![]() ![]() A March Gallup poll found that 51% of Americans oppose fracking, and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (not really a DuBois kind of guy, though he does like hunting) has called a for complete ban.įracking is basically just cracking open rocks rich in oil and natural gas with high-pressure injections of sand, water, and slick chemicals. So fewer are injecting fracking fluid into the ground - or money into towns like DuBois. Oil and natural gas prices are so low that bankruptcy threatens many drillers. oil drilling, and yet seems headed for trouble. The EPA had approved, halted, and again approved the proposed well by 2015, but last September, in the face of local politicians’ protests, the state agency announced it was putting the permit on hold until after this hearing.įracking now accounts for half of all U.S. “This is playing Russian roulette with the lives in our residential community,” Randall Baird, a 70-year-old who’s lived on the hill of the proposed well for 32 years, testified at a podium to three DEP officials. So the residents at the hearing who are displeased with the proposed well, a “Class II” injection well in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) terms, don’t mince words. (“ Better To Eat Than To Talk,” read a sign the loggers dined beneath.) They are the children and grandchildren of people who came here to work on farms, or in sawmills, now gone, or coal fields, played out, or factories, mostly shut. A lot of them have vinegar in their veins, as the journalist Susan Stranahan put it when she wrote about life on the western branch of the Susquehanna River. People in Western Pennsylvania are blunt. It’s the same auditorium where, 30 years ago, an earnest campus official had welcomed me and other students to college, telling us we were here because our grades were lousy, which was true enough in my case, and that he didn’t expect us to do all that well, considering. Here the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is holding a hearing on the Windfall Injection Well, which the nearby Windfall Oil and Gas Inc. It’s only half full, with about 100 retired white folks in brown and black plaid coats, down-filled vests. On this early March evening, the trees on the hill above the campus are bare and the sun has already set as I follow a few people into a beige, cinder-block auditorium. ![]() His estate now holds a Penn State college campus. They are all gone along with his mansion. It was built by John DuBois, the lumber tycoon who gave the town of 7,700 people its name, and built sawmills, tanneries, and ironworks here more than a century ago. I park where a Tudor mansion once stood, until 1978, when its pipes burst in a winter freeze. I’m going to hear people protest a hole in the ground, a deep well for fracking wastewater, planned for a hill just on the outskirts of this town where I grew up. I steer away from the forest and follow the Bee Line Highway into town, past the cemetery and along the creek that meanders alongside the railroad, and past the mall that drained all the stores out of the town decades ago. DUBOIS, Pennsylvania - Just over the wooded hill is a forest filled with oak and pine, littered with massive stumps, weed-covered strip mines, and dynamite shacks, where the mouth of a shuttered coal mine shaft beckoned me as a child. ![]()
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