New business is being generated in the region as companies begin tapping into the Marcellus Shale natural gas reserves. State officials announced a $700,000 grant to D & I Silica for improvements in Cameron, Tioga, McKean and Luzerne counties to deliver sand for the natural gas industry.
“They got sick in August. It was before school started. I thought it was just a bug and was trying to get them over it before school started. It didn’t go away and kept going until November and December. They had very severe stomach cramps and would throw up or have diarrhea, one or the other other. I was having problems with the water myself. One of my cats would throw up every time she drank the water inside, so we started using other water. This was reinforced by one of my neighbors telling me that one of my neighbors water wells had gone bad, and this was before Norma’s well had blown up. I started putting things together saying, my kids don’t get sick at school but they get sick at home.”
Just last week, the 15 families filed a lawsuit against Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation for allegedly causing a number of problems, including ruining their water supply.
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Southern Tier farms, businesses and residents have a big stake in pending federal water quality regulations being developed to protect the Chesapeake Bay, 400 miles downstream on the Susquehanna River.
On Tuesday, they will have a chance to meet directly with officials from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to learn more about how the regulations are being developed, and their stake in the issue. The public meeting is scheduled from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Broome County Public Library, 185 Court St., Binghamton.
The meeting is part of the process to develop new standards, called a “pollution diet” by EPA officials, for the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
“We see this as the beginning of at least a one-year dialogue with the public,” said Bob Koroncai, a regulator with the EPA who covers Chesapeake Bay issues. “Anybody who eats food, flushes a toilet, uses fertilizer or drives a car is contributing to the problem.”
Although specific regulations are still being worked out, they involve capping states' contributions to pollution flowing to the bay. The goal is to impose the pollution diet to reduce nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment degrading water quality in the bay and upstream.
Over the past year, I have watched the hydro-fracturing industry rapidly expand into central Pennsylvania, and I have been disgusted by the consequences. The state forests, where generations of Pennsylvanians have hunted, fished, and hiked, have been defaced by a growing network of well pads. But even more disturbing are the effects that we can't see. Unknown chemicals are being pumped thousands of feet underground. The extreme pressures involved in the hydro-fracturing process are forcing methane gas into people's homes and into their water supplies. It's clear to me that hydro-fracturing is the single biggest environmental threat to Pennsylvania that this generation faces. I should say up front that I am not a scientist, nor am I an expert on this issue. What I've done here is try to sort through conflicting claims in order to present objectively the facts on the effects of hydro-fracturing.
DEP offices in Meadville, Wilkes-Barre, Williamsport and Pittsburgh have received “many dozens” of applications for National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits to build plants to treat waste water produced in the Marcellus Shale to “clean it” before it is returned to the environment.
One of those applications belongs to Somerset Regional Water Resources, based in Tunkhannock, which has proposed a plant along the Chemung River in Athens Township. Somerset plans to build a treatment plant on a lot in the Valley Industrial Park.
Dead fish float in a once-pristine stream. Algae thrives. Lovers of the outdoors are heartsick, and everyone wants to know what happened.
The scenario is playing itself out this autumn on the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border, and a Harrisburg-based agency wants to be ready in case the same scenario unfolds in its jurisdiction.
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George Zimmermann, the owner of 480 acres in Washington County, southwest Pennsylvania, says Atlas Energy Inc. ruined his land with toxic chemicals used in or released there by hydraulic fracturing.
Water tests at three locations by gas wells on Zimmermann’s property — one is 1,500 feet from his home — found seven potentially carcinogenic chemicals above “screening levels” set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as warranting further investigation.
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Clean Water Action accused the state’s Department of Environmental Protection of illegally entering an agreement with Shallenberger Construction Inc, a water infrastructure contractor, to build the plant at Masontown in southwest Pennsylvania.
The plant would dump 500,000 gallons (1.9 million litres) of gas drilling waste water a day into the Monongahela River, violating federal clean-water standards, the group said.
The DEP has failed to control many of the chemicals that are used in hydraulic fracturing, a technique widely used to extract gas from deep deposits beneath Pennsylvania and parts of surrounding states, it added.
A salt-loving alga that killed tens of millions of fish in Texas has struck for the first time in an Appalachian stream that flows along the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Prymnesium parvum or “golden algae” caused the sudden death of thousands of fish, mussels, and salamanders in early September along some 30 miles of Dunkard Creek. University and government scientists fear the disaster could presage further kills in the region. Streams at risk due to high concentrations of total dissolved solids (TDS) include portions of the northern branch of the Potomac River and 20 other streams in West Virginia, according to state scientists. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky also have many vulnerable rivers and streams, according to U.S. EPA scientists.
Environmentalists have challenged the proposed construction of a plant that would process waste water from natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania’s booming Marcellus Shale field, an activist group said on Tuesday.
Clean Water Action, a nonprofit, said the plant would discharge drilling waste into the Monongahela River in southwest Pennsylvania without testing for most of the toxic chemicals that form part of the fluid.