BY ROBERT L. BAKER
Wyoming County Press Examiner
Gas drilling in Bradford, Susquehanna and Wyoming counties is about to take off exponentially and will likely make not a few folks rich.
It has already made one Gerri Kane, 56, of Auburn Township, angry.
Very angry.
Kane was talking with her girlfriend at the Citgo station in Rushboro, Susquehanna County. Last week and was told that about 1800 gas men were about to come into the area over the next 30 days to launch multiple drilling sites.
She hoped it was not true, but given that well pads are going up all around her, including one right behind the Springville Baptist Church, she guesses she better look out.
And given that Hibbard Road which leads to her house has been shut down much of the past week, Kane wanted to know why no one had apprised her or anyone else that her road would be shut down, leaving them some days without mail service and on others without any way for emergency vehicles to get through.
"We're praying that nobody needs emergency help," she said Thursday.
Kane called the Auburn Township office and said that someone told her construction crews could close the road 10 minutes at a time while they did their work.
She even called Congressman Chris Carney's office where she talked to field representative Ed Zygmunt, who also lives in Auburn Township, and he told her nothing could be done about the road situation.
On Sunday evening, she asked rhetorically why Hibbard Road had been closed the previous 48 hours with 4-6 foot deep gashes were left in the main road where a brand new pipe line was to go.
"They call me the crazy *** on the hill," Kane said as she looked out over the 12 acres her friend and companion Ken Machialek bought seven years ago and refuses to lease to gas companies.
"If we had known they were going to destroy all this we would have never moved here," she said.
Machialek, 53, and a graduate of Lake-Lehman High School, agreed.
Last November, the couple got the jolt of their life when one of the seismic crews- she believes it may have been Dawson Geophysical out of Midland, Texas- dropped two and a half sticks of dynamite in holes along the road and the unthinkable happened.
Not only were wild turkeys and deer terrified by the blast, but the couple found that that water from their well started smelling ‘dirty.'
"We had it tested and treated, and I still won't drink it," she said wistfully.
She longs for the days of going back into her garden and raising crops. But, she also wonders out loud if the soil and water supply can now sustain it or if what comes out of the garden will be edible.
Kane expresses dismay over the rapidity at which gas companies literally drop in overnight, setting up shop before you even realized they're there.
Paula Balaron a spokesperson for the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, which has given its okay for Cabot which has a well pad nearest to Kane's to draw water from some selected nearby water sources, said she had not heard a specific number given to how much gas activity would be coming into the region.
"I know it will be a steep increase from what we saw last year, and given that the weather is starting to take a turn, it's probable areas of your county will start to look different," Balaron said Tuesday morning.
Kane hardly relished the thought.
She noted that in the 1970s she lived in San Angelo, Texas, when she worked for Poole Drilling and she saw what gas money did to the countryside.
"You won't like it, and I don't like it," she said.
"Everybody wants me just to be quiet, but I can't be quiet," she said. "I know what they're doing around me is big money, and I don't give a damn about them. I am worried for the kids and what kind of a legacy our neighbors are leaving for them."
"It's just not right," she said. "What good is all of this if you can't drink the water."
Posted
Mar 25 2009, 12:26 AM
by
WCEeditor