& now, disturbing truth of natural gas mining: Living In The Middle Of A 'Gasland'

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Fri Jun-11-10 10:20 AM
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& now, disturbing truth of natural gas mining: Living In The Middle Of A 'Gasland'

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=127593937

Josh Fox: Living In The Middle Of A 'Gasland'

June 10, 2010 - TERRY GROSS, host:

What would you do if you were offered a lot of money by a gas company in return for leasing the right to drill on your land? That was the position my guest Josh Fox was in. His family's land is on the Delaware River Basin, on the border of New York and Pennsylvania.

When the offer was made, he didn't know anything about the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process which was just described in our show by reporter Abrahm Lustgarten. It involves high pressure injections of millions of gallons of water, chemicals and sand into underground wells. This causes the rock layers deep underground to crack so that natural gas flows up the well.

Fox decided to investigate what happens to those toxins and how they affect communities that said yes to the gas companies. So he took his camera to over 20 states, where gas companies have been fracking. His new documentary, called "Gasland," won the Special Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It will be shown on HBO Monday, June 21st.

<snip>

Mr. FOX: Well, you know, the first place I went was a town called Dimmick, Pennsylvania, which was about 50 miles from me, and I'm right near the New York, Pennsylvania border. What I found there was absolutely astounding. I found people who had leased for very little money - $25 an acre. And when I got to that town, the first thing that I heard about was a woman name Norma Fiorentino. Her water well exploded on New Years Day of 2009, and it sent a concrete casing soaring up into the air and scattered debris all over her yard. And then other people started to notice that their water was bubbling and fizzing, some of their water had been discolored.

By the time I got there just a month later, there were children who were complaining of getting sick, animals who were getting sick, and the whole place was pretty much laid to waste. I mean, there was like gas well pads everywhere, incredibly heavy truck traffic. It seemed like normal life had just been turned completely upside down. And I heard all these reports of people who could light their water on fire.

And I saw water tests which indicated lots of natural gas in the water, heavy metals in the water, which are - I've later found out to be associated with the drilling muds, which are the lubricants for the drill bit that punctures down through the aquifer. When you're subsisting off of well water for your whole life, your water is a point of pride. And I think everybody was shocked that their water, which had been great, would - had turned into something that they couldn't rely on and that they were afraid of.

GROSS: Now, you did find places where the tap water could be set on fire. Where did you go to find that?

<snip>

But at the same time, there's a kind of gallows humor that takes over, because I think they'd had so little ability to appeal to any government agency about this problem. You know, they were continually not being able to find a government agency, whether that was the State Department of Environmental Protection, or the - in Colorado, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission - generally, were telling them what was happening to them was not happening to them.

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