Gas drillers invite visitors, sort of

By TOM KANE

OREGON TOWNSHIP, PA - A very clearly worded sign stands at the entrance of the rough gravel road leading down to the latest Chesapeake Appalachia gas drilling site on Fox Hill Road in Oregon Township stating that “salesmen and visitors are welcome.”

Only they’re not, or at least not visitors who say that they are newspaper reporters.

On the two-acre pad, holding a recovery pit that is lined with black plastic, several large water tanker trucks, and other diverse machinery, stands a high rig shooting up into the air, poised to begin drilling for gas. A group of “rough necks” were working on a rig platform, in preparation to begin drilling.

“You shouldn’a come down here,” said a man with a heavy southern accent and a handle-bar mustache. He was sitting in a work trailer when this reporter came calling.

“But, the sign?” I asked quizzically. “It says that salesmen and visitors are welcome. Why is the sign there if visitors are not welcome, even though the sign says they are?”

“You are welcome, if you are invited,” the man said.

I thought that’s what the sign was doing, inviting me. Not so, it turns out.

Several cars with West Virginia license plates stood outside the trailer office.

I retreated in my car, up the rough gravel road with some difficulty, but not without taking some pictures.

In March, this paper reported that this gas drilling site would not be targeting the Marcellus Shale deposits but rather a deeper gas deposit called the Oriskany Sandstone formation that does not require as much water as the Marcellus wells. This kind of well is only vertical and not horizontal as Marcellus Shale wells are.

The property where the drilling operation is occurring belongs to Christopher and Betty Ann Robson.