Drilling debate divisive

Community groups sit down to talk

By TOM KANE

MILANVILLE, PA - It was a scene that could have occurred a lot sooner.

Sitting on one side of a table in Sheila Dugan’s home was Joe Levine, spokesman for the Damascus Citizens for Self-Government and Friends speaking against gas drilling. On the other side was Jo Clearwater, spokesperson for the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance (NWPOA), a 50,000-plus acre group of landowners who banded together to ensure property and environmental protection and rights while facilitating oil and gas leases on their property.

In between, and acting as moderator, was Beverly Sterner, creator of the Upper Delaware Community Network, a group formed after September 11, 2001 to provide a way for people to communicate. The group maintains an email communications network and hosts a monthly gathering on the second Saturday of the month in members’ homes to discuss relevant issues to the community.

The issue of whether or not to sign leases that allow gas drilling has quickly surfaced as a controversial matter. It has divided neighbors and friends, who are coming down on both sides of the issue.

“We recognize that as individuals we may have different views, but as neighbors and friends we want to educate ourselves and respect the views of others,” Sterner said.

Joe Levine is an architect from New York City who owns a house in Damascus. Jo Clearwater is an organic farmer, hospice nurse and a member of the NWPOA’s sustainability committee and its environmental committee. (See Visioning the Upper Delaware, page 7.)

For over three and a half hours, information and questions and answers flowed?as well as out-of-order remarks that Sterner attempted to control, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, in an exchange that was often heated.

“The more we found out, the more frightened we got,” Levine said. The gas companies are operating under the protection of exemptions granted them by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was maneuvered through Congress by Vice President Dick Cheney, one-time CEO of Halliburton, a company that is making millions on gas drilling, he said.

“There are no safeguards in place to protect us,” Levine said. “The power people in industry make the laws that legalize whatever they want. They don’t have to reveal the toxic chemicals that are being used in this kind of drilling.”

Levine disclosed some vivid stories from people in communities throughout the country who are suffering from uncontrolled drilling. People are walking away from their farms because they are being contaminated, he said.

“No one is looking out for us,” he said. “The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) merely regulates what the law states and the law gives the companies every advantage.”

Clearwater began by expressing sympathy for what Levine was saying. However, she assured the group that NWPOA would not allow these horror stories to occur in Wayne County.

“We are learning how to deal with these companies,” she said. “We are doing our best to put into our leases controls and regulations for clean water and for best-management practices that will avoid these kinds of abuses.”

Clearwater said that NWPOA has enlisted a third party for testing and ensuring that best practices are followed. We need to watchdog our own wells, she said.

“Within our leases, we can monitor any time and any place to see that these kinds of abuses don’t happen,” she said. Clearwater stated that the horror stories coming out of Fort Worth and other parts of the country will not happen here.

“It’s vital that we own the mineral rights to our properties-which 90 percent of our members do,” she said. “Owning these rights gives you considerable power over what happens on your property.”

Clearwater said that such practices as using open evaporation pits for the fluids pumped out of the wells would not be utilized. In other sites in the country, open pits were the source of a lot of contamination to the water table since the pits leaked in many instances.

“We are insisting on closed-containment systems where the resulting fracking fluids are pumped out and taken to a toxic-waste facility,” she said.

Clearwater suggested that anyone who is in conscience against drilling could accept a lease and donate any profits to charity. She also suggested that township boards could make the companies accept a bond to repair the roads if they are seriously damaged.

Sterner said that the community network will hold more joint meetings in the future.

Visit www.DamascusCitizens.org for more information on the Damascus Citizens for Self-Government and Friends and www.nypoa.info for more about the NWPOA.