Environmental Engineering Reference
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about natural gas riches, Taylor can cite a danger to communities, the
environment, and businesses like his that depend on it.
Chuck Sammarone feels the tension quite acutely. h e sixty-nine-
year-old mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, sporting slicked-back hair and
a bold silver tie when we met, won oi ce in 2011, a fortuitous time.
Shale-driven business was providing some hope in an area that had
been in decline for decades. V&M, a prominent French player in the oil
and gas industry, would announce later in the year that it would spend
nearly a billion dollars to build a new manufacturing plant in the city
to make steel tubes. Sammarone was i rmly in favor of fracking. Few in
his position wouldn't be.
When the earthquake hit, though, the upside of shale gas was the
last thing on his mind. “It was New Year's Eve, three o'clock. I was
watching the football game. h is loud noise occurred.” For more
than a year, drillers had been injecting wastewater from their opera-
tions into the Northstar 1 well, located just outside of Youngstown.
Unbeknownst to the operators, who had received all the permits they
needed from the state, the well struck near an underground fault.
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“When the noise stopped, my house shook. I mean, me and my wife
were home, and it shook. Stuf fell of the wall. We heard the dishes
in the cabinet. So I told my wife, 'We bet er go outside.'” Scientists at
the Lamont-Doherty Observatory 350 miles away in New York would
later analyze recordings at their station and come to an unavoidable
conclusion: the l uids pumped into Northstar 1 had sent the nearby
fault over the edge, triggering a 4.0 magnitude quake.
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At the next city council meeting, Sammarone successfully pushed for
a moratorium on injections in the area. He reminded me that, twenty
years earlier, he had sponsored legislation to allow drilling. “So I'm not
against drilling. Just like I sponsored an ordinance a year ago for a well
to be drilled. So I'm not against drilling,” he emphasized. “I'm against
earthquakes.” Jobs were important, but they weren't everything. “You
get a pot of gold. But if you got earthquakes, people say, they don't want
the pot of gold that's creating the earthquakes. 'Cause if they wanted
earthquakes they'd have moved to California. . . . I feel the same way.”
Later in 2012, the National Academy of Sciences appointed a panel
to study the earthquake issue. It concluded that, with some simple
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