Paradise Lost: Not everyone in love with gas industry

BY LAURA LEGERE

Times-Shamrock Writer

The yellow house at 877 Fraser Road went up for sale in January, not long after the 150-foot derrick settled in the pasture just to the southwest.

The rig is there to drill eight natural gas wells into the Marcellus Shale from a gravel pad a football field away from the property line on a ridgetop in Susquehanna County.

Anna Fisco-Aubree, a former nurse in her 60s, and her husband, Maurice Aubree, 77, moved from New York to the country 17 years ago. They were looking for quiet in the expanse of farms and hills around their 4-acre lot.

Now that noise has found them, they feel there is no way to stay.

“I can’t expect them to stop drilling eight hours a night because I’m complaining,” Mrs. Aubree said, sitting at her kitchen table flanked by the figurine angels stationed in the china cabinet behind her. “I know you can’t fight a corporation.”

State law focuses on environmental regulation of the industry and offers few protections for landowners from the nuisances of nearby drilling. Wells must be drilled 200 feet from a structure or water well, and homeowners within 1,000 feet of a well are supposed to be notified 24 hours before drilling begins.

For landowners who want to participate in the gas extraction, tailored leases can offer further protections, including larger setbacks, noise restrictions and some say about where wells, driveways and pipelines are built.

But for small landowners like the Aubrees, who will not sign a lease and want no part of the gas development entering their communities, saying no is no protection from the surrounding activity.

“Generally speaking, you’re limited in controlling what goes on on somebody else’s land,” said Ross Pifer, director of Penn State’s Agricultural Law Resource and Reference Center. “As far as statutory or regulatory protection, I’m not aware of anything” an adjacent landowner can do about the gas development. “And that’s really not that different than any other use of the land.”

The issue is becoming increasingly apparent in parts of Pennsylvania where drilling is moving from large farms to more populated areas with smaller lots and wary residents.

Some communities have attempted to limit drilling’s impact on their citizens through traditional zoning laws, but it is unclear if those efforts will withstand court challenges by drilling companies. The Oil and Gas Act, the state law that regulates drilling, supersedes any local attempt to police the industry, but the Supreme Court has found that communities have some limited rights to regulate where drilling takes place through zoning.

In Cross Creek Twp. in southwestern Pennsylvania, for example, supervisors have proposed prohibiting drilling within 1,000 feet of a structure – five times the state’s minimum setback. According to local news reports, drillers are willing to settle for half that distance.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund thinks such zoning efforts outline only the “terms of surrender,” projects director Ben Price said. Instead, the nonprofit proposes a more drastic option: banning drilling outright in a municipality by establishing it as an infringement of a community’s rights.

Mrs. Aubree “has rights that the state has not bothered to protect,” Mr. Price said.

Ordinances drafted by the organization are being considered by residents in both Benton and Newton townships in Lackawanna County. A community rights ordinance that bans drilling was adopted by Pittsburgh in November.

Because of a back injury that left her partially disabled, Mrs. Aubree walks slightly hunched over a metal cane when she is on unsteady ground.

She prodded the soft snow during a tour of her small parcel last week. The yard is ringed by 23 blue spruce trees that help shield her view of the well site and the blaze orange fence that stands in the gap between her house and the well’s heavily traveled dirt driveway and parking lot. A worn sign propped against her porch railing reads, “A day in the country is worth a month in town.”

Her complaint is not about corporate behavior; it is about sleep. Without at least six hours flat on her back at night, she finds the pain the next day makes simple tasks like lifting a coffee cup impossible.

“I have nothing against energy. I told them that right out,” she said about Cabot Oil and Gas Corp., the company drilling the wells. “I have nothing against my neighbors. All I want is to live a peaceful life.”

The noise started in October, when Cabot began to build a driveway and well pad yards from the Aubrees’ home, ushering in trucks and equipment. Drilling began in January. During one particularly noisy period, Mrs. Aubree drove to Montrose High School and parked there in the middle of the night, trying to get an hour of rest.

The real noise, she has been told, will begin when the company returns to hydraulically fracture the shale using trucks capable of pumping a mixture of water, sand and chemicals underground at extremely high pressures.

Each of the eight wells will take about four weeks to fracture. The disturbances are expected to last at least through next year.

Legally, Cabot has not done anything wrong. The township, which is not zoned, approved the placement of the driveway and the state approved the location of the wells. The company voluntarily installed a sound barrier around the well pad after Mrs. Aubree raised her complaints.

“We have tried to do everything we can to accommodate Mrs. Aubree,” Cabot spokesman George Stark said, including meeting with her “at least half a dozen times” and placing the driveway “as far away as we could be from her property” while ensuring safe visibility and turning radii for trucks.

He added later, “It does go away. Mrs. Aubree won’t have drilling 24 hours a day for her lifetime.”

The company also has repeatedly tried to get the couple to sign a gas lease. Land agents for Cabot told the Aubrees they could make $90 a day in royalties but refused to put that promise in writing. As recently as last week, a land agent called their son on Long Island and told him “there’s gold under your feet.”

“They can have it,” Maurice Aubree said. “Lock, stock and barrel.”

Mr. and Mrs. Aubree’s double-wide mobile home, their 3.75-acre lot and the mineral rights below the property are for sale for $174,990.

Cabot told the family it is “not in the business of buying houses.”

To some extent, Mrs. Aubree understands the driller’s actions. “It’s not the gas company’s fault,” she said. “They’re going as far as Pennsylvania is allowing them to go.”

The family hopes legislators will spare others from the same disruptions by passing stricter regulations to protect people unwillingly caught in the middle of the gas development.

“They didn’t give me a choice,” she said.