I try not to think about what’s going into the water supply from this drilling:
Dairy farmer Christine Pepper’s worst fears were realized when a natural gas drill 3 miles from her home blew out, spilling toxic fluid into a creek.
A 25-year-old native of rural Bradford County in northern Pennsylvania, Pepper said she was against the boom in drilling by hydraulic fracturing ever since wells started popping up a few years ago, surrounding her livestock and family, fearful that safety would be overlooked.
“I was crying when I heard about it (the blowout),” Pepper said on Thursday, a day and a half after the accident at the Chesapeake Energy well in the town of LeRoy. “They’re taking the county and taking our livelihoods.”
Chesapeake suspended hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” operations in Pennsylvania and said it was working to plug the well while investigating the cause of the blowout.
A theoretical debate about the environmental safety of fracking drilling for natural gas burst into real life for the people of Bradford County with the blowout late Tuesday. Similar debates are taking place in other states and Washington, where President Barack Obama has identified natural gas as crucial to U.S. energy needs.
This Chesapeake Energy is a real hard-core corporate player. A few years back they and some other gas producers were sued by a group of property owners who claimed that the companies had cheated them out of royalties on gas under their land. Chesapeake Energy threatened the Governor that they would cancel the deal to put their big headquarters in West Virgina unless he pulled strings to get the lawsuit overturned in their favor. When the Supreme Court ruled against them they pulled the headquarters.