Many of our readers have seen the film “Gasland” and are familiar with the horrible pollution caused by fracking in Pennsylvania. Probably no state has suffered more from the greed of Big Oil and fossil fuels corporations. Just as in Florida the polluting companies lied to the citizens. Not strange that trust does not exist.
Read the complete article with photos here in APNews.
Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum
By MICHAEL RUBINKAM November 22, 2022
The tiny crossroads in northeastern Pennsylvania, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from the New York state line, drew national notoriety after residents were filmed lighting their tap water on fire in the Emmy Award-winning 2010 documentary “Gasland.”
Pennsylvania American Water said it plans to drill two wells — what it calls a “public groundwater system” — and build a treatment plant that will remove any contaminants from the water before piping it to about 20 homes in Dimock, site of one of the most notorious pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom.
Dimock residents were briefed on the plan Monday night at a meeting with Pennsylvania American Water and high-level officials in the state attorney general’s office, which is pursuing criminal charges against the drilling company blamed for polluting Dimock’s aquifer.
Residents declined comment Monday night as they left the meeting at a high school near Dimock, saying they’d been instructed by a prosecutor not to talk.
“Our office remains laser focused on using our limited tools to restore clean drinking water for the residents of Dimock,” Jacklin Rhoads, a spokesperson in the attorney general’s office, said in a statement Tuesday. “Yesterday, our attorneys along with Pennsylvania American Water updated the impacted residents on the status of the case and the extensive independent research done with one goal — how best to provide clean water to their homes.”
Further details of the water line plan, including its cost and whether the driller, Coterra Energy Inc., will bear the financial burden as part of any settlement of the criminal case, were not publicly released Tuesday.
The state attorney general’s office got involved in June 2020, filing criminal charges against the former Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. after a grand jury investigation found the company had failed to fix its faulty gas wells, which leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies in Dimock and surrounding communities.
Cabot, which recently merged with Denver-based Cimarex Energy Co. to form a new company, Coterra Energy Inc., has long maintained the gas in residents’ water was naturally occurring. It faces a total of 15 criminal counts, most of them felonies, including illegal discharge of industrial wastes and unlawful conduct under the state’s Clean Streams Law.
The company — the most prolific driller in the nation’s No. 2 natural gas-producing state — said Tuesday that it is working to resolve the criminal charges.
“Coterra remains committed to achieving an amicable resolution with the Office of the Attorney General. We continue to work towards a resolution that is productive and beneficial to the community and landowners,” said George Stark, a company spokesperson.
Pennsylvania American, meanwhile, was involved in the state’s aborted 2010 effort to connect the residents of Dimock to an existing municipal water system about 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) away.
A dozen years ago, state environmental regulators secured nearly $12 million in financing for the project — and pledged to sue Cabot to recoup the money — but were forced to back down under legal threat from the company and local officials, who called it a boondoggle. Instead, Cabot agreed to pay residents a total of $4.1 million and install individual water treatment systems.
Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro won the state’s gubernatorial election this month and will take office in January.