The dash for unconventional gas may have brought financial benefits to some, but for struggling dairy farmers in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, the arrival of drilling wells could be the final nail in the coffin. Dimiter Kenarov reports
When Sheila Russell decided to move back to her ancestral home in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, she wanted to start a new life. A seventh-generation Russell, whose family had settled the land in 1796, the last year of George Washington’s presidency, she left her corporate job at a catalogue company to do what she loved best: farming.
There was only one problem: shale gas. As luck would have it, the Russell farm happened to sit on top of the Marcellus shale, a large underground formation rich in natural gas. In 2010, just as Ms. Russell was embarking on her new career in organic farming, Chesapeake Energy drilled two shale-gas wells across the road, less a thousand feet from the farm.
Although not worried at first and even hopeful that future royalties from the gas may help her expand her business, Ms. Russell soon found herself in a nightmare, when she discovered that one of the wells on her property had been leaking methane gas into the ground, due to a faulty casing, for over a year.
TVNL Comment: Think about this every time you see a commercial aired by a gas company about the safe extraction methods used in fracking. They are lying. People are dying.