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.