Victoria Switzer says Coterra Energy, once Cabot Oil & Gas, is fracking again under her home in Dimock, Pennsylvania. She blames Gov. Josh Shapiro for allowing the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to lift a moratorium on fracking in 2022.
My letter to reps, including VP Harris and Governor Shapiro.
Ban Fracking. I have not forgotten about Dimock.
Christmas movie propaganda, job creator myths, and “sides” in perpendicular axis Dec 25, 2023
(excerpt)
So many politicians promised that the gas fracking boom would be an economic boon to our area, and create tons of jobs for Pennsylvanians, and anything but that happened, and worse did. It turned out to be also largely about real estate speculation which maybe makes sense why there was a bust after the subprime mortgage crisis driven financial crash.
Some people who interviewed for these jobs were asked if they had experience in the fossil fuel industry, and were told that the employer would be going with an out-of-towner who was willing to relocate and already had experience in the industry. So Pennsylvanians were left out in the cold, and we knew that people from other areas were being brought in to take these promised jobs.
To add insult to injury, we then had to hear about all these people who when the boom went to bust, they lost their jobs, and of course would qualify for Pennsylvania Unemployment Compensation. The interesting part about it was that Pennsylvania residents with PA UC benefits had mandatory work search requirements and very punitive investigations of determining if people were active enough in “looking for work” – this was the mid 2010s when the economy certainly had not really recovered from the Great Recession in northeastern Pennsylvania. People who came in for gas fracking jobs, made their 6 figure income money, then when they lost their jobs they collected PA UC benefits (probably at the maximum), but since they went back to their own states, we heard that they were NOT subject to work search requirements, while Pennsylvania residents had to jump through hoops and were under scrutiny.
The influx of people from other areas during that time drove up housing prices and apartment rent prices to way above what any locals could ever afford.
And people who own property were incentivized to push out their long-time tenants in order to jack up the rent and take advantage of the transplants who were willing to pay thousands for a room above a garage. This had a knock-on effect to where these rural areas pushed out disabled, elderly, and poor people, and so they came to towns like Scranton to seek subsidized or cheap housing, which then exacerbated the public housing wait lists and drove up rents in the towns. There were stories in the news about disabled people living in campers set up in the yards of their family members.
Then came the stories of people having their well water contaminated and unusable. The companies denied it. And worse, the government went along and sided with the companies and failed to protect citizens, and we all knew it at the time, but it took more than a decade for there to be any formal recognition of that fact.
When the stories out of Dimock were put into a documentary called “Gasland” in 2010, I remember there was some effort to smear it all as made up or at least exaggerated. Meanwhile these people have been living by having tankers of water delivered in order to live in their homes, because their wells were ruined and they have no water systems in that area. A year ago a company was found responsible and now has to pay to construct a new public water system and cover 75 years of water bills for homeowners that were impacted.
Yet now the latest news is that they’re actually going to start drilling in Dimock again!
