The Sautners say the land men told them that their neighbors had already signed leases and that the drilling would have no impact whatsoever on their land. They were in the process of renovating their modest but beautifully situated home on tree-canopied Carter Road when land men from Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas, a midsize player in the energy-exploration industry, came knocking on their door to inquire about leasing the mineral rights to their three and a half acres of land. Dimock is now known as the place where, over the past two years, people’s water started turning brown and making them sick, one woman’s water well spontaneously combusted, and horses and pets mysteriously began to lose their hair.Ĭraig and Julie Sautner moved to Dimock from a nearby town in March 2008. The real shock that Dimock has undergone, however, is in the aquifer that residents rely on for their fresh water. You don’t need to drive around Dimock long to notice how the rolling hills and farmland of this Appalachian town are scarred by barren, square-shaped clearings, jagged, newly constructed roads with 18-wheelers driving up and down them, and colorful freight containers labeled “residual waste.” Although there is a moratorium on drilling new wells for the time being, you can still see the occasional active drill site, manned by figures in hazmat suits and surrounded by klieg lights, trailers, and pits of toxic wastewater, the derricks towering over barns, horses, and cows in their shadows. Sixty miles west of Damascus, the town of Dimock, population 1,400, makes all too clear the dangers posed by hydraulic fracturing. “Fracking,” as it’s colloquially known, involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, many of them toxic, into the earth at high pressures to break up rock formations and release natural gas trapped inside. It found in 2020 that the state government systemically had failed to oversee the drilling industry in the public interest, and recommended mandatory disclosure of all chemicals used in fracking, expanded drilling buffer zones in sensitive areas, comprehensive public health assessments near drilling sites, and more.That’s because large swaths of land-private and public-in the watershed have been leased to energy companies eager to drill for natural gas here using a controversial, poorly understood technique called hydraulic fracturing. Josh Shapiro should implement recommendations by a state grand jury that he empaneled as attorney general in 2018. With the administration’s regulatory authority affirmed, Gov. They also found that “public resources” need not be publicly owned, citing as an example the Frank Lloyd Wright architectural masterpiece Falling Water in Fayette County. An unconventional gas well near spaces used by the public for recreational purposes could threaten the ambient air quality and cause significant noise pollution,” the justices ruled. “Unadulterated outdoor recreation space is a basic component of quality of life and encompassed in the broadly defined values of the environment protected by the.
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