the Black River Formations—which could be tapped in time with existing and improved technology. “We’re looking at our children’s generation and beyond,” he concluded.


Lovegreen agreed. “This gas play is all tied up with national security and energy issues,” he said. “The Energy Policy Act exempted them from regulation under the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act. They pretty much can do anything they want. We’re just a throw away zone.”


“National sacrifice zone” is the term that West Virginians apply to their region under assault for decades by poorly regulated coal extraction and now mountaintop removal mining. The gas industry points out that their own production does not alter the environment nearly as much as strip mining; and the land can be made to look much the same as it did before drilling ever began. In theory, the thousands of well pads in field after field could be scraped of their millions of cubic yards of gravel and graded back to match the contour of the land (albeit not the soil’s original fertility). Pipelines buried in fields are already indistinguishable from the surrounding pasture (although those going through forestland will always be an unnatural straight swath of grass).

Lovegreen and Lutz held out the probability that the massive presence of the gas industry in Bradford County would subside in time. Though the statistics, they said, are stacked against them regarding any happy outcome from a boom and bust era (studies show that a region is usually worse off after the boom than it was before) life could return to normal—but not for several generations.

Heading home back down the Susquehanna, I kept trying to take the measure of 60 years. Depending upon your perspective, those decades might seem a tolerable sacrifice for “homegrown energy” and for the wealth that will come to some. Unless, of course, you would prefer not to live in a region wholly dominated by an industry in boom mode. And unless, of course, the fracking fluids—benzene, toluene, and their sister chemicals—have contaminated an entire aquifer—in which case, 60 years becomes forever.

In resignation, we survive?

By LAURIE STUART
April 29, 2010

We drove on dirt roads that were once paved. The surfaces were rough and torn, with patches of gravel. Here and there was a remnant of a double yellow line. We passed gravel pits that were being reestablished and our guide, Mike Lovegreen, the Bradford County Conservation District Manager, said that the gas-drilling industry was hauling in stone from three counties over, and whole mountains were disappearing, fodder for the sinking roads. We, a van of 13 people, which included the newspaper’s editorial staff, the new National Park Service superintendent, some interested teens, the headmaster of a environmentally active Montessori School and a couple of parents, had traveled to the Pennsylvania Northern Tier county, where gas drilling has been going on for about two years.

Mike told us that the chief industries, before gas drilling, in a county of about 60,000 people, were agriculture and tourism. With the Susquehanna River flowing through its center, the county currently has 1,400 farms, 450 of them being dairy farms, and supports a large fishing economy.

He said that about 85 percent of the land was leased.




In the van was John Sullivan, a Conservation District Board member, a county commissioner, a farmer and a leaseholder. He said the mineral rights of his family’s farm had always been leased, and when it was time for renewal a couple of years ago, he signed the standard lease for $85 an acre. At the time, he had no idea that natural gas drilling was on the horizon. And when he knew things would be different, he said, he imagined that the wells the company would build would be in some backfield. The first map he was shown had the well placed 300 feet from his house. When he inquired whether it could be moved, he was told “no” and that the distance from the house was within the law. Nearby neighbors were offered over $2,500 an acre as a sign-on bonus and he said he still has a visceral reaction every time he see the landwoman (the gas company contractor who negotiated the lease) because she took advantage of his ignorance.

“The other night,” he said, “When I was sitting in my living room, I counted 26 trucks that went by in an hour.”

The roads are crawling with heavy oversized vehicles, hauling water, chemicals, steel pipe, backhoes, and exotic equipment of all varieties. Mike said he didn’t know what some of it was and that he was going to suggest that the gas companies put out a picture book illustrating all of the equipment they employ. John says it used to take him five minutes to get from the courthouse in Towanda to his home in Wysok. Now, it takes him 25.

At lunch, we were joined by Terry Lutz, a township supervisor, a farmer and a leaseholder. We asked him if the quality of life was higher before or after the gas industry arrived and he shrugged and said, “It depends on how you define quality of life. If you don’t mind the traffic and you don’t care about the dust, which gets into everything and sometimes becomes a dust storm, I guess it’s better now.”

One of the parents remarked, “That doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement.” Terry again shrugged his shoulders. He said that he thought that 20 percent of the county’s population would benefit financially and that he is in that group.

We talked about other social implications. Our hosts agreed that housing was a real problem and Mike said that there were no hotel rooms available, as they were filled with “roughnecks” from southern states. They said they had no idea what that would do to the tourist industry. Social services had no emergency housing and with rents going up 400 percent, long-time resident seniors were being forced out of their homes. He said that the Council of Churches was meeting to see what they could do to support these people in their transition of being moved out of the county and that there were two sociologists that were beginning to study the area and compare it to other boom-and-bust areas.

“We imagine that this activity will go on for 50 years,” Mike said. “And then it will be a ghost town.”

Fortunately, they all agreed, there had been no outright environmental damage, although John added that with 1,600 above-ground joints, that carry the millions of gallons of clean water with thousands of pounds of chemicals added, during the fracking operation, there were bound to be leaks. With 70 percent of that substance staying deep underground, all of the produced water—the frack water which picks of heavy metals and salt in its underground travels—is now recycled and used on the next job, they said. The companies have found that it is economical to build water retention ponds, each holding six million gallons of clean water, and using over-ground pipes to carry it to surrounding wells. It cuts down on the road usage and repairs and there are currently about a dozen of these impoundments being built a month, Mike said.

Covering an area of about three acres, the ponds, Terry said, are a new land use that was not covered in leases, and that these new requests for land is a constant occurrence to the leaseholder. “I keep a list of all of the things that need to be fixed, and when they come to me wanting to do something new, we go over that list and I get some of the things fixed before granting them permission for what they want.”

When roads got so bad this spring so that they were impassable and school buses could not get through, he said that he officially closed the road and the next morning there were 15 tractor trailer trucks lined up with gravel. “The operation at each well costs about $50,000 a day, so if we close the road, they respond.”

Mike said he learned at the Chesapeake Citizens Advisory meeting on Monday night that the company had spent $7 million on road repairs that spring. He said that it would be easy to get into an emotional downward spiral and be totally consumed by the situation but that he’d rather work from the inside “to see if it’s possible to have things go better.”

At the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship this past Sunday, we listened to a Holocaust scholar who spoke about how easy it was at the time to become a bystander to evil. In relation to the Holocaust, some people, he said, were doing what they were told and others were somehow convinced that the ethnic cleansing was necessary for the good of the society. Others were simply made numb by the shear immensity of the operation. Incrementally, and with an ever building force, there was an energy released that was so large, so ever-present, that the only defense was to become numb, to hunker down, to become silent. The lesson that we needed to learn to come to terms with now, he said, is our identification with the perpetrator and not the victim.

It’s a lesson that we could project onto gas drilling.

Our Bradford County hosts said that there was no organized opposition to the activity that was consuming the landscape.

“There’s no stopping it,” Mike said, “the only thing we can do is try to plan for what might come after.”

“This is the hand we have been dealt,” John said. “And there’s nothing to do but make the best of it.”

“This is our life now,” Terry said, “This is what we’re facing.”

As we drove through the beautiful rolling hills of the Susquehanna River Valley back to the Upper Delaware, we were all a bit stunned by the enormity of what we too are facing.