The Catskill Chronicle

By Brian Powers – Publisher of The Phoenicia Times

Every day in this state, projects break ground after fulfilling the requirements of a 33-year old law which analyzes their impacts, modifies them if need be, and ultimately permits the vast majority of them to be built. That law, SEQRA, is surely imperfect, but on balance has served New York’s interests extremely well. So we view with concern Governor Paterson and DEC’s recently announced intention to “streamline” its process in the interests of expedited economic development. The simple fact is that DEC has long lacked the people and the funding to fulfill its regulatory obligations under the law, a reality which has always placed the onus on the public rather than on government to identify, challenge, and ultimately help mitigate issues raised under it. What the Governor’s really saying is that since it’s too costly to enforce our laws, we’ll now just look for ways to make compliance cheaper and quicker for those regulated under them. If implemented, whether any changes will ultimately serve the public interest or only private ones, it’s too early to say. But what worries us far more is that it may be a sign of a statewide public policy shift that could soon threaten everything we treasure about the Catskills.

Buried a mile deep in the earth beneath our feet is a layer of shale holding enough natural gas that its extraction is inevitable. Last week, DEC released 800 pages of new draft guidelines governing how that extraction will be regulated. What those guidelines say and don’t say scare the hell out of us. Because in our view, they appear to clear a path for massive environmental degradation to our region without adequate protection for its impact on residents, communities, public lands, every aspect of our ecosystem, and the safety of the drinking water for over 17 million people.

Can’t be, you say. Surely our state’s regulators must be on top of this. Well the truth is at this point that’s not at all clear. Right now in Chemung County plans are underway for a massive gas drilling support facility to store and mix chemicals, explosives, and radioactive materials needed to fracture the shale and capture its gas from thousands of wellheads. But instead of overseeing this huge regional plant being built by oil giant Schlumberger, DEC has accorded SEQRA lead agency status for it to the tiny village of Horseheads outside Elmira. For now we’re withholding judgment as to whether that’s as absurd an abrogation of regulatory responsibility as it looks. But to us, everything about this gas drilling process is going to need far more scrutiny than it’s seen so far. In Pennsylvania where the drilling’s already started, problems are arising at an alarming pace.

There’s nothing small or preliminary or experimental about what’s proposed for our region: This is by far the largest industrial undertaking in the history of New York State. The drilling process called hydrofracking involves high pressure pumping of a volatile and toxic chemical soup into the earth, then recapturing and storing in holding ponds millions of gallons of it from each wellhead, all for eventual disposal one tractor-trailer at a time over our local roads and interstates.

DEC’s draft regs stipulate that each drilling operation will be evaluated separately with no limit to the number of sites permitted in a given area and no review of any cumulative impact. That isn’t a misprint: thousands and thousands of gas wells across a small band of counties, each site with its attendant industrialized infrastructure of five to ten acres, and no cumulative impact review of how this will affect communities, the land, the air, wildlife, none of it. There will be no special protections for the watersheds, not New York City’s and not the Delaware watershed that serves Philadelphia and much of New Jersey. It isn’t just the gas itself, or the pipelines or the chemicals or the end of regional tourism or the Final Solution to the peace and quiet we’ve grown accustomed to. Everything about the coming gas boom is explosive, and if we expect the State to protect us from it, we’re just not paying attention.

Here in Ulster County nobody’s focused much on any of this, as we all tend to think this gas stuff is happening somewhere else. Anyone who thinks that needs to go to DEC’s website and look at their maps of the Marcellus Shale deposits. Because the maps say the eastern edge of the known gas reserves are right underneath us.

We’re not taking a position that the Marcellus shale gas resource should not be developed. It’s too big and too critical to our national security. So it will be exploited and when it is, we pray it will be done properly and with adequate review and protections for everyone and everything impacted. But we do believe a line needs to be drawn delineating exactly how far it can go. The line that we draw is already shown on every map of New York State, it’s the Blue Line of the Catskill Park. Within it, we believe no drilling should be permitted.

In 1895, these 700,000 acres in four counties were carefully set aside by the state. In 1912, the law that created the park was amended to make all land including private land within its boundaries parkland. All state lands within the blue line are held in trust for the people of New York as “forever wild,” the historical precedents for the park’s protection are solid and sacrosanct. We call on our legislators, federal, state and county to join with us in backing this. And we call on our town governments and on each of you to do the same. There is no equivocating or halfway position; for us and our children and for the forest and mountains we all love, this line must be made to hold.