Water and Power - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 243

Streaming into a high school auditorium in downtown Manhattan one evening in
November 2009, at least a thousand people arrived for a raucous public meeting as state
regulators deliberated plans to frack in the New York City watershed, the vast and heav-
ily protected source that supplies water to over 9 million people a day.
The mountains, fields, and forests of many upstate counties overly the vast Marcellus
Shale deposit , which stretches across New York, Pennsylvania, western Maryland, West
Virginia, and eastern Ohio. Estimates on the deposit's size vary, but it may contain as
much as 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. (New York State uses about 1.1 trillion cu-
bic feet per year.)
The stakes are enormous, with gas companies and landowners in a frenzy to capit-
alize on it. As gas prospectors offered increasingly lucrative leases to landowners, many
rural residents lined up to offer their property in what amounted to a natural gas bon-
anza. Leases to frack property over the Marcellus Shale skyrocketed from $25 an acre
plus royalties of 12.5 percent in 2007 , to $6,000 an acre plus royalties of up to 20 percent
in 2009.
Gas company representatives went door-to-door in New York State, and some people
signed leases for a pittance. One poor resident of Delaware County, for instance, leased
her 110 acres for $2,750 in 2007, in order to pay her taxes; two years later, she could
have leased the same land for over half a million dollars. Others, such as residents of
Broome County, leased their property in 2009 and were grateful for the income—over
a million dollars per parcel—which helped them weather the recession.
But in the high school auditorium that November evening, city residents said they
considered the potential for gas to pollute the city's drinking supply “a nightmare.”
Armed with stories about poisoned fish, deformed livestock, tap water that smells of
gas or ignites when lit with a match, and neurological and gastrointestinal problems,
the crowd at the high school—some dressed as fish or mountains—held placards saying
KILL THE DRILL and hurled questions at state regulators. Politicians eyed TV cameras and
whipped the crowd into a frenzy, saying things like “Why aren't the gas companies re-
quired to adhere to the Clean Water Act?” and “There is no plan on how to deal with
the fracking wastewater—which is highly problematic!”
If fracking liquids, some of which are toxic, seep into the city's water supply, New
York would be forced by EPA regulations to build a iltration plant, which could cost
$10 billion . After a century of carefully buying property to nurture and protect its water-
shed, the city's Department of Environmental Protection was caught in a political bind.
While Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that fracking “is not a risk that I think we should
run,” Governor David Paterson was intrigued by the jobs and income fracking prom-
ised.