Fracking worries Crestline residents

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

Bill Baker, an active Mans­field oppo­nent of frack­ing in Rich­land County, speaks to about 25 Crest­lin­ers at a frack­ing forum held Thurs­day, Feb. 9, at the village’s pub­lic library.

By Sarah Einselen

Inquirer Reporter

CRESTLINE—Concern over Crestline’s water sup­ply dom­i­nated a frack­ing forum held Thurs­day night, Feb. 9, at the vil­lage library. Bill Baker, an Occupy Mans­field activist and oppo­nent of hydraulic frac­tur­ing (frack­ing) in Rich­land County, pro­vided infor­ma­tion and led dis­cus­sion for about an hour in the vil­lage that relies on Ontario’s water sup­ply for its needs. He led a four-hour series of dis­cus­sions in Mans­field last month.

“We have to make peo­ple aware of what is going on,” said Crest­line mayor Dave Shar­rock, who invited Baker to speak. Crestline’s sister-cities Ontario and Mans­field are work­ing hard to block frack­ing around those locales, Shar­rock said, and Crest­line and Mans­field are both work­ing on munic­i­pal ordi­nances to try to limit fracking.

How­ever, it’s an issue that falls under state Depart­ment of Nat­ural Resources juris­dic­tion, so munic­i­pal­i­ties and coun­ties can’t legally pro­hibit frack­ing, said Baker. He encour­aged the 25 peo­ple who attended the forum to con­tact their vil­lage, county and state leg­is­la­tors to make sure they were aware that cit­i­zens are concerned.

Frack­ing is a process by which oil com­pa­nies pump a water-based solu­tion into porous bedrock deep in the earth’s crust to free the oil and gas that’s trapped in the rock. It’s often done using hor­i­zon­tal wells, mile-long tubes through the bedrock that the water mix is pumped through.

“Under very high pres­sure, a com­bi­na­tion of water, sand and chem­i­cals is sent deep into the earth to cre­ate cracks and fis­sures in the shale rock,” accord­ing to a StateIm­pact Penn­syl­va­nia back­ground arti­cle on frack­ing. “Those fis­sures are held open by the sand, allow­ing the nat­ural gas to flow through those cracks, into the well bore and up to the surface.”

After the water mix is used for frack­ing, the left­over waste has to be dis­posed of, and in many cases it is dumped into an injec­tion well under high pressure.

Some con­cerns voiced at Thursday’s forum included whether frack­ing was caus­ing the recent earth­quakes near Youngstown, whether the prac­tice had con­t­a­m­i­nated ground­wa­ter in Penn­syl­va­nia and New York and whether many wells had been drilled in Crestline’s vicinity.

“There’s a lot of drilling going on, not a lot of injec­tion yet,” Baker said. Driling is espe­cially pre­dom­i­nant in Mor­row County but three wells had been drilled within 15 miles of Crestline.

Some com­mu­ni­ties in Penn­syl­va­nia have blamed frack­ing for con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing their water supply—and the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency has begun truck­ing clean water to Dimock, Pa., after methane got into the water sup­ply there, accord­ing to a ProP­ub­lica report dated Jan. 20. It has not deter­mined how the methane got there but local and state lead­ers blame nearby gas wells.

Geol­o­gists have linked the minor Youngstown earth­quakes that hap­pened between Christ­mas and New Year’s to the area’s injec­tion wells, accord­ing to a an arti­cle from Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can. The waste­water dis­posed of in the injec­tion wells “can act as lubri­cants between two abut­ting rock faces, help­ing them to sud­denly slip along the bound­ary,” accord­ing to the article.

A prob­lem with hold­ing energy com­pa­nies account­able for pos­si­ble con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, Baker said, is that most landown­ers don’t test their water for con­t­a­m­i­nants before drilling begins, so if water does get pol­luted it’s hard to prove when or how it became contaminated.

Plus, oil com­pa­nies form sub­sidiary lim­ited lia­bil­ity com­pa­nies for the var­i­ous wells and take out insur­ance for each one. If one well is com­pro­mised and pay­out is required for truck­ing in fresh water or pay­ing fines, the multiple-LLC struc­ture keeps that from affect­ing other wells.

“That $3 mil­lion they have for insur­ance would not even put a dent in the cost if some­thing hap­pened to Crestline’s wells,” Baker said.

Frack­ing has been prac­ticed in this area for about six decades, said Baker, and was started even earlier.

“They would drop dyna­mite down into the well and break the rock up to encour­age stronger gas flow,” Baker said, when frack­ing was first tried in the 1800s. High-pressure hydraulic frack­ing became preva­lent about eight years ago, when tech­no­log­i­cal advances made it lucrative.

Nobody’s thought much about it until recently, Baker said, because it took five or six years for peo­ple to get sick from frack­ing contaminants.

“We need to ban it,” he said. “It’s evi­dent that it’s haz­ardous at this time.”

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Feb 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.