Fracker Gets Court to ban Activist from 40% of Her Own County, including local hospital & friends

[JPZenger]

http://tomwilber.blogspot.com/2014/01/trespassing-case-tests-drillers-control.html

You may remember Cabot Oil and Gas as the company that was blamed for the fire-breathing faucets in Dimmock, PA, and which convinced the Corbett administration to kill the Rendell Administration order that they provide public water service to those residents.

Now they are in the news for having successfully convinced the Courts in Susquehanna County to ban a local activist and grandmother from 40% of her own county. Vera Scroggins regularly makes videos of fracking activities and posts them on youtube. Her main crime has been to enter property where gas activities are occurring in order to pose questions to the workers.

She is now banned from all land that has a lease with Cabot. That includes 200,000 acres, which is 40 percent of the County. She is not allowed to go to the local hospital and is banned from her local supermarket, many other stores, restaurants, the homes of dozens of friends, her auto repair garage, public parks, schools and the VFW.

Excerpt of link:

"Scroggins admittedly crossed into designated work areas on occasion, but there were no signs denoting trespass zones, she said, and her ventures into drilling territory in each case were in good faith to openly ask questions and seek information. The remarkable and possibly groundbreaking aspect of this case, however, is not the charge or the defense, but the resulting preliminary injunction the Susquehanna Court of Common Pleas issued on October 21, 2013. Pending trial of the case this spring, the order forbids Scroggins from setting foot on land owned or leased by Cabot ...

Cabot’s action raises the broader issue of how much control energy companies have over land they lease. While mineral extraction is their stated intention, many standard leases give companies ill-defined and seemingly limitless discretion over land use. “When drilling companies lease rights to land for mineral extraction,” Kinchy said, “does that mean they have rights to exclude other people from that land, even property owners?”

Apart from the Scroggins case, that question has mostly applied to practical matters of daily extraction operations. A company such as Cabot might own rights to a large tract, but it is generally concerned about gaining or restricting access to active work areas. Conflicts might crop up over where exactly a company might build a pad, access road, or pipeline, and at what inconvenience or loss of land use to the landowner. When that happens, lease language and the respective parties’ appetite and resources for litigation come into play, with the company often in a position of leverage."

[mrmpa]

1. How fucked up are these courts...........

I'm a Pennsylvanian and I am shocked, dismayed and sickened by the drilling companies and how the courts seem to be in the
pocket(s).

[Curmudgeoness]

2. I believe that this is a real fuck up on the part of Cabot.

With all the happy, smiling ads that the gas industry is putting out, they should not want to push so hard that they look ridiculous. And this goes way too far. It is one thing to ask that she be barred from their active work sites, but to suggest that they can bar her from any land that is under lease to them, whether or not they are working that land, is destructive.

I hope that this gets a lot more visibility. It should get national attention.