Public Meeting at Normantown, Gilmer County, WV

Marcellus Well Pad

 “What is the Scale of the Marcellus Shale ‘Play’?”

Update Report by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemist and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

On Thursday the 1st of August an informational meeting organized by residents of Gilmer County was held at Normantown, in Gilmer County. Gilmer County has been the target of a lot of Marcellus leasing activity in the recent months. Although Gilmer has been the location of much of the older type of oil and gas extraction, shale drilling with horizontal wells, slickwater fracking, and endless traffic is new to the area.

The introduction was made by Julie Archer of the Surface Owners Rights Organization, which has several members in the area. She explained the meeting was to help people know what is coming and to anticipate it. Knowing the law, monitoring the industrial activity, and staying in contact with the various state agencies is the way to protect the community. Citizens must be the eyes and ears of the agencies, because they are undermanned. Contamination, accidents, safety hazards on the road, environmental hazards, are all known to citizens almost as soon as or sooner, in some cases, than those who cause them. Citizens act as “sensors” for the agencies.

Three speakers presented talks about the kind of experience residents could expect. The first was Diane Pitcock, representing West Virginia Host Farms. Diane recognized very early that scientists and writers were being excluded from full coverage of shale drilling if the company had any reasonable expectation of anything but a glowing account of their exploitation of the resource. The way to give scientists and media access to drilling was for landowners to invite them to their properties where the drilling was going on.

Doddridge is the heart of the Marcellus industry in West Virginia at this time. Although the price of gas is still depressed, Doddridge is in the “wet” part of the Marcellus, producing heavier compounds closely related to methane, which can be extracted and sold separately at considerable advantage. Some of the wells make $75, 000 a day. There are tremendous problems for residents, though. The drilling pads are huge, the roads they make to them are wide and pipelines require huge strips of forest. So there is a lot of property damage. Road traffic is intense, with people being crowded by the trucks, dust problems, sometimes long delays. There is evidence of connection between the new high pressure wells and older, often un- or poorly plugged wells.

Diane quoted Dr. Tony Infraffea’s research showing that over 6% of the wells in Pennsylvania are faulty at the time they are drilled, and more can be expected to fail in time. She pointed out that the pad workers and truck drivers are doing hazardous work. The hours are long, especially for truck drivers, many are exposed to silicosis, various kinds of poisonous fumes, and being burned. They have no protection, because the usual OSHA protections are denied by exceptions to the law for oil and gas workers. Workers must keep their complaints about danger to themselves or loose their jobs.

The second speaker was Wayne Woods, president of the Doddridge County Watershed Associaltion. This organization is a good example of what citizens in a drilled area can do to help the situation.

Wayne showed many pictures of damage to streams, property and wild life. The DCWA functions as a support group, gathering information, researching problems and keeping an eye on the neighborhood. One of the members monitors which streams the companies can take water out of, and reports this to others, who watch for violations, which can be reported to the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources (DNR). By being familiar with regulations, members can watch for things like brine dumping on roads, silt in streams, ponds contaminated, erosion measures not complete or not in required shape, and similar effects of careless construction. Things like stream diversion and a low water bridge (culvert system for a larger stream) which functions as a dam in high water or later after the tubes stopped up, also violates Army Corps of Engineers regulation. Very high on the list is detection of damage to water wells of members and neighbors, since Doddridge is so rural. No one wants to pay for “city water” for livestock and gardens.

The DCWA also monitors streams with conductivity meters and pH meters to detect any changes that might occur. They are very concerned with flood plain issues, having had a very bad incident of a company putting a drilling pad in a flood plain.

The third speaker was Bill Hughes of the Wetzel County Action Group. Wetzel County represents a county with a more developed Marcellus industry. It has over 300 wells now in production from just starting to well down the line to exhaustion. The web site for WCAG is located here.  It has hundreds of pictures of the problems people living in Wetzel county have had to face, from massive slips to countless truck accidents to the notorious destruction of Blake Run Falls, one of the few natural falls in West Virginia and its shoddy reconstruction by Chesapeake upon order of the US EPA.

Bill showed a slide of how the county is divided up according to areas each company drills. He says Wetzel got it first because someone in Oklahoma City pointed to a map and that made a bull’s eye of the county. He showed the production steps each driller must follow from deciding where to drill to production.

The second issue Bill discussed was the aggregation of air pollution from sites closely situated together. Each of these sites, wells, compressor stations, yards are the site industrial grade air pollution. When situated far apart the gases have a chance to disperse into the atmosphere. When they are close together, particularly under certain atmospheric conditions, such as an inversion of temperature in the atmosphere, or a still day, they tend to stay in place and the health problems become much worse, such things as asthma, nose bleed, dermatitis, and irritated mucosa. This aggregation of effect is not recognized by law at the present. Changing this should be one of our primary objectives, before full development occurs.

In conclusion, many people in Gilmer depend on the oil and gas industry for their income. About the only other sources of jobs in the county are service jobs and Glenville State and the Federal prison. They are having a hard time recognizing the effect of the scale of the Marcellus industry on what will happen to them. Some in the audience already work for Marcellus drillers. There was a good discussion after the meeting that lasted for most of an hour.