U.S. Energy Future Hits Snag in Rural Pennsylvania
Reuters
13 March 2009
By Jon Hurdle
DIMOCK, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - When her children started missing
school because of persistent diarrhea and vomiting, Pat Farnelli began
to wonder if she and her family were suffering from more than just a
classroom bug.
After trying several remedies, she stopped using the water drawn from
her well in this rural corner of northeastern Pennsylvania, the
forefront of a drilling boom in what may be the biggest U.S. reserve of
natural gas.
"I was getting excruciating stomach cramps after drinking the water,"
Farnelli said in an interview at her farmhouse, cluttered as a home
with eight children would be, while her husband, a night cook at a
truck stop, slept on the couch.
"It felt like an appendicitis attack."
The family, which is poor enough to qualify for government food stamps,
began buying bottled water for drinking and cooking. Their illnesses
finally ended, and Farnelli found something to blame: natural gas
drilling in the township of 1,400 people.
Dimock, in a former coal mining region that was economically struggling
even before the recession, is one of hundreds of sites in Pennsylvania
where energy companies are now racing to tap the massive Marcellus
Shale natural gas formation.
Some geologists believe Marcellus has the potential to meet total U.S.
natural gas needs for a decade or more. But the gas is trapped deep
within layers of rock, requiring a mix of highly toxic chemicals for
drilling.
And, while companies pay royalties to landowners for drilling rights
and for gas recovered from their properties, some residents have become
alarmed about their water supply.
They say the drilling has clouded their drinking water, sickened people
and animals and made their wells flammable.
In Dimock township, about 150 miles north of Philadelphia, Cabot Oil
& Gas has drilled about 30 wells since 2006, 20 of them just last
year.
Industry spokesmen maintain the groundwater is protected by meticulous
safeguards and that any chemicals used are heavily diluted and pose no
health threat.
It is "impossible" that drilling has contaminated the groundwater, said
Cabot spokesman Kenneth Komoroski.
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell told Reuters the state is careful in
granting drilling permits. "We are very scrupulous about whether it
will have an effect on the groundwater," he said this week.
In addition, the Department of Environmental Protection tested well
water in Dimock houses over the last month.
"We have not seen anything that would be of concern," said agency
official Mark Carmon. Continued...