Hands Across Riverdale: The Human Costs of Fracking
Stanley Rogouski
Photojournalist
Last February, residents of the Riverdale Mobile Homes Park, a neighborhood on the outskirts of a small city in rural Lycoming County, Pennsylvania with the unlikely name of Jersey Shore, noticed an article in Williamsport Sun-Gazette. Richard A. "Skip" Leonard, who owned the land on which the 32 unit trailer park was located, had agreed to sell his property. A few days later the residents got letters from Donna P. Alston, director of communication for Aqua America Corporation, informing them that their leases had been terminated "immediately."
A few months before the property had been re-zoned as industrial. Aqua PVR LLC, owned by Nicholas DeBenedictis, who served as the head of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources under Governor Dick Thornburgh in the 1980s, needed the small patch of land to build a pump station. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission had given Aqua America permission to withdraw up to 3 million gallons of water per day from the Susquehanna River to their fracking operations in the north, and the residents of Riverdale had been given a "generous" offer. Anybody who moved out by April 1 would be given a $2,500 incentive. Anybody who moved out by May 1 would be given $1,500. Since it would cost at least $5,000 to relocate each trailer, and since rents in nearby Williamsport had skyrocketed due to the recent influx of gas workers, it was the worst possible news. Some of the residents of Riverdale, who had lived there for decades, were elderly people in their 70s and 80s, and had little chance of finding work or new living accommodations. It was, quite literally, the end of their world.
The Riverdale Mobile Homes Park, nevertheless, has become an unlikely nexus of resistance to corporate power.
more at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stanley-rogouski/fracking_b_1566162.html
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