As New York state residents wait for the state Department of Environmental Conservation to decide whether to permit horizontal gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing here, gas drillers have been going full bore in northern Pennsylvania, just across the New York border. This week, The Daily Star sent a reporter and photographer to Dimock, Pa., about 25 miles south of Binghamton, to find out how widespread gas drilling has affected one rural town in a neighboring state.
DIMOCK, Pa. _ Dimock, a rural town of about 1,400 people in northern Pennsylvania, is struggling with gas drilling.
Some people love it because it has created jobs, pumped money into the economy.
Others hate it because it has ruined their drinking water and quality of life.
In the last few years, Cabot Oil & Gas Inc., a Houston, Texas-based firm, and its associates have been acquiring leases, drilling wells, laying pipe and changing the countryside. The land, much like central New York, is dotted with lakes, crossed by streams. Many of the hillsides are wooded, and rolling fields are bordered by venerable stone walls.
Nearly all white, Dimock is less educated and poorer than the average American town, with a median household income of $35,104 in 1999, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Sitting just south of Montrose, Dimock was a sleepy town until recently, according to residents. At its center _ the four corners where state Route 29 divides state routes 2024 and 3023 _ there are no restaurants or gas stations, just Dimock Family Eye Care and the post office.
But Dimock is booming in what seems, at first, the mostly unusual places. Back roads are busy with truck traffic, tall drilling rigs stand off roadsides, and yellow Caterpillar excavators trench through fields and woods, carving mostly straight routes for natural gas pipelines.
Travel down a dirt road and likely as not you'll find Cabot signs with warnings like "no open flames or lights beyond this point," and "Consumptive Water Use: peak day consumptive use: 3.575 million gallons."
The quietest locations have become noisy as drillers tap veins of gas, trapped thousands of feet below ground. Before the tall rigs can be set up, ground is cleared and bulldozers shape level, gravel drilling pads. Makeshift, lined ponds are dug to hold the brackish water that flows back from wells after they're hydraulically fracked _ flushed with water, sand and chemicals to make the gas flow faster.
"The whole operation is pretty incredible," said Curt Bennett, standing in his front yard on Route 3023. "You wouldn't believe the size of the equipment they use when they pull out the trees _ whole trees this big," he said, holding his hands a couple of feet apart, gazing across the road at a well site.
Drilling has saved his business
Don Lockhart, who operates Lockhart's, a diner and gas station in nearby South Montrose, says the quest for natural gas has saved his business.
"I was thinking of closing a couple of years ago," he said Tuesday at about noon, sitting down at a booth near a cooler filled with bottled drinks.
"After Bendix left town, we didn't have much business here, except the stone quarries, and they weren't doing too well," he said.
"Now, I've gone from selling one load of gasoline a week to working on four. We did $250 worth of coffee and doughnuts this morning and probably $300 yesterday," he said.
"People have money in their pockets, and down in Tunkhannock, they're building a motel," Lockhart said. "You know what that means: Jobs."
Lockhart, who's in his late 60s, believes he'll now be able to retire in some comfort, passing his business on to his daughter.
"I'm not saying there aren't problems with drilling, but companies are coming here, contractors are busy, truckers are busy," he said.
A large U.S. map with pins marking places where his customers have come from hangs proudly near the door. And for sale at the register is "Gas Odyssey," a gas-drilling promotion film, touting the many benefits of tapping this natural resource.
Her water well blew up
on New Year's Day
On the same day, about five miles away, near the intersection of Carter Road and Route 2024, Norma Fiorentino, watches TV, sipping water from a plastic Endless Mountain bottle.
Although she has two water wells on her 2.9 acres, neither produces potable water anymore, she said.
The well she had been using most recently exploded Jan. 1, 2009.
"I was at my daughter's for dinner," she says. "Lucky thing I wasn't here."
When she came home that day, she found the concrete cap on her water well had been shattered. A gas well drilled by Cabot just off her property had leaked methane, which contaminated the ground water and migrated into her well, she said.
Since then, she has relied on plastic tanks of chlorinated water, often called "buffalos," to wash her clothes and dishes, and cases of Endless Mountain to drink. The trucked-in water is paid for by Cabot, she said.
"I used to have very good water, and this isn't the same," she says. "Who knows how long it's been in the bottle?"
Fiorentino, 68, said her husband died in 2007, and she signed a gas lease the following year. "I signed up in January 2008 and I've had nothing but trouble, since," she said.
After a gas well was drilled just off her border, Fiorentino received royalties, but these quickly declined, she said.
"I was getting $500, $600 a month, but it went down and down and down, then up a little and down," she says. "Very sporadic."
Her house is a wreck and she wants to build another. "They told me I'd have enough money to build 10 houses," she chuckled ruefully.
Last month, she received less than $150 _ "not enough to pay my light bill," she said.
And now, because Cabot has been ordered by Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection to plug up the leaky well, she will receive no more royalties, she says.
Gone with the good water is the wildlife that used to roam here.
"We have no deer, no rabbits, nothing," she says,
About two miles away, on Route 3023, Wendy Seymour operates an organic farm, but a leaky gas well has ruined her well water, too, she said.
"I have a $300,000 home and now it's worth about two bucks," she said. "Who'd want live here without water?"
U.S. Rep. Christopher Carney, D-Dimock
Seymour noted that U.S. Rep. Christopher Carney, D-Dimock, lives nearby, but says he has done little to help those whose water is ruined.
"He lives at end of the road, but he hasn't done much for us."
Asked about this, Carney's office e-mailed a response that reads, in part: "The natural gas boom in northeastern Pennsylvania has provided our region with a tremendous economic opportunity, but one that requires strong oversight by the Pennsylvania DEP. That's why I applaud the Department of Environmental Protection's ongoing investigation into Cabot's gas drilling in Susquehanna County."
Not far from Seymour's farmette, Sheila Ely tells a similar story of rural paradise becoming a nightmare at her home.
On a Sunday morning she'll never forget, her water well was ruined by migrating gas. Her clear water turned "cloudy, slimy. It was so disgusting you could hardly stand to be near it," says Ely, who adds that she signed a gas lease in 2006 for $25 an acre.
The fears and worries of living with contaminated water since then have been devastating, she said.
"I feel like I'm an Indian and they're the cowboys from Houston," says Ely, who has joined with neighbors to sue Cabot.
Worker dies Monday
Cabot Oil & Gas has an office on Route 29 in Dimock, but no one working there would speak to The Daily Star on May 11.
The day before, a worker at a Cabot drilling site just down the road, 41-year-old Gregory Walker, had died from injuries sustained when he was hit in the head by a casing pipe, according to the Scranton Times-Tribune.
"Mr. Walker was taken by ambulance to Endless Mountains Health Systems in Montrose and then flown by helicopter to Geisinger Medical Center, Plains Twp., where he died at 1:20 p.m., according to the Luzerne County coroner's office," the Times-Tribune reported Wednesday.
The Cabot office on Route 29 has two doors. Inside one, a young woman said she cannot speak to reporters and pointed to the other door. Inside the second door, an older woman whose desk has a placard reading "Fran," handed out a sheet of paper, directing questions to Jerome Washo of Resource Environmental Management and to George Stark.
Reached by telephone Wednesday, Washo said he does not work directly for Cabot and is not an authorized spokesman.
A woman answering Stark's telephone Tuesday said he would not be in all day. Wednesday afternoon, no one answered at that number.
A few miles from Cabot's office, the firm has a drilling operation on a dirt road that appears to be Route 3021. Here, work trailers and trucks form a semi-circle around a tall drilling rig, and compressors are roaring.
A sign at the entrance to this site advises visitors to immediately report to the site supervisor, but where the supervisor might be is not readily apparent. In the trailer nearest the gate, a man named Cody points at a black pickup truck about 60 yards away.
"He's in that building there," said Cody, who added that he views gas drilling as "all about keeping America running."
In the trailer by the black truck was a man, upset that a photographer has been taking pictures.
"You can't do that here," he said, adding that no one is wearing a hard hat, a safety violation.
His name is Geno, he said, and won't give his last name. After a tense few minutes, he wrote down the name and telephone number of his supervisor, Art Stewart, and told The Daily Star crew to leave.
Reached by telephone Wednesday, Stewart said he cannot comment for the company, and referred the matter to Stark.
Friday afternoon, Stark called The Daily Star, but could not discuss the contamination of water wells because of pending litigation, he said.
Cabot has spent $48 million this year acquiring leases in Susquehanna County, where Dimock lies; will spend $3 million rebuilding roads in the area; and has put many people to work in the area, Stark said.
"Gas drilling can be done in an environmentally responsible manner, and we're committed to doing it that way," he said.
Pennsylvania's DEP steps in
According to Tom Rathbun, a spokesman for Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection, last month Cabot was ordered to stop drilling in Dimock, except to plug wells, and to install permanent treatment systems for 14 drinking water supplies that have been contaminated in the town.
The order was issued because Cabot failed to comply with a consent order to correct problems, signed last year, he said.
Addressing this on the DEP's website, Secretary John Hanger stated "Cabot had every opportunity to correct these violations, but failed to do so. Instead, it chose to ignore its responsibility to safeguard the citizens of this community and to protect the natural resources there.
"I have ordered that all of Cabot's permit applications for further drilling in any region of the state be put on _ hold, indefinitely, until the region's homeowners receive their new water treatment systems, the fines are paid, and the wells are plugged.
"Gas migration is a serious issue that can have dire consequences to affected communities and we will not allow Pennsylvania's citizens to be put in harms way by companies that chose not to follow the law."
Hanger stated the DEP will continue to investigate 10 Cabot other gas wells in the Dimock area during the next 85 days that could be sources of migrating gas and determine whether Cabot should be ordered to plug some or all of them.
Progress entails sacrifice
Phyllis Myers, office manager for lawyer David A. Morgan Jr. in Dimock, said the gas rush in Dimock has pitted some neighbors against each other, but has also put people to work and food on some tables.
"Has progress ever been without problems?" she asked from her desk, just across the road from where Walker was fatally injured.
Landowners who have signed leases, and farmers whose livelihoods were in serious decline, now have hope they can survive, she said.
"Men who were on unemployment are working again," she said. Children growing up in the area may stay on as adults, able to support themselves and raise families.
"Like everything else, there have been problems, but there have been problems with water in this area before," she said.
"People in their 70s talk about setting water on fire years ago," she said. "In this area, we have gas in our water."
Don't sign early
Paul Wellover leased his land about three years ago, but if he had it to do over again, he wouldn't be so eager, he said.
"I have 44 acres and they gave me a sign-on bonus of $50 an acre," he said. "They told me I was lucky to get that, and the price would never go higher," said Wellover, as he watched an excavator at work near his land.
"Now they're giving $6,700 to $7,000 an acre, so if I have any advice for people up your way, it's this," he said. "Don't believe what they say and don't sign early. The price is only going up."
Gas firms typically sign up landowners with the largest parcels first. But later, when they come shopping for adjacent smaller parcels, they're willing to pay exponentially more, in sign-on bonuses and royalties, Wellover said.
"The real problem is the companies know what they're doing, and usually, the landowner doesn't," he said. "And once you sign your name, that's it."
