This is a sobering report....

Fracking Experiences from “Victory Field”, Wetzel County, WV

On Jan. 9, 2012, a group of Athens residents travelled to Wetzel County, WV to have an eyewitness view of hydraulic fracturing sites run by Chesapeake Energy, a company planning extensive fracking in our county.  We were hosted by the Wetzel County Action Group.  Northern Wetzel County is home to33 Marcellus Shale gas wells and 3 compressor stations installed by Chesapeake in a 6 square mile area of the county since 2007.  Chesapeake has a total of 140 wells permitted in Wetzel, and many additional wells and permits exist with other companies. What was once miles of bucolic forested and agricultural West Virginia countryside is now a rural industrial petrochemical complex.  We saw numerous ridgetop drill pads and compressor stations, and spoke to several farmers who experienced significant impacts on their water, air, land, livelihoods, property values, personal health and quality of life.

From a sheep farmer’s hilltop, we saw 6 well pads and a compressor station in the surrounding viewscape.  Numerous ridgetops had been cut down, leveled, and populated with drilling equipment and interconnecting pipelines.  We were told that most of the well pads in the county were situated on leveled ridgetops.  All of these facilities seemed surprisingly close to one another, unlike what we expected from horizontal drilling.  We estimated a distance of only 2000 feet between two of the drill pads.  From another landowner’s hilltop, the elevation had been reduced by 18 feet, and a 5 acre drill pad was placed 200 feet from his home, filled with storage tanks containing toxic frack water and volatile condensate, well heads, and various processing equipment.  That was his living environment, with views of more drill pads on the surrounding hillsides.   As we drove around the county, it was common to see ridgetops that had been lopped off by 18-55 feet that were now covered with gas wells, storage tanks, compressor stations, and huge storage ponds (many with slipping dams).  While Wetzel County is higher in elevation, the general topography seemed very similar to the rolling hills of Athens County.  It was disturbingly easy to imagine our area transformed in the same way.
At the sites we visited, there was no active drilling or muddy conditions.  Overall, the well pads were in good shape with good gravel.  All tanks, pumps, heaters, and well head “Christmas trees” were painted white and operating on several solar panel sets.  The actual well sites seemed well maintained.  We also viewed the exterior of a 5 compressor station and a 12 compressor station.  They are used to increase the pressure for gas flow in the gathering and distribution pipelines. These sites also seemed well-maintained.  These were very large facilities, occupying significant portions of flattened ridgetop land and creating a dominant presence in the viewscape.  At the time of our visit, there was no noise from the stations, although we were told that it is extremely loud when they are running and broadcasting noise from these hilltop settings.

Air pollution from drill pad sources has been a serious concern in Wetzel County.  Landowners documented many instances of clouds of noxious gas rising up hillsides, illegal release and pluming of gas streams, and significant diesel pollution from the vast number of trucks, heavy equipment, drill pumps, frack pumps, and gas flaring.  With drilling and high-volume trucking operations continuing 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, noise levels were constantly overwhelming and the air consistently smelled of diesel fumes plus vented and flared toxic gases from wells.  Flaring of gases created breathing problems for nearby residents and flared gas condensate was noted in ground areas.  After filing multiple complaints, the Wetzel County Action Group was able to get Chesapeake to install vapor recovery systems.  When forested areas were cleared for drill sites or gathering pipelines, the burning of large numbers of tree crowns created enveloping smoke clouds.  The burns were started with diesel fuel and tires.  The community was eventually able to get Chesapeake to chip the tops instead, which was a big improvement.   High-intensity industrial lighting is used 24/7 at the compressor stations and during drilling and fracturing, illuminating the night sky, creating significant light pollution and a brightly lit nighttime display of rural industrialization.
We witnessed the aftermath of several landslides, where water holding ponds the size of football fields had dams fail and slip off the hillside.  These ponds were constructed to hold the trucked-in water for drilling and fracking.  We were told that Chesapeake did not employ an engineer for this.  The contents had leaked the down the valley and required multiple efforts and additional land (20-30 acres) for slope stabilization.   The US EPA had issued many orders for violation of Section 309 of the Clean Water Act.

We observed miles of temporary water line strung along the roadside.   Chesapeake had connected temporary 8 inch plastic flexible water pipe, staked to the road shoulders with rusted metal T- posts and snaked for miles to bring fresh water to the drill sites.  Someone declared it looked like 3rd world engineering.  In areas where there was no drilling and the scenery beautiful, the rural beauty was destroyed by the ugliness of miles of "gerryrigged" water pipe.  The tour leader said the miles of ugly pipe were better than all of the truck traffic that previously had been hauling water.  The water source for this pipeline is the Ohio River.  Prior to tapping the Ohio, trucks were randomly damming area creeks, pumping the water into their trucks and hauling it to the holding ponds.  Several area creeks were drained, until complaints were filed with the US EPA and the practice was stopped.
At the same time, we saw where residents along Fish Creek had developed extra wells and springs on their property to prevent surface drilling near potable sources.  Some landowners living near drill wells documented water that was undrinkable by humans or livestock and streams that had been polluted with frack wastewater. The residents depend on well water and springs.  There is no public water line in the area, much like parts of rural Athens County.

The landowners documented over 300 rig-related truck accidents over the past year (just in this 6 sq. mile area), often closing roads for 4-8 hours, preventing residential as well as emergency access.  Huge numbers of large trucks hauling drilling equipment, water and toxic fracking waste were travelling the steep, winding roads to and from their hilltop destinations 24/7, with operators working 12 hour shifts.   Driver fatigue, operating during icy road conditions on steep slopes, and road failure were all noted.  Numerous spills of drill mud (with associated chemicals) and frack wastewater were documented as a result of tanker truck accidents, overturned dump trucks and even dump trucks spilling from open tailgates. Roadside litter from 100’s of trucks was also a large problem.  After complaints from the community, Chesapeake instituted rules and fines for littering and that situation has been corrected. 

The truck traffic overwhelms the structural integrity of the road system, along with the travel of emergency responders, school buses and farm type vehicles.  We were told of an emergency situation with an elderly man living on a blocked road, where a Kubota tractor was used to access his property and deliver him to the emergency squad.  While on our tour, a Chesapeake Energy heavy duty pickup wrecked off the steep side of a road.  The road edge had given away.  The tow truck sent to pull it out was undersized.  Chesapeake was paying for constant, repeated road improvements.  Although roads were widened to accommodate large rig vehicles, the steep road shoulders were insufficiently stable to support the weight and volume of trucking traffic. Chesapeake refused to stop trucking during school bus times, so bus traffic is monitored by CB radio and escorted by a vehicle.  Escorts are also used for larger tractor-trailer type vehicles, which occupy both lanes on curves and turns.  All of this made us wonder how normal commuting, schooling  and especially how ambulance services, Meals on Wheels, and oxygen services will be interrupted for those in dire need in our county.

Clearly, there is more work for volunteer fire departments (not paid positions, and not trained for highly flammable industrial fires), tow truck drivers, truck drivers, heavy equipment operators and the lodging industry.  Nevertheless, there was no wealth effect in evidence.   There was no indication that money went back to the community.  Wetzel County still has the highest unemployment rate in WV.  We saw poverty, pipelines, wealth extraction and large-scale devastation of the landscape.  Sadly, most of the landowners do not own their mineral rights, and were paid a one-time damage charge of $15-18,000. Where they had previously farmed for years, they now cannot use the 5 acre drill pad areas of their land for the next 25 years, while still having to pay the full property taxes on those parcels.  Also, their property values have dropped by more than half.  Some charitable organizations could no longer hold their rural retreats because hotels are booked with rig operators.  Tourism revenues  have decreased.  Hunting and wildlife have also been impacted by the dramatic changes to the countryside.  Chesapeake has made donations to local charities.
We were advised to keep a close, watchful eye on all activities related to fracking operations. In Wetzel County, they witnessed and documented a consistent pattern of negligent procedures by drillers, combined with negligible federal and state oversight, resulting in pollution of their drinking water, surface water, land and air.  They photo-documented many instances of rig crews cutting corners to get things done quickly, including discharging large volumes of excess gas into the atmosphere, releasing waste water into creeks, burning toxic materials and burying toxic waste with backhoes.  With this documentation, they were able work with the US EPA to get these procedures stopped, although they regularly reoccur when there is no oversight.  We were also advised to photo-document pristine, natural areas that should not be disturbed.  We were shown photos from 2004 of a waterfall that was destroyed in 2007 by a stream road crossing.  Chesapeake was ordered to restore the waterfall.  The before photos have been the key to restoration.  All of the stoppage of illegal activity, establishment of better practices, or remediation of environmental damage were the direct result of community supervision and reporting.

There were social consequences as well.  We heard stories from residents about the disruption of the social fabric of the community, problems with the numerous outsiders who had no regard for the community, increased crime, increased drug use and drug-dealing, local girls becoming pregnant with out-of-state fathers simply disappearing, and the need for the community action group to carry guns for protection.

The life and viewscape in Wetzel County has changed from rolling agricultural hills, woods, streams and ponds, to an industrial landscape.  The ridgetops are now filled with gas wells, storage tanks, compressor stations, huge storage ponds with slipping dams, while the trucks, noise, pollution and frack waste roll on (into Southeast Ohio).  As a responsible citizen, before you lease your land, support unmitigated fracking and especially if you don’t own your mineral rights, you owe it to yourself and the community to view the implications firsthand.  If plans for extensive hydraulic fracturing in our area materialize, we must prepare and plan for the consequences in advance, and take coordinated action to mitigate the negative impacts on our water, land, air and quality of life.

The preceding report was contributed to and approved by:

Al Blazevicius, Ann Brown, Ken Edwards, Jane Jacobs, Bruce Kuhre, Loraine McCosker, Michele Papai, Celia Wetzel

Forwarded by:  Dan Philipps

Contributed by:  Gail Lason

Dear Neighbors:

If your home is All Electric, this will be a familiar issue to you.  Please file a comment with PUCO if you have the time.

If you are not All Electric, but know others that will be impacted by a severe rate increase from First Energy, please forward this email on to them.

Thank you for any help you can give us.  I hope PUCO will reconsider any severe costs to us for KWHs used above a certain level.  If they would only charge us the same price for each KWH used, that would be a fair cost.

Gail Larson
Trumbull Township

Continue the outcry to win back our discounts

Hi Gail. 

Good to hear from you again.  No need to file complaint with the OCC as they are on our side all the way.  Please encourage any all electric homeowners you know to do the same.  It is only because of the huge public outcry we created in March 2010 that we won back part of the discount and the ability to pass it along to whoever we sell our homes to.
 

Sue Steigerwald, Founder
Citizens for Keeping the All Electric Promise (CKAP)
www.AllElectricHomes.info
 

Which side of the rate structure is increasing?

Thank you, Sue.

 I was wondering which side of the rate structure was going to increase 30%.  I will file a PUCO complaint.  Do you want us to file a complaint with the OCC as well? 

Once again, you have given us information that will allow us to try to make our case.  Hopefully, PUCO will at least spend more time looking at the impact on the All Electric users this time than they did in  2010.

Take Care,

Gail Larson
Trumbull Township

All Electric Proposed Rate Case Plan

Dear CKAP Friends,



In my last email to you I spoke about the Public Hearing that I was planning to testify at regarding FirstEnergy’s (FE) Proposed Rate Case Plan (ESP3) that is currently being heard by the PUCO.  Yesterday, I received a call from the Ohio Consumer’s Counsel warning me that the proposed bill impacts that FE finally submitted reflect an expected bill increase of between 25% to 30% for all electric customers beginning in 2014. 



How can this happen???  While FE did not modify the credits they are giving us for being All Electric, what they are trying to do is raise the Distribution Rates for all customers, but it always hits the All Electric Customers the most because we use the most electricity, and such increases are based on a charge per kilowatt used.  Specifically, FE is asking for an additional $405 million in Distribution Costs (rider DCR). 



It is imperative that we all write and call into the PUCO and ask that these rate increases not be allowed.   As of Monday morning June 25th, the case is in the hands of the PUCO Commission and can be decided on at any time, so time is truly of the essence. Please, please take 5 minutes and submit your own personal comments about how you do not want such a rate increase to be passed and how it will negatively affect you as an All Electric Home Owner.  To file comments, use one of the methods below and be sure to request your comments be filed in the case for FirstEnergy’s new ESP3 or Case # 12-1230-EL-SSO:



·         Online via  https://www.puc.state.oh.us/secure/PicForm/index.cfm?intype=comment

·         By Fax (614) 752-8351

·         By Phone (800)-686-7826  8 am to 5pm



These rate increases will affect us regardless of who our electric supplier is (Duke, NOPEC, FirstEnergy Solutions) because the increase is planned on the Distribution side, the side we have no competitive control over.  Unlike the nightmare we all experienced back in Winter 2010, we have the chance now to fight against these price hikes BEFORE they affect our bill.  The PUCO has not yet made a decision on this case, and your comments NOW do have a chance to make a difference.  It is much easier to stop something before it happens/becomes law than it is to reverse something that has already been approved, so I urge you to please post contact the PUCO and make your voice heard no later than Friday June 29th (the earlier and more frequent the better). 





For those who like to know more details, I’ve attached two documents.  One is the OCC’S Press Release from yesterday where they are asking the PUCO to reject the charges.  The other document is the testimony I presented at the Public Hearing which gives a good, high level overview of what we don’t like about the ESP3.  Also, in case you missed it in today’s PlainDealer, Business Section front page, here is John Funk’s article:  http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2012/06/firstenergy_rate_plan_will_rai.html



Please take action before Friday June 29th. 



Sue Steigerwald, Founder

Citizens for Keeping the All Electric Promise (CKAP)

www.AllElectricHomes.info

Dear Senator Cafaro, Rep Kozlowski, Cand. Patterson and Neighbors...

Dear Senator Cafaro, Representative Kozlowski, Candidate Patterson and my Ashtabula neighbors:

That last post is a very long but enlightening aricle about the injection well leaks that have occurred throughout our country, to date.

Thank you for taking the time to become informed about gas and oil drilling.

Gail Larson

3200 State Road
Rock Creek, Ohio 44084

Important information on Injection Wells a MUST READ

From MSNBC today :

Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.There are growing signs they were mistaken.
Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation's drinking water.  In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation's most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami's drinking water.

There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.
Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater reserves — from which most Americans get their drinking water — remain safe and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.
But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work."In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted," said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA's underground injection program in Washington. "A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die."
The boom in oil and natural gas drilling is deepening the uncertainties, geologists acknowledge. Drilling produces copious amounts of waste, burdening regulators and demanding hundreds of additional disposal wells. Those wells — more holes punched in the ground — are changing the earth's geology, adding man-made fractures that allow water and waste to flow more freely.
"There is no certainty at all in any of this, and whoever tells you the opposite is not telling you the truth,' said Stefan Finsterle, a leading hydrogeologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who specializes in understanding the properties of rock layers and modeling how fluid flows through them. "You have changed the system with pressure and temperature and fracturing, so you don't know how it will behave."
A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections found that structural failures inside injection wells are routine. From late 2007 to late 2010, one well integrity violation was issued for every six deep injection wells examined — more than 17,000 violations nationally. More than 7,000 wells showed signs that their walls were leaking. Records also show wells are frequently operated in violation of safety regulations and under conditions that greatly increase the risk of fluid leakage and the threat of water contamination.
Structurally, a disposal well is the same as an oil or gas well. Tubes of concrete and steel extend anywhere from a few hundred feet to two miles into the earth. At the bottom, the well opens into a natural rock formation. There is no container. Waste simply seeps out, filling tiny spaces left between the grains in the rock like the gaps between stacked marbles.Many scientists and regulators say the alternatives to the injection process — burning waste, treating wastewater, recycling, or disposing of waste on the surface — are far more expensive or bring additional environmental risks.
Subterranean waste disposal, they point out, is a cornerstone of the nation's economy, relied on by the pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. It's also critical to a future less dependent on foreign oil: Hydraulic fracturing, "clean coal" technologies, nuclear fuel production, and carbon storage (the keystone of the strategy to address climate change) all count on pushing waste into rock formations below the earth's surface.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has primary regulatory authority over the nation's injection wells, would not discuss specific well failures identified by ProPublica or make staffers available for interviews. The agency also declined to answer many questions in writing, though it sent responses to several. Its director for the Drinking Water Protection Division, Ann Codrington, sent a statement to ProPublica defending the injection program's effectiveness.
"Underground injection has been and continues to be a viable technique for subsurface storage and disposal of fluids when properly done," the statement said. "EPA recognizes that more can be done to enhance drinking water safeguards and, along with states and tribes, will work to improve the efficiency of the underground injection control program."Still, some experts see the well failures and leaks discovered so far as signs of broader problems, raising concerns about how much pollution may be leaking out undetected. By the time the damage is discovered, they say, it could be irreversible.
"Are we heading down a path we might regret in the future?" said Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell University engineering professor who has been an outspoken critic of claims that wells don't leak. "Yes."
***In September 2003, Ed Cowley got a call to check out a pool of briny water in a bucolic farm field outside Chico, Texas. Nearby, he said, a stand of trees had begun to wither, their leaves turning crispy brown and falling to the ground.
Chico, a town of about 1,000 people 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth, lies in the heart of Texas' Barnett Shale. Gas wells dot the landscape like mailboxes in suburbia. A short distance away from the murky pond, an oil services company had begun pumping millions of gallons of drilling waste into an injection well.
Regulators refer to such waste as salt water or brine, but it often includes less benign contaminants, including fracking chemicals, benzene and other substances known to cause cancer.
The well had been authorized by the Railroad Commission of Texas, which once regulated railways but now oversees 260,000 oil and gas wells and 52,000 injection wells. (Another agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, regulates injection wells for waste from other industries.)
Before issuing the permit, commission officials studied mathematical models showing that waste could be safely injected into a sandstone layer about one-third of a mile beneath the farm. They specified how much waste could go into the well, under how much pressure, and calculated how far it would dissipate underground. As federal law requires, they also reviewed a quarter-mile radius around the site to make sure waste would not seep back toward the surface through abandoned wells or other holes in the area.
Yet the precautions failed. "Salt water" brine migrated from the injection site and shot back to the surface through three old well holes nearby.
"Have you ever seen an artesian well?" recalled Cowley, Chico's director of public works. "It was just water flowing up out of the ground."
Despite residents' fears that the injected waste could be making its way towards their drinking water, commission officials did not sample soil or water near the leak.If the injection well waste "had threatened harm to the ground water in the area, an in-depth RRC investigation would have been initiated," Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for Texas' Railroad Commission, wrote in an email.
The agency disputes Cowley's description of a pool of brine or of dead trees, saying that the waste barely spilled beyond the overflowing wells, though officials could not identify any documents or staffers who contradicted Cowley's recollections. Accounts similar to Cowley's appeared in an article about the leak in the Wise County Messenger, a local newspaper. The agency has destroyed its records about the incident, saying it is required to keep them for only two years.
After the breach, the commission ordered two of the old wells to be plugged with cement and restricted the rate at which waste could be injected into the well. It did not issue any violations against the disposal company, which had followed Texas' rules, regulators said. The commission allowed the well operator to continue injecting thousands of barrels of brine into the well each day. A few months later, brine began spurting out of three more old wells nearby.
"It's kind of like Whac-a-Mole, where one thing pops up and by the time you go to hit it, another thing comes up," Cowley said. "It was frustrating. ... If your water goes, what does that do to the value of your land?"
Deep well injection takes place in 32 states, from Pennsylvania to Michigan to California. Most wells are around the Great Lakes and in areas where oil and gas is produced: along the Appalachian crest and the Gulf Coast, in California and in Texas, which has more wells for hazardous industrial waste and oil and gas waste than any other state.
Federal rules divide wells into six classes based on the material they hold and the industry that produced it. Class 1 wells handle the most hazardous materials, including fertilizers, acids and deadly compounds such as asbestos, PCBs and cyanide. The energy industry has its own category, Class 2, which includes disposal wells and wells in which fluids are injected to force out trapped oil and gas. The most common wells, called Class 5, are a sort of catch-all for everything left over from the other categories, including storm-water runoff from gas stations.
The EPA requires that Class 1 and 2 injection wells be drilled the deepest to assure that the most toxic waste is pushed far below drinking water aquifers. Both types of wells are supposed to be walled with multiple layers of steel tubing and cement and regularly monitored for cracks.Officials' confidence in this manner of disposal stems not only from safety precautions, but from an understanding of how rock formations trap fluid.
Underground waste, officials say, is contained by layer after layer of impermeable rock. If one layer leaks, the next blocks the waste from spreading before it reaches groundwater. The laws of physics and fluid dynamics should ensure that the waste can't spread far and is diluted as it goes.
The layering "is a very strong phenomenon and it's on our side," said Susan Hovorka, a senior research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin's Bureau of Economic Geology.
According to risk analyses cited in EPA documents, a significant well leak that leads to water contamination is highly unlikely — on the order of one in a million.
Once waste is underground, though, there are few ways to track how far it goes, how quickly or where it winds up. There is plenty of theory, but little data to prove the system works.
"I do think the risks are low, but it has never been adequately demonstrated," said John Apps, a leading geoscientist who advises the Department of Energy for Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. "Every statement is based on a collection of experts that offer you their opinions. Then you do a scientific analysis of their opinions and get some probability out of it. This is a wonderful way to go when you don't have any evidence one way or another... But it really doesn't mean anything scientifically."
The hard data that does exist comes from well inspections conducted by federal and state regulators, who can issue citations to operators for injecting illegally, for not maintaining wells, or for operating wells at unsafe pressures. This information is the EPA's primary means of tracking the system's health on a national scale.
ProPublica's series on injection wells
Yet, in response to questions from ProPublica, the EPA acknowledged it has done very little with the data it collects. The agency could not provide ProPublica with a tally of how frequently wells fail or of how often disposal regulations are violated. It has not counted the number of cases of waste migration or contamination in more than 20 years. The agency often accepts reports from state injection regulators that are partly blank, contain conflicting figures or are missing key details, ProPublica found.In 2007, the EPA launched a national data system to centralize reports on injection wells. As of September 2011 — the last time the EPA issued a public update — less than half of the state and local regulatory agencies overseeing injection were contributing to the database. It contained complete information from only a handful of states, accounting for a small fraction of the deep wells in the country.
The EPA did not respond to questions seeking more detail about how it handles its data, or about how the agency judges whether its oversight is working.
In a 2008 interview with ProPublica, one EPA scientist acknowledged shortcomings in the way the agency oversees the injection program.
"It's assumed that the monitoring rules and requirements are in place and are protective — that's assumed," said Gregory Oberley, an EPA groundwater specialist who studies injection and water issues in the Rocky Mountain region. "You're not going to know what's going on until someone's well is contaminated and they are complaining about it."
***
ProPublica's analysis of case histories and EPA data from October 2007 to October 2010 showed that when an injection well fails, it is most often because of holes or cracks in the well structure itself.
Operators are required to do so-called "mechanical integrity" tests at regular intervals, yearly for Class 1 wells and at least once every five years for Class 2 wells. In 2010, the tests led to more than 7,500 violations nationally, with more than 2,300 wells failing. In Texas, one violation was issued for every three Class 2 wells examined in 2010.
Such breakdowns can have serious consequences. Damage to the cement or steel casing can allow fluids to seep into the earth, where they could migrate into water supplies.
Regulators say redundant layers of protection usually prevent waste from getting that far, but EPA data shows that in the three years analyzed by ProPublica, more than 7,500 well test failures involved what federal water protection regulations describe as "fluid migration" and "significant leaks."
In September 2009, workers for Unit Petroleum Company discovered oil and gas waste in a roadside ditch in southern Louisiana. After tracing the fluid to a crack in the casing of a nearby injection well, operators tested the rest of the well. Only then did they find another hole — 600 feet down, and just a few hundred feet away from an aquifer that is a source of drinking water for that part of the state.Most well failures are patched within six months of being discovered, EPA data shows, but with as much as five years passing between integrity tests, it can take a while for leaks to be discovered. And not every well can be repaired. Kansas shut down at least 47 injection wells in 2010, filling them with cement and burying them, because their mechanical integrity could not be restored. Louisiana shut down 82. Wyoming shut down 144.
Another way wells can leak is if waste is injected with such force that it accidentally shatters the rock meant to contain it. A report published by scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Texas said that high pressure is "the driving force" that can help connect deep geologic layers with shallower ones, allowing fluid to seep through the earth.
Most injection well permits strictly limit the maximum pressure allowed, but well operators — rushing to dispose of more waste in less time — sometimes break the rules, state regulatory inspections show. According to data provided by states to the EPA, deep well operators have been caught exceeding injection pressure limits more than 1,100 times since 2008.
Excessive pressure factored into a 1989 well failure that yielded new clues about the risks of injection.
While drilling a disposal well in southern Ohio, workers for the Aristech Chemical Corp. (since bought by Sunoco, and sold again, in 2011, to Haverhill Chemicals) were overwhelmed by the smell of phenol, a deadly chemical the company had injected into two Class 1 wells nearby. Somehow, perhaps over decades, the pollution had risen 1,400 feet through solid rock and was progressing toward surface aquifers.
Ohio environmental officials – aided by the EPA – investigated for some 15 years. They concluded that the wells were mechanically sound, but Aristech had injected waste into them faster and under higher pressure than the geologic formation could bear.
Though scientists maintain that the Aristech leak was a rarity, they acknowledge that such problems are more likely in places where industrial activity has changed the underground environment.
There are upwards of 2 million abandoned and plugged oil and gas wells in the U.S., more than 100,000 of which may not appear in regulators’ records. Sometimes they are just broken off tubes of steel, buried or sticking out of the ground. Many are supposed to be sealed shut with cement, but studies show that cement breaks down over time, allowing seepage up the well structure.  Also, if injected waste reaches the bottom of old wells, it can quickly be driven back towards aquifers, as it was in Chico.
“The United States looks like a pin cushion,” said Bruce Kobelski, a geologist who has been with the agency’s underground injection program since 1986. Kobelski spoke to ProPublica in May, 2011, before the EPA declined additional interview requests for this story. “Unfortunately there are cases where someone missed a well or a well wasn’t indicated. It could have been a well from the turn of the [20th] century.”
Clefts left after the earth is cracked open to frack for oil and gas also can connect abandoned wells and waste injection zones. How far these man-made fissures go is still the subject of research and debate, but in some cases they have reached as much as a half-mile, even intersecting fractures from neighboring wells.
When injection wells intersect with fracked wells and abandoned wells, the combined effect is that many of the natural protections assumed to be provided by deep underground geology no longer exist.
“It’s a natural system and if you go in and start punching holes through it and changing pressure systems around, it’s no longer natural,” said Nathan Wiser, an underground injection expert working for the EPA in its Rocky Mountain region, in a 2010 interview. “It’s difficult to know how it would behave in those circumstances.”
EPA data provides a window into some injection well problems, but not all. There is no way to know how many wells have undetected leaks or to measure the amount of waste escaping from them.
In at least some cases, records obtained by ProPublica show, well failures may have contaminated sources of drinking water. Between 2008 and 2011, state regulators reported 150 instances of what the EPA calls "cases of alleged contamination," in which waste from injection wells purportedly reached aquifers. In 25 instances, the waste came from Class 2 wells. The EPA did not respond to requests for the results of investigations into those incidents or to clarify the standard for reporting a case.
The data probably understates the true extent of such incidents, however.
Leaking wells can simply go undetected. One Texas study looking for the cause of high salinity in soil found that at least 29 brine injection wells in its study area were likely sending a plume of salt water up into the ground unnoticed. Even when a problem is reported, as in Chico, regulators don’t always do the expensive and time-consuming work necessary to investigate its cause.“The absence of episodes of pollution can mean that there are none, or that no one is looking,” said Salazar, the EPA’s former injection expert. “I would tend to believe it is the latter.”
***The practice of injecting waste underground arose as a solution to an environmental crisis.
In the first half of the 20th century, toxic waste collected in cesspools, or was dumped in rivers or poured onto fields. As the consequences of unbridled pollution became unacceptable, the country turned to an out-of-sight alternative. Drawing on techniques developed by the oil and gas industry, companies started pumping waste back into wells drilled for resources. Toxic waste became all but invisible. Air and water began to get cleaner.
Then a host of unanticipated problems began to arise.
In April, 1967 pesticide waste injected by a chemical plant at Denver’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal destabilized a seismic fault, causing a magnitude 5.0 earthquake -- strong enough to shatter windows and close schools -- and jolting scientists with newfound risks of injection, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
A year later, a corroded hazardous waste well for pulping liquor at the Hammermill Paper Co., in Erie, Pa., ruptured. Five miles away, according to an EPA report, “a noxious black liquid seeped from an abandoned gas well” in Presque Isle State Park.
In 1975 in Beaumont, Texas, dioxin and a highly acidic herbicide injected underground by the Velsicol Chemical Corp. burned a hole through its well casing, sending as much as five million gallons of the waste into a nearby drinking water aquifer.
Then in August 1984 in Oak Ridge, Tenn., radioactive waste was turned up by water monitoring near a deep injection well at a government nuclear facility.
Regulators raced to catch up. In 1974, the Safe Drinking Water Act was passed, establishing a framework for regulating injection. Then, in 1980, the EPA set up the tiered classes of wells and began to establish basic construction standards and inspection schedules. The EPA licensed some state agencies to monitor wells within their borders and handled oversight jointly with others, but all had to meet the baseline requirements of the federal Underground Injection Control program.
Even with stricter regulations in place, 17 states – including Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wisconsin -- banned Class 1 hazardous deep well injection.“We just felt like based on the knowledge that we had at that time that it was not something that was really in the best interest of the environment or the state,” said James Warr, who headed Alabama’s Department of Environmental Management at the time.
Injection accidents kept cropping up.
A 1987 General Accountability Office review put the total number of cases in which waste had migrated from Class 1 hazardous waste wells into underground aquifers at 10 -- including the Texas and Pennsylvania sites. Two of those aquifers were considered potential drinking water sources.
In 1989, the GAO reported 23 more cases in seven states where oil and gas injection wells had failed and polluted aquifers. New regulations had done little to prevent the problems, the report said, largely because most of the wells involved had been grandfathered in and had not had to comply with key aspects of the rules.
Noting four more suspected cases, the report also suggested there could be more well failures, and more widespread pollution, beyond the cases identified. “The full extent to which injected brines have contaminated underground sources of drinking water is unknown,” it stated.
The GAO concluded that most of the contaminated aquifers could not be reclaimed because fixing the damage was “too costly” or “technically infeasible.”
Faced with such findings, the federal government drafted more rules aimed at strengthening the injection program. The government outlawed certain types of wells above or near drinking water aquifers, mandating that most industrial waste be injected deeper.
The agency also began to hold companies that disposed of hazardous industrial waste to far stiffer standards. To get permits to dispose of hazardous waster after 1988, companies had to prove – using complex models and geological studies -- that the stuff they injected wouldn’t migrate anywhere near water supplies for 10,000 years. They were already required to test for fault zones and to conduct reviews to ensure there were no conduits for leakage, such as abandoned wells, within a quarter-mile radius. Later, that became a two-mile minimum radius for some wells.
The added regulations would have prevented the vast majority of the accidents that occurred before the late 1980s, EPA officials contend.
“The requirements weren’t as rigorous, the testing wasn’t as rigorous and in some cases the shallow aquifers were contaminated,” Kobelski said. “The program is not the same as it was when we first started.”Today’s injection program, however, faces a new set of problems.
As federal regulators toughened rules for injecting hazardous waste, oil and gas companies argued that the new standards could drive them out of business. State oil and gas regulators pushed back against the regulations, too, saying that enforcing the rules for Class 2 wells – which handle the vast majority of injected waste by volume -- would be expensive and difficult.
Ultimately, the energy industry won a critical change in the federal government’s legal definition of waste: Since 1988, all material resulting from the oil and gas drilling process is considered non-hazardous, regardless of its content or toxicity.
“It took a lot of talking to sell the EPA on that and there are still a lot of people that don’t like it,” said Bill Bryson, a geologist and former head of the Kansas Corporation Commission’s Conservation Division, who lobbied for and helped draft the federal rules. “But it seemed the best way to protect the environment and to stop everybody from just having to test everything all the time.”
The new approach removed many of the constraints on the oil and gas industry. They were no longer required to conduct seismic tests (a stricture that remained in place for Class 1 wells). Operators were allowed to test their wells less frequently for mechanical integrity and the area they had to check for abandoned wells was kept to a minimum  – one reason drilling waste kept bubbling to the surface near Chico.
Soon after the first Chico incident, Texas expanded the area regulators were required to check for abandoned waste wells (a rule that applied only to certain parts of the state). Doubling the radius they reviewed in Chico to a half mile, they found 13 other injection or oil and gas wells. When they studied the land within a mile – the radius required for review of many Class 1 wells – officials discovered another 35 wells, many dating to the 1950s.
The Railroad Commission concluded that the Chico injection well had overflowed: The target rock zone could no longer handle the volume being pushed into it. Trying to cram in more waste at the same speed could cause further leaks, regulators feared. The commission set new limits on how fast the waste could be injected, but did not forbid further disposal. The well remains in use to this day.  In late 2008, samples of Chico’s municipal drinking water were found to contain radium, a radioactive derivative of uranium and a common attribute of drilling waste. The water well was a few miles away from the leaking injection well site, but environmental officials said the contaminants discovered in the water well were unrelated, mostly because they didn’t include the level of sodium typical of brine.
Since then, Ed Cowley, the public works director, said commission officials have continued to assure him that brine won’t reach Chico’s drinking water. But since the agency keeps allowing more injection and doesn’t track the cumulative volume of waste going into wells in the area, he’s skeptical that they can keep their promise.
“I was kind of like, ‘You all need to get together and look at the total amount you are trying to fit through the eye of the needle,’” he said. 
***
When sewage flowed from 20 Class 1 wells near Miami into the Upper Floridan aquifer, it challenged some of scientists’ fundamental assumptions about the injection system.
The wells – which had helped fuel the growth of South Florida by eliminating the need for expensive water treatment plants -- had passed rigorous EPA and state evaluation throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Inspections showed they were structurally sound. As Class 1 wells, they were subject to some of the most frequent tests and closest scrutiny.
Yet they failed.
The wells' designers would have calculated what is typically called the "zone of influence" — the space that waste injected into the wells was expected to fill. This was based on estimates of how much fluid would be injected and under what pressure.
In drawings, the zone of influence typically looks like a Hershey’s kiss, an evenly dispersed plume spreading in a predictable circular fashion away from the bottom of the well. Above the zone, most drawings depict uniform formations of rock not unlike a layer cake.
Based on modeling and analysis by some of the most sophisticated engineering consultants in the country, Florida officials, with the EPA's assent, concluded that waste injected into the Miami-area wells would be forever trapped far below the South Florida peninsula.
“All of the modeling indicated that the injectate would be confined in the injection zone,” an EPA spokesperson wrote to ProPublica in a statement.But as Miami poured nearly half a billion gallons of partly treated sewage into the ground each day from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, hydrogeologists learned that the earth – and the flow of fluids through it – wasn’t as uniform as the models depicted. Florida’s injection wells, for example, had been drilled into rock that was far more porous and fractured than scientists previously understood.
“Geology is never what you think it is,” said Ronald Reese, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey in Florida who has studied the well failures there. “There are always surprises.”
Other gaps have emerged between theories of how underground injection should work and how it actually does. Rock layers aren’t always neatly stacked as they appear in engineers’ sketches. They often fold and twist over on themselves. Waste injected into such formations is more likely to spread in lopsided, unpredictable ways than in a uniform cone. It is also likely to channel through spaces in the rock as pressure forces it along the weakest lines. 
Petroleum engineers in Texas have found that when they pump fluid into one end of an oil reservoir to push oil out the other, the injected fluid sometimes flows around the reservoir, completely missing the targeted zone.
“People are still surprised at the route that the injectate is taking or the bypassing that can happen,” said Jean-Philippe Nicot, a research scientist at the University of Texas’ Bureau of Economic Geology.
Conventional wisdom says fluids injected underground should spread at a rate of several inches or less each year, and go only as far as they are pushed by the pressure inside the well. In some instances, however, fluids have travelled faster and farther than researchers thought possible.
In a 2000 case that wasn’t caused by injection but brought important lessons about how fluids could move underground, hydrogeologists concluded that bacteria-polluted water migrated horizontally underground for several thousand feet in just 26 hours, contaminating a drinking water well in Walkerton, Ontario, and sickening thousands of residents. The fluids travelled 80 times as fast as the standard software model predicted was possible.
According to the model, vertical movement of underground fluids shouldn't be possible at all, or should happen over what scientists call "geologic time": thousands of years or longer. Yet a 2011 study in Wisconsin found that human viruses had managed to infiltrate deep aquifers, probably moving downward through layers believed to be a permanent seal.According to a study published in April in the journal Ground Water, it’s not a matter of if fluid will move through rock layers, but when.
Tom Myers, a hydrologist, drew on research showing that natural faults and fractures are more prevalent than commonly understood to create a model that predicts how chemicals might move in the Marcellus Shale, a dense layer of rock that has been called impermeable. The Marcellus Shale, which stretches from New York to Tennessee, is the focus of intense debate because of concerns that chemicals injected in drilling for natural gas will pollute water.
Myers’ new model said that chemicals could leak through natural cracks into aquifers tapped for drinking water in about 100 years, far more quickly than had been thought. In areas where there is hydraulic fracturing or drilling, Myers’ model shows, man-made faults and natural ones could intersect and chemicals could migrate to the surface in as little as “a few years, or less.”
“It’s out of sight, out of mind now. But 50 years from now?” Myers said, referring to injected waste and the rock layers trusted to entrap it. “Simply put, they are not impermeable.”
Myers' work is among the few studies done over the past few decades to compare theories of hydrogeology to what actually happens. But even his research is based on models.
...
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Ohio is preparing for potential drilling in state parks and forests

COLUMBUS —

 

Ohio officials are cataloging how much state property sits above the Utica shale as they prepare for potential gas and oil drilling in state parks and forests.
A law enacted last year opens such properties to drilling.

The Columbus Dispatch reports the state has spent three months reviewing property records in 16 eastern Ohio counties with the most active shale drilling. A spokesman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources says the extensive work to assess state mineral rights in those counties is almost done.

Research is planned in up to 19 more counties with less active shale drilling.
The industry has flooded the state in search of gas and oil deposits, and state leaders are hinging much of Ohio’s job growth strategy on the increase in drilling.

The State is considering a plan to let shale oil drilling pay to take water

FRED SQUILLANTE | DISPATCH

State officials are considering a plan that would let shale-oil drilling companies pay to take water from streams and reservoirs in state parks and forests.

Drilling companies’ growing thirst for water to “frack” Utica shale wells could soon be quenched in Ohio’s parks and forests.Ohio Department of Natural Resources officials are weighing plans that would grant drillers access to state-held reservoirs, lakes and streams.

For a price.Agency records and emails obtained by The Dispatch show that officials have been discussing the issue since at least April. Natural Resources manages state parks and forests and regulates the drilling industry.

“Access to rivers: Can we charge and how much?” states one undated memo circulated among agency officials. “Access to scenic rivers: Can we do this?”Drilling companies require use as much as 5 million gallons of water to frack a single shale well.

The water is mixed with sand and chemicals, and is pumped underground to fracture the shale and free trapped oil and gas.Companies can take water from Ohio streams and pay to draw water from privately owned ponds. Several companies have signed contracts with cities, paying them for access to drinking-water reservoirs.

The demand for water will grow.

The state estimates that by the end of 2015, there will be 2,250 shale wells.

The use of public water for fracking is a growing issue across eastern Ohio. Environmental groups say that fracking could strain sources for drinking water, boating and wildlife.

“These streams and watercourses are our playgrounds and our drinking water,” said Cheryl Johncox, director of the Buckeye Forest Council. “I see this sell-off of our state resources as incredibly short-sighted.”

Those concerns led the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District to announce on June 7 that it won’t sell water from six reservoirs until a water-availability study is completed.

Nine state parks and two forests that feature reservoirs, lakes or central streams are located within a 16-county region of eastern Ohio where shale drilling is the most active. Natural Resources officials looking to lease state lands for drilling named the area “Tier 1” because of the intense interest from energy companies.Carlo LoParo, a Natural Resources spokesman, said the agency’s water plans are still being developed.

“Our goal is to develop a plan that will allow for the use of water if, based on a detailed analysis, withdrawal of that water does not cause a negative impact to navigation, recreation or wildlife,” LoParo said.

Records include a draft copy of a water-leasing policy dated April 16 that quotes a state law granting the authority to sell water from state-held lands when it is “advantageous.” Where reservoirs are concerned, the law bars sales that would hinder recreation or wildlife.

Officials also questioned how much money the state could make. “One company paid 1 penny per gallon or $10 per 1,000 gallons,” according to the undated memo.Muskingum Watershed Conservancy officials have asked the U.S. Geological Survey for a study of its Atwood, Clendening and Leesville reservoirs.Greg Koltun, a hydrologist in the Geological Survey’s Columbus office, said results should be available by the end of the year.

The survey will focus on water that’s discharged from each reservoir’s dam. Koltun said the analysis will subtract what’s needed to maintain drinking-water supplies and downstream wildlife to calculate the amount of “excess” water.

Lea Harper, a member of the Southeast Ohio Alliance to Save Our Water, questioned why conservancy districts would want to sell water. As many as a dozen oil and gas companies have asked to draw water from six district reservoirs.

“They should be working with us to help preserve and protect that water,” Harper said.Darrin Lautenschleger, a conservancy district spokesman, said his agency includes industry among its “ beneficial public uses” of water.“Conservation involves the wise use of a natural resource, and that’s something we take very seriously,” he said.

Dear Neighbors:

I heard Jamie's story in Youngstown.  It is very disturbing that such a beautiful family has so much to contend with due to the fracking in her neighborhood.  Please take the time to watch her story. 

Thank you for caring.
Gail Larson

Rock Creek

Don't Frack Ohio Rally this Sunday!

Friends-

Later this week the Ohio fracking movement will be joining together for our
biggest show of force yet - and we don't want you to miss it.

Over a thousand people from dozens of states are converging on Columbus from
the 14th to the 17th to send a crystal clear message to Gov. Kasich: Don't
Frack Ohio!

On the 17th - that's Sunday - we'll be joined by Bill McKibben of 350.org
and Josh Fox, director of Gasland, for a big rally that will march to the
Statehouse and occupy the rotunda to send a message to the Governor and the
State Assembly that our state is not for sale to the oil and gas industry.
Kasich and the oil industry's paid for allies in the Assembly have passed
one of the worst fracking bills in the country and we need to show them that
there will be consequences.

Thursday through Saturday we'll be spending time together in Columbus
building the kind of movement we need to win, with trainings on non-violent
direct action, media strategy and how to mobilize your community for big
change.

If you haven't made plans yet to be there, take a few minutes now to plan a
trip to be there. If you can only be there for one day, be there on Sunday
for the rally, but if you can spare an extra day or two to join the
trainings, it's absolutely worth your time.

Click here to sign up and to get all the details:
http://www.dontfrackoh.org/sign-up
--350.org, NEOGAP and the supporters of Don't Frack Ohio

Gail Larson

Here is what is happening in Broadview Heights OH

BROADVIEW HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Susan Fowler's Georgian colonial has been on the market for two-and-a-half years. The four-bedroom house sits on a wooded lot on a quiet cul-de-sac in Broadview Heights, where home values are among the highest in Cuyahoga County cities. Fowler's house lists at $250,999 -- knocked down from $389,000.

But with several oil and gas wells on land behind her property, she says potential buyers want no part of it. The closest well is 89 feet from her property line.

An oil and gas company cleared woods to drill a well behind the house in 2008. The next year brought two more wells. The family moved out during the drilling of the second well.

While there is much debate over whether oil and gas well drilling poses health risks, Fowler said her family experienced vomiting and headaches during the process.

They moved into an apartment, and a year later they left the area for good.
She was a design engineer at Ford. Her husband was an information technology director at Progressive Insurance. They moved to Portland, Ore.

"It's just been a brutal financial strain for us," Fowler said in an interview.
"You couldn't pay me to live in Ohio again," she said. "It was our dream home. Now it's a lovely home right on top of an industrial site. We feel like refugees from our city and our state."
Many Ohioans are just waking up to the fracking boom. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a method of extracting natural gas hidden deep within shale formations. The boom is expected to create thousands of jobs and add billions to the state's economy.

Broadview Heights has had a head start on many communities when it comes to drilling. The suburb south of Cleveland has become home to more than 80 oil and gas wells -- by far the most in Cuyahoga County -- since a 2004 state law opened the floodgates to urban drilling. Broadview Heights also stands as an example of how drilling where people live can riddle a community with contention.

Tensions between residents and city officials, oil and gas well drillers and regulators have been roiling for several years, as bobbing pump jacks and oil storage tanks have taken up space in wooded lots and manicured neighborhoods.

Lynn Ischay, The Plain DealerTish O'Dell is working to get a bill of rights passed that would protect future homeowners in Broadview Heights. Many residents are moving out because of the problems that fracking has caused in their health and finances.

"They are ruining my hometown," said Tish O'Dell, a Broadview Heights resident who co-founded a group called Mothers Against Drilling In Our Neighborhoods. "You only have two options. You either let them keep destroying the community or you do something."

Cuyahoga County has been a hotbed of urban drilling since the state legislature passed a measure called House Bill 278. The law gave the Ohio Department of Natural Resources sole authority to regulate oil and gas wells, stripping local governments of any authority over placement or permitting of wells.

Nearly 400 new wells have been permitted in the county since passage of the state law, according data provided by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. The wells here don't involve horizontal drilling -- a larger-scale operation that has fueled the fracking boom. Horizontal drilling requires large rigs and lots of acreage to drill thousands of feet down, and then bore horizontal shafts extending up to nearly two miles.

While the fracking debate is often associated with horizonal drilling in non-urban areas, the proliferation of urban wells in Cuyahoga have raised similar concerns over health and environmental effects.

In Broadview Heights, O'Dell is among a small group of activists who have pressed city officials to take a stand.

The City Council is considering a so-called citizens bill of rights to halt drilling in residential areas and prohibit fracking in the city until the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency rules on the safety of the practice.

But its chances of success are dubious. Vince Ruffa, the city law director, warned the council in May that the city is setting itself up to be sued.

"We don't have any authority to pass legislation to regulate drilling," he told the council.
The council in recent years passed two other measures calling for state curbs on residential drilling. But critics say city government has also been part of the problem.

Broadview Heights, like other suburbs, saw a new source of a revenue in oil and gas well leases on city property. Since House Bill 278, Broadview Heights has signed leases for 15 wells on city-owned land, which generated $163,000 in revenue for the suburb last year.

City leaders also came under criticism for granting a 13-acre right-of-way that allowed Cutter Oil Co. to drill on the property behind Susan Fowler's house. In addition, some residents were miffed that former council President Helen Dunlap signed a private oil and gas well lease in 2010, after she and council had called for a state moratorium on drilling in heavily populated areas.
Dunlap, who is now the City Council clerk, declined to comment on the deal, saying she would have to check the dates of the council action and her lease with Cutter Oil. She said the well is on a neighbor's property, and that she and her husband could possibly have been forced to participate anyway, under a mandatory pooling law.

The law says drillers can compel a landowner to lease mineral rights in order to achieve necessary acreage for a well, if enough neighbors want it. Twenty acres are required for the type of wells in Broadview Heights.

"We were right in the middle of the 20 acres they (Cutter) were putting together," Dunlap said.
Mayor Sam Alai says the city has fought Columbus on behalf his residents, including challenging mandatory pooling. The mayor said he finds it absurd that a city can require building permits for home improvements, but has no say on the placement of gas and oil wells.
"What do you do?" Alai said. "They want to drill, drill, drill. I wish they would change the regulations for urban areas."

Alai said he's concerned about the safety of having wells in residential neighborhoods, though he said the few accidents that have occurred were minor.

Lynn Ischay, The Plain DealerThe EPA is working on this watershed restoration project, right next to fracking wells in Broadview Heights.

A well in neighboring North Royalton sprung an oil leak in 2011, spilling 200 gallons of crude into Chippewa Creek. North Royalton and Broadview Heights have also in recent years dealt with gas leaking into the air.

"There's no monitoring of any of these wells that are hundreds of feet from our homes," said Michelle Aini, who lives near the Broadview Heights well that spewed gas in 2011.
As part of the citizens' group with O'Dell, Aini has battled to halt drilling near houses and schools. The group cites harmful health effects from chemicals and gases.

The question of whether fracking -- which uses high-pressure water, sand and chemicals --is harmful to health and the environment is a controversial one. The Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, said in April it will study whether fracking poses health risks.
The Ohio Oil and Gas Association, which represents the industry, did not respond to interview requests for this story.

O'Dell and Aini are regulars at City Council meetings, and they were also sued this year by a Brecksville energy company that claims the women made false statements that the company uses fracking water in its road deicer.

Despite the critics, Mayor Alai, who beat back an election challenge from O'Dell last year, says drilling would not have proliferated if residents didn't want it.
"You have all these residents cashing in on the gas and oil under their feet," he said. "You have hundreds if not thousands of people involved in gas wells in the city. You have a lot more residents involved with gas wells than against it."

One Broadview Road resident who signed on for a well and storage tank behind his brick ranch said some people complain about drilling because they aren't making as much as they anticipated. The man spoke with The Plain Dealer, but did not want to disclose his name because of tensions over wells in the city.

He and his neighbors pulled in $400 to $500 a month when the well started production a few years ago, but the amount has fallen, he said.
"I got what I wanted," he said. "I didn't sign up for the money, I did it for the free gas. I haven't had a gas bill in three years."

In some cases, the lure of royalty checks has frayed relationships between neighbors.
Louis Chodkiewicz said he had a falling out with his Wyatt Road neighbor, after being forced into a pool in 2007. He appealed to the state and lost. Wells have been drilled on three sides of his 720-foot-long property, which is filled with fruit and maple trees and rows of berry bushes.
"You don't know who your neighbor is any more," said Chodkiewicz, a real estate broker. "They tell you they're against it and the next thing you know they signed. I don't think it should be in a residential area. I don't want the money."

The scenario seems certain to play out in other areas, as companies are rushing in to acquire leases. Anti-fracking citizen groups are coalescing in areas such as Portage and Medina counties. Some 300 people showed up at a fracking forum in Medina Township earlier this year.

In Medina County, leases have been signed for more than 600 land parcels, according to the county auditor's office. Auditor Michael Kovack said he believes most were signed in the past year.
Hinckley Township Trustee Martha Catherwood says residents have been deluged with lease solicitations. Meanwhile, Hinckley is among five townships in Medina County where trustees have voted to ban drilling on township-owned property.
Catherwood said the biggest fear among residents is that fracking will taint their well water.
"We've had to tell them there's not much we can do" to control drilling. "You know what? That's just so lame," Catherwood said.
"Your neighbor has no say about it if you decide to do it. There's something fundamentally wrong with that."

We may be next!

Read this - we're next .

http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/08/12106895-oil-boom-brings-wealth-and-waste-to-north-dakota?lite

K. Flora

June 17th. Sign up to join the movement!

Friends-
On June 17th Ohio will be at the epicenter of another earthquake - this
time, a people-powered quake that will shake the oil and gas industry. The
earthquake is an action called Don't Frack Ohio, and we're planning to take
over the Ohio statehouse and pass a people's bill to protect our state from
the oil and gas industry.
Already over 1000 people are signed up to be there from states all across
the country, and we'll be joined by Bill McKibben of 350.org and Josh Fox,
the director of Gasland. Gov. Kasich and the State Assembly just passed one
of the worst fracking bills in the country, and we need to show them that
there will consequences for selling out our state.
The oil and gas industry put millions of dollars into the pockets of
politicians to make this bill happen. We don't have that kind of money, so
we need to use people power to show them our state is not for sale.
The action is on the 17th, but there are big plans for the 14th-16th as
well. That's when we'll be meeting up for a series of trainings and strategy
sessions to plan and build the movement we need to stop the fracking
industry in Ohio. We'll be getting trainings in non-violent direct action,
media strategy and skills, and how to mobilize our communities to win this
fight.
We're really hoping you can join us for this exciting event. With the drills
on their way to turn Ohio into the fracking capital of the midwest, time is
of the essence, and this is a perfect opportunity to tell Gov. Kasich that
we won't accept his style of sellouts any longer.
Click here to sign up for the action: http://www.dontfrackoh.org/sign-up
See you in Columbus soon,
-350.org, NEOGAP and the supporters of Don't Frack Ohio

Time is now to get involved!

To my Ashtabula neighbors:

Harmon and Sandy have passed on a very urgent request(forwarded email below) for us to show up in Columbus this weekend to let Governor Kasich and the entire State House and Senate know that they must hold the gas industry accountable and the government must carefully monitor any and all activity the gas industry brings to our state; from taking our fresh water resources to threatening our water and air to extracting the gas and then leaving our county economy dry to the greed and misrepresentation of the hydrofracking process and on and on.
Please go to Columbus!

Thank you,

Gail Larson
Rock Creek, Ohio

Friends -

In about 10 days we'll be gathering in Columbus for a giant rally against fracking in Ohio. Today we found out that big oil will be there to greet us.

The American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil and gas lobby in America, already has an event planned on Saturday in Columbus meant to smear Josh Fox and Bill McKibben, and no doubt that industry will turn out in a big way for our rally too.

This makes our organizing over the next 10 days even more important. If the media sees a small anti-fracking rally met by a bigger pro-fracking action on the 17th… well, the implications should be obvious. Forgive the tired expression, but we have to go big or go home.

We can't let Gov. Kasich and the oil industry's paid representatives in government take cover behind an astroturf campaign by big oil. Our movement is better organized to exercise people power than big oil and gas. The first step to beating the industry is to make sure that all of y'all make it out to the action - the movement is counting on you.

The next step is to bring your friends, family and allies with you when you come. We need to get the word out that big oil is rallying against us - can you share this news with your social networks now?

Thanks to you, the gas industry knows that there is a grassroots movement rising to stop them. That's progress, but it also means we have a lot more work to do. I'm very grateful to be a part of this growing movement.

-Duncan

June 17th, State House in Columbus for antifrack action

Friends-

On June 17th Ohio will be at the epicenter of another earthquake - this
time, a people-powered quake that will shake the oil and gas industry. The
earthquake is an action called Don't Frack Ohio, and we're planning to take
over the Ohio statehouse and pass a people's bill to protect our state from
the oil and gas industry.

Already over 1000 people are signed up to be there from states all across
the country, and we'll be joined by Bill McKibben of 350.org and Josh Fox,
the director of Gasland. Gov. Kasich and the State Assembly just passed one
of the worst fracking bills in the country, and we need to show them that
there will consequences for selling out our state.

The oil and gas industry put millions of dollars into the pockets of
politicians to make this bill happen. We don't have that kind of money, so
we need to use people power to show them our state is not for sale.
The action is on the 17th, but there are big plans for the 14th-16th as
well. That's when we'll be meeting up for a series of trainings and strategy
sessions to plan and build the movement we need to stop the fracking
industry in Ohio. We'll be getting trainings in non-violent direct action,
media strategy and skills, and how to mobilize our communities to win this
fight.

We're really hoping you can join us for this exciting event. With the drills
on their way to turn Ohio into the fracking capital of the midwest, time is
of the essence, and this is a perfect opportunity to tell Gov. Kasich that
we won't accept his style of sellouts any longer.
Click here to sign up for the action: http://www.dontfrackoh.org/sign-up
See you in Columbus soon,

-350.org, NEOGAP and the supporters of Don't Frack Ohio

Submited by Gail Larson, Trumbull Township

New Standard for Lake Erie Water Withdrawl

Gov. John Kasich signed into law new standards for withdrawing water from Lake Erie yesterday, about 10 months after vetoing regulations that he didn’t think were strong enough.

Some argue that this revision isn’t strong enough, either.

House Bill 473 is designed to bring Ohio into compliance with the 2005 Great Lakes Compact, an agreement signed by Ohio, seven other states and two Canadian provinces and ratified by Congress to protect the Great Lakes from excessive water use in their basin, and to prohibit withdrawals outside the basin.

The new Ohio law allows companies and farms to withdraw 2.5 million gallons of water per day, averaged over 90 days, without a permit. It allows for 1 million gallons a day from rivers and streams feeding the lake, and 100,000 gallons a day from “high quality” streams.

The bill that Kasich vetoed in July would have allowed 5 million gallons to be withdrawn from Lake Erie without a permit.

When the legislature passed the revised bill in May, Kasich said that legislators, local officials, businesses and environmental advocates had crafted a bill that “provides strong protections for Lake Erie and its watershed. It meets federal obligations and supports Ohio’s need to boost job creation.”

The bill was among five signed by Kasich yesterday, including one that would eliminate Ohio’s cap on credit-card interest rates for in-state banks. Supporters argued that Ohio’s current 25-percent rate cap was “phantom protection” because the vast majority of credit card issuers are based outside Ohio and could ignore it.

Backers say the law removes a disadvantage that Ohio has with other states, 31 of which have passed similar laws. Central Ohio has 69,000 financial-services industry jobs, and some people hope that the law change could attract more, or at least stop financial-industry jobs from leaving. Huntington Bancshares supports the law and quietly suggested to lawmakers that it could help the bank decide where to place a new credit-card line that it hopes to start in mid-2013.

The Lake Erie bill was widely considered to be a significant improvement over the one Kasich vetoed last year. But groups including environmentalists and fishermen say it remains flawed.

Democrats, many of whom opposed the bill, tried unsuccessfully to make it more restrictive by reducing from 90 days to 60 the period of average daily water use considered in calculating whether a permit would be required. Critics have argued that the 90-day average could allow water users to make huge withdrawals over a few days.

“Unfortunately, mining, drilling, and bottling companies have undermined the interests of millions of anglers and boaters and the countless fish and wildlife that depend on a healthy Lake Erie,” said Kristy Meyer, director of agricultural and clean-water programs at the Ohio Environmental Council.

Critics also do no like that the law will not allow those with a recreational interest in the lake to appeal a water-withdrawal decision.

“The sportsmen of Ohio have a fundamental right to challenge a water use if it would impair our ability to enjoy the natural resources held in trust for all Ohioans,” said Rick Graham, president of the Izaak Walton League of America, Buckeye All State Chapter.

Former Govs. George V. Voinovich and Bob Taft expressed support for a shorter period of 30 days to calculate average water use, and they also called it a “troubling precedent” to eliminate appeal rights for those who use the lake for recreation.

Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, a Napoleon Republican, has said the bill “clearly strikes the right balance between protecting high-quality waters and ensuring our businesses can continue to create high-paying jobs.” As bill sponsor, he has drawn criticism for also owning a water-bottling company.

Kasich also signed a bill sponsored by Sen. Jim Hughes, R-Columbus, that will require used-car dealers who are new to the industry to complete a $99 training course. Developed by the Motor Vehicle Dealers Board, the course will last at least six hours and focus on the regulations they must follow.

In 2011, about 5,100 consumer complaints involving “motorized vehicles” were filed with the Ohio attorney general’s office, ranking the category first. It includes complaints about gasoline, rentals, sales of new and used vehicles and repairs.