North East's ruination at hand?
Erie Times-News, www.goerie.com 22 May 2011
It would appear that those of us who live in North East Township are set for the pillage and ruin we feared.
The rig for drilling a 6,230-foot well has secured a prominent place on the green hillside near Twenty Mile Creek and, in a matter of days, will be grinding to extract the gold of gas, for all the eager and greedy participants.
Those of us who have the misfortune to live in the radius of this work, can sit in fear of having contaminated water, pollution of air from the exhaust of large and constant machinery and an end to what was a quiet and bucolic existence.
Now that this ruin has been let loose on us by North East Township supervisors, whose fear for their own safety precludes concern for the citizenry they were elected to work for, no one will be safe.
Any county or boro that the seismic trucks deem a hot drilling site will be fair game to any eager gas driller. We will conceivably have huge off shore gas drilling in the lake as proposed by energy companies and interspersed among the grape vineyards will be industrial gas wells.
Even wind turbines are proposed as a massive industry to dominate the lake and the forested hillsides beyond. It doesn’t matter what these projects do to the environment, they represent the democratization of big industry whose rights supersede those of the individual taxpayers upon whose back the procurement of funds rests. We all recognize the need for alternative energy, but to commit to all plans is to ignore the rightness of one plan over another.
Perhaps the most insulting salt to the wound is the large American flag fixed to the top of the gas rig, reminding us we’re being assaulted by our own country and state, due to the lack of meaningful environmental regulations and the continuing mentality that money is the end-all.
Sally Griffin|North East
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2011/05/24/north-easts-ruination-at-hand/