OtegoNY.com

Of course not. 

Do they say they can? 

Of course they do. 

The story is as old as mankind. It’s called “lying.” I have no idea why people would pretend that they can protect that which they are incapable of protecting. I guess they want to protect themselves from being called “inept.” 

Here’s a story from NPR’s “Living on Earth,” from today, Feb. 20, 2009:

“…recently two scientific studies concluded there were no adverse health effects from drinking Washington DC’s tap water, even though it contained the highest level of lead ever recorded in the U.S.”

Click here to read the or listen to the full story about Washington D.C.s water pollution and how the protectors flubbed it. 

How many times do people have to see or hear that same kind of story over and over to finally realize that there is no adequate protection from health hazards once you start polluting your water and pretending you “have it under control?”

Apparently some people never get it. 

Don’t let those people lead you into the false temptation of some material gain, just because they “say it’s safe.” 

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair:

“It’s amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he is promised a small fortune not to understand it.”

This is a parody of the Scottish ballad, The Rolling Hills of the Border. I was inspired by a version called, The Rolling Mills of New Joisey.

Clarification: The second to last verse does not mean to imply that anyone who leases their land is going to hell, or anything silly like that. I just mean that the gas companies will turn this area into a kind of hell.

No moral judgements here. We are neighbors, and I respect everyone’s rights.

This is a copy of a letter to the Oneonta Daily Star  that was published on February 13, 2009. It is reprinted with the permission of the author. 

I am responding to Dick Downey’s guest commentary on horizontal gas drilling published on Jan 17. This way of thinking is a huge mistake.

Watchdogs have great value to society, but they must have the law on their side.

Unfortunately, the laws protecting our water have been compromised. In 2004, the EPA stripped the protections of the Clean Water Act from all aspects of horizontal drilling. In September, H.R. 7231 was introduced by Diana DeGette, co-sponsored by John Salazar and Maurice Hinchey, and would have repealed the exemption for hydraulic fracturing to the Safe Drinking Water Act. This repeal would have given watchdogs some teeth.

Until this repeal can come up for a vote, there is not protection for our drinking water.

This is bound to come up for review again in the 111th Congress. Please let your congressmen know that we need to protect our drinking water supply. We are very fortunate to have great drinking water, and we should all work to keep it safe and clean.

Mike Mitchell

Otego

This is a letter to the editor of the Oneonta Daily Star newspaper, which was published on Feb. 4, 2009

Real dangers in natural-gas drilling

The natural gas industry is a creeping disease that is slowly infecting Otsego County. It has weaseled its way into leases to drill from unsuspecting landowners.

The representatives from the natural gas industry have made outrageous promises of “found money” and “it’s like you’ve won the lottery.” Then they low-ball people into selling out their land rights, heritage, property-value, possibly their health and that of their neighbors, as well as the well-being and way of life of their communities. That includes you.

Some well-intentioned but misguided people have been convinced that “it’s a done deal, and we might as well get the best out of it.”

It only becomes a done deal when they con enough people to band together to try to sell at a higher price, while trusting that there are enough protections against disaster in place.

There are no adequate safety measures, no matter what the apologists for the predators tell you. The state Department of Environmental Conservation is woefully understaffed and has shown no ability to regulate effectively. Gov. Paterson has even proposed a large budget reduction for the DEC. Obviously regulation is not a priority.

The gas companies are not even bound by the Federal Clean Water Act. So who has the safety of your water at heart? The gas companies (one of which is Halliburton)?

Some would have you believe that the drilling that is planned for this area is safe, and the people who care about the danger are over-reacting. That sounds like when Rumsfeld mocked people who thought the Iraq war wouldn’t be a slam-dunk, by saying, “Oh my goodness gracious, isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny, the sky is going to fall.”

That’s not the lottery, that’s Russian roulette.

The Following is an excerpt from an article in The Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, Wisc.), January 24, 2009

EPA A FAILURE ON CHEMICALS, AUDIT FINDS

By Meg Kissinger of the Journal Sentinel

Warning: Chemicals in the packaging, surfaces or contents of many products may cause long-term health effects, including cancers of the breast, brain and testicles; lowered sperm counts, early puberty and other reproductive system defects; diabetes; attention deficit disorder, asthma and autism. A decade ago, the government promised to test these chemicals. It still hasn’t. The Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to assess toxic chemicals is as broken as the nation’s financial markets and needs a total overhaul, a congressional audit has found.

Read the rest of the article on the EPAs Failure to Monitor Chemicals

Can this really be news? Is there anyone who didn’t expect this?

I just came back from the DEC meeting at the Ballroom at S.U.C.O., where many well-spoken and well thought out Ideas were presented by people who were pleading the case for a sane and thorough vetting of the drilling process before considering permitting it.

One speaker who I did not find fit in with the well-spoken, nor well-thought-out deliveries was a flunky from the gas industry. He spoke for about 15 minutes and basically said, “Don’t worry, we have it under control. There’s been hydro-fracturing in NYS since the fifties with no incidents.”

Well, that kind of misleading tripe is proof-positive that you shouldn’t trust these windbags as far as you can spit a rat.

As I left the venue I saw him in the lobby, and I couldn’t help but tell him he was the best speaker our side could have. He smiled, then asked, “Uh, which side are you on?”

I told him I was on the side opposing his. He was taken aback, and asked what he had said that I had a problem with. I told him that I, like most of the other people in the room, were livid as he spoke and misrepresented the entire situation.

It was readily apparent to most people in the room that the “gentleman” had left out the word “horizontal” in his entire statement. Comparing the hydrofracking that is being discussed today with the vertical drilling that was done in the fifties is like comparing apples to codfish, and he knew it.

Everyone who cared to actually consider what he was saying was aware that he was being “disingenuous” to say the least.

He assured me that they are “virtually the same procedure.”

I love that. To these guys, “horizontal” is virtually “vertical.” That is their logic, and they expect you to swallow it.

It’s like saying, “Hey, in 1925 there were airplanes, and there wasn’t a single case of spewing burned jet-fuel into the atmosphere, so why are you worried about airplanes doing that now?”

People like that give me gas.

There was a nice local gentleman standing with him, who was trying to defend him. He tried the same old, tired argument that, “Well, we need to get energy from somewhere. You need to drive your car, don’t you?”

I have no argument with that. But that is precisely the point: He can’t win an argument I am not fighting him on. The argument is about how they extract gas from the ground with hydro-fracking, and why not to trust them, not about if gas is a good fuel or not. I mean, I like to eat potatoes, but if they had to poison my well to get them, I don’t think I’d be eating them for very long.

If the horizontal drilling that the industry is lobbying for were truly safe, would they have to revert to double-speak to defend it? Why don’t they address the issues we bring up and show us logically that there is no problem?  (Um, because they can’t?) It’s the same crap argument the cigarette companies used for years. “There’s not proof that it’s harmful.”

That’s what the guys in Chernobyl said. That’s what they told the soldiers and sailors they had witness the first a-bomb tests (you know, the guys that developed elephantitis of the testicles…)

We have met the enemy, and this time it is them.

What do you have to do to let people know when they are being shat upon by people who live far away and will make money off their misinformed decisions?

There were many things to be gotten out of this meeting.

One, was now we can put a face on the faceless bureaucrats that blow gas at you. (Damned if I remember the guy’s name, though – but if you were there, there is not much of a chance you don’t know who I mean).

Another is that it was great to see the ballroom packed with concerned neighbors who are so passionate about protecting the great area in which we live.

My admiration goes out to all those who did such in-depth research and who presented their cases so well.

Hotcha!

Brian

Petition for a Moratorium for the Town of Otego

Petition for a Moratorium for Otsego County

How is natural gas drilling like a game?  It is frequently referred to by the oil and gas companies as a “play,” only it is a game in which there is no level playing field, no clear-cut winners, and no ”do-overs” if mistakes are made.

In this game, New York State, by way of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), is required to be the referee and regulate natural gas wells as they are drilled, yet there are not enough inspectors (currently there are only 19 inspectors to regulate 6,683 pre-existing vertical wells across the entire state), nor is there necessarily money to train and hire more during the state’s budget crisis.  The federal government is primarily a benchwarmer, since the 2005 Energy Policy Act exempts the oil and gas companies (and horizontal drilling, by extension) from the clean water, air, and safe drinking water acts.

There are also at least two divisions, or tiers, in the game of natural gas drilling and extraction; us (i.e. the majority of New York State) and New York City.  In the DEC’s draft scope document for the

Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement, or dSGEIS, New York City and its drinking water are provided with a special “1,000 ft. wide protective corridor” around aqueducts and a 1-mile buffer around reservoirs.  In contrast, we are expected to be content with a minimum of 50 ft. from public streams and rivers, 100 ft. from wetlands, and 100 ft. from private homes and water wells. (To give you a visual image, 100 ft. is about 1/3 the size of an average football field.)  Why is the clean drinking water of New York City considered to be more important than our own?

Cities like Oneonta, and larger towns and villages should not be complacent, either.  While the scoping document apparently thinks that municipal water should have more protection than private water wells

(around 1,000 ft.), the DEC and the private gas companies reserve the right to obtain special permits to drill closer if there is a lot of natural gas to be extracted.  Drilling can also take place a short distance from public buildings like schools (150 feet away), and even in densely populated suburbs, as in Fort Worth, Texas.  Airborne pollutants like diesel fumes, methane, and evaporated fracking chemicals from open pits, and 24-hour noise from compressors and drills, recognize no boundaries or exclusive addresses.

So, what can you do to level this “playing field?”  For starters, attend the Department of Environmental Conservation’s scoping hearing on December 2 in the Hunt Union Ballroom at SUCO. (Doors open at 4:30 pm.)  Learn more online and talk to your friends about the issue. Hold off on leasing your land.  Attend your local village and town board meetings and remind them, the DEC, and Governor Patterson who they are working for—not private gas companies, but YOU.  Only by standing up now can we prevent the “Marcellus Gas Play” from turning into a game of Russian Roulette.  Or a New York State version of the movie Erin Brockovich.

Megan Byrnes, Concerned Citizens for Otego

This is from the Scientific American website from November 17, 2008:

In July a hydrologist dropped a plastic sampling pipe 300 feet down a water well in rural Sublette County, Wy. and pulled up a load of brown oily water with a foul smell. Tests showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level safe for people.

Read the article at the Scientific American .