History Looks to be Repeating Itself in Light of New Boom

Morgantown Dominion Post
12 September 2010
Guest Commentary
By Betty L. Wiley

Today we are beginning to experience a new extractive industry boom, the production of gas from deep shales. The Marcellus is the one presently undergoing most of the production activity. It’s just the beginning. In fact, only two Marcellus wells have been permitted in Monongalia County to date.

This is the lull before the storm. Many of us can perceive that we are going to see the alteration of something we value deeply ... that is, the aesthetic quality of living in green, quiet Appalachia. Many of us are already seeing it. My point of view is from Monongalia County; but Pennsylvania to the north and Wetzel County to the west are seamlessly joined despite political boundaries. Chaos reigns in some places. People fight to preserve peace and quiet, water and air.

The bad and good thing is, all these lucrative extractive industries provide jobs. In this area, coal mining is big.

Now gas production. The worst thing is that regulations are inadequate to protect the environment, and the technology has evolved into something extreme in order to reach extreme lengths to extract the gas. But regulations are not extreme. They are puny.

In the past few decades there are people who have moved into our woods and hollows and breathed a sigh of relief that at last they’d found it, a place of sunwarmed, tree-breathed air, clear water streams and birdsong.

It seemed that here was something pristine ... but only if you didn’t know its history.

A hundred years ago there was an oil boom, hundreds of oil wells, teams of horses pulling pipe into the oilfields, hotels and boarding houses built on ridgetops, and little towns springing up overnight. There were accidents and flares, pollution, etc. Farmers got rich from royalties, their cows grazing beside oil rigs, their lives changing overnight.

The region, including Monongalia County, had hundreds of oil rigs with big onecylinder engines. Crude and gas were pumped for decades. We lived on W.Va. 7 West; there was a 60-foot rig beside the highway maybe 50 yards from our house, basically in our front yard.

An older photo shows two others out in the nearby field. Standing in our yard, you could see three or four more rigs on the surrounding hills, one on Browns Hill, part of what later became Mason-Dixon Historical Park. It was like that wherever you drove up W.Va. 7 — it was a game to count how many rigs you could see at one time.

They are all gone now. (There is one I know of, near Shamrock, where Dunkard Creek is formed by the confluence of West Virginia’s and Pennsylvania’s forks.) These were all metal rigs; the older ones were built of wood.

As we grew up, the big throb and “spat” of the hit-and-miss engine was a common refrain. Our Pentress neighbor, Downey Liming, pumped the well once a week. When the rig was not pumping, we played in the belthouse, on the oiled drilling deck by the big bullwheels, and went along the belt to the engine house.

The bottoms of our bare feet were black with oily dust. Sometimes we’d get a splinter from the rough deck. The well was abandoned years ago, all the trappings of industry — great heavy metal engine, wheels, and derrick — removed for salvage. The well casing was still there, a metal cap on top.

But the well was not plugged until 2009, by the state. Over the years the ground had caved in around the casing until there was a hole as big as a Volkswagen and nobody knows how deep, but at least hundreds of feet. After numerous attempts at phone calls, I finally took photos and wrote a letter, and soon the well was plugged. There are many abandoned wells needing plugged. They (the state) prioritize by how hazardous and how public the situation is. Thirty feet from a main highway, a large open shaft was finally noticed.

Years ago, there was a newspaper article about a family that went berry picking and their young son, who was saved by his berries; he stepped into an unplugged well, fell, and was holding his arms out with buckets of berries.

That’s what kept him from falling a couple of thousand feet into the well.

Norma Jean Venable wrote a book, “Dunkard Ridge,” in 1979, about the adventure of moving into an old decrepit farmhouse on Dunkard Ridge, where the oil boom had once dominated. She writes about the history she learned from a local man.

“Glycerine wagons carried the explosive to the wells. This was an extremely hazardous trade because the glycerine was carried in a liquid state on wagons that bounced over the rough roads. Most members of this ‘profession’ died young. One man and his wagon blew to bits and the only thing that ever was found were two shoes from his mules that were embedded in a barn a long distance from where the wagon blew up.” The book is a collection of anecdotes and nostalgia. The new gas boom, with its huge well sites and machinery, its huge appetite for water and chemicals, may have a more ominous impact.

BETTY L. WILEY is a former Monongalia County Commissioner. [and an UMRA Board member] She lives in Westover. This commentary should be considered another point of view and not necessarily the opinion or editorial policy of The Dominion Post.