Special Report: Gas Drilling Brings Stress, Social Ills

Speakers at a conference sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh on the health impacts of Marcellus Shale drilling included two sociologists who have studied how these phenomena are playing out in the region, which encompasses a swath of northern Appalachia from New York to Tennessee and west into Ohio.

We're in the Money

Simona Perry, PhD, an ethnographer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., said she has been interviewing residents of Bradford County in northeastern Pennsylvania.

One of the most rural counties in the state, Bradford has become its biggest center of drilling for shale gas, with 653 permits issued by state regulators so far this year.

Perry, who uses a deliberately unstructured technique that lets people tell their own stories in their own way, said the people she's interviewed almost universally cherish their rural way of life and the stable, predictable social networks that resulted from an almost complete lack of in-migration.

The Marcellus Shale boom has changed all that.

Gas drilling is familiar in the region because of the extensive methane deposits associated with near-to-the-surface coal formations. But Marcellus Shale lies much deeper, a mile down in most places, and the so-called fracking process needed to free the gas is largely novel in the Northeast.

There are not enough local workers familiar with deep-well drilling and fracking technology. Consequently, the drilling companies have brought in thousands of experienced workers from Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Canada, and elsewhere.

Drilling a well and bringing it into production takes only a few months, not long enough for most workers to buy houses or rent apartments. Mostly they stay in local motels and eat in restaurants. Their families generally stay home, wherever that is, so the workers have a lot of time as well as money on their hands.

That's one source of disruption. The other comes from the royalty money paid to local landowners -- the quantity and the distribution. Not everybody can get in on the Marcellus boom.

Much of the Marcellus region is also coal country, where many landowners don't own the "mineral rights" on their properties -- that is, the right to extract stuff from underground. Decades ago, coal companies bought up mineral rights from as many small property owners as they could.

Moreover, when those rights have been sold, the surface landowner can't forbid the holder from digging a mine or drilling a well on his or her property. The landowner can demand money for the surface use and set restrictions, but he or she is not entitled to royalties from the product being brought from under ground, which is where the big money is.

One landowner in Marcellus country who does own his mineral rights told MedPage Today that he is receiving a monthly royalty check of nearly $30,000 from a shale-gas company -- and that was from a well drilled on a neighbor's property but that extended under his own.

To Have and Have Not

Perry said that the unequal distribution of Marcellus money has put a huge strain on the local community in Bradford County. While one farmer might be getting a monthly check for $30,000, his neighbor may be receiving only $4,000. Or nothing.

Residents didn't seem to be jealous per se, she told MedPage Today, but rather puzzled and frustrated at the apparent randomness of who is benefitting.

Perhaps more important, is that the influx of money is creating friction within families and between neighbors about whether and how Bradford County's way of life should evolve.

For most of its history, the area has been a quiet agricultural community and most of the long-time residents liked it that way. The truck traffic, the noise, the influx of people from elsewhere are giving it more of an industrial feel.

Perry said that some of her interview subjects embraced the changes, seeing new life for a community in which young people often left town and never came back. Others said they thought it was their "patriotic duty" to support gas development for the country's energy security.

But still others bemoaned what they saw as the desecration of their beloved fields and forests, as well as everyday problems with noise and road damage.

She quoted one resident as telling her, "You can't swing a dead cat in our county right now without hitting a water truck."

Asked another, fearing for the future of agriculture in the area, "Are millionaires going to milk dairy cows?"

These differences in viewpoint have divided the county into factions.

This past summer, Perry said, county residents began showing signs of "collective trauma" and loss of community similar to that documented in Buffalo Creek, W.Va., following the 1972 flood from a burst coal-slurry impoundment that killed 125 people.

Another speaker at the Pittsburgh conference, Kathy Brasier, PhD, of Penn State University in State College, has led a separate survey-based study of attitudes in a broader range of communities in the Pennsylvania Marcellus region, now under review at a sociology journal.

She, too, reported a mixture of responses. For most types of impacts, overt expectations of negative consequences were about as common as anticipation of clear benefits.

But, Brasier cautioned, "don't forget the middle." The largest number of responses in four of six categories of projected impact was "neutral," she said. These included the possibility that negative impacts would be reversed, that benefits would be distributed equitably, that catastrophic accidents should be a concern, and that knowledge of the risks was adequate enough to allow development to proceed.

And a clear majority believed negative effects could be prevented.

The Boom Town Effect

Several times during their talks, Perry and Brasier referred to the "boom town literature." Other areas have also undergone similar energy-related bonanzas in the past few decades -- notably some Western states and the Alberta province of Canada -- recently enough to be studied closely by academic sociologists and government agencies.

The resulting journal articles and government reports paint a not-very-pretty picture of crime, alcoholism, homelessness, and domestic abuse, among other ills.

In December 2010, the Royal Society of Canada (analogous to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences) sponsored a review of impacts in the "oil sands" region of Alberta, which began to be developed seriously in the mid-1990s.

One community heavily affected by the boom was Fort McMurray, which saw population growth approaching 9% annually from 2001 to 2006.

The review cited several studies that found, in the words of one, "many of the effects associated with boom town style development including inflation, extreme housing shortages, labor shortages in all sectors, family stress, drug and alcohol abuse, [and] increased crime."

Another review by Penn State researcher Jeffrey Jacquet, PhD, examined the experience in Wyoming's Sublette County, a thinly populated area where shale gas in the Jonah Basin has been extensively drilled since 2001.

He found that the monthly number of ambulance runs increased linearly with the number of drilling rigs in operation.

The annual number of arrests increased exponentially with the number of rig-months.

An earlier study, published in the journal Administration in Mental Health in 1983 and conducted during the boom years in western Colorado, found that the per capita mental health caseload doubled in four years among people not employed in the oil and gas industry.

The study did not delve into the reasons, but the leader of an environmental group who spoke at the Pittsburgh conference offered up a theory.

Raina Rippel of the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project pointed out that, whether or not groundwater contamination or air pollution are actually causing physical illnesses in the Marcellus region, many people are convinced that they are and others worry about it.

With 24-hour drilling often taking place within a hundred yards of private homes, noise and loss of sleep is a commonly reported problem as well, she said.

"That stress is real, and it needs to be addressed," Rippel said.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/EnvironmentalHealth/30010