Blueprint America » Weekend America

In the Hills: Radio: Full Report

tom mcnamara — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:08:02 +0000

Rick Karr, Blueprint America correspondent

[Transcript]

Over the past few years, prospectors have been combing the hills of Pennsylvania. They aren’t looking for gold – instead, the mineral that’s setting off the frenzy is shale. It’s known as the Marcellus Shale, it lies a mile or more below ground, and it’s full of natural gas – maybe enough to fuel the entire United States for two years.

The “gas rush” could make some Pennsylvanians rich. But it could also pollute the state’s air and water. And that’s set up a conflict between natives of the area and “weekenders” – mostly New Yorkers – who own second homes there.

Bill Bryant’s family moved to Damascus Township, Pennsylvania close to a hundred and seventy years ago – in 1841. I observe that that means he has pretty deep roots there. “Yeah, they cleared the land here,” he laughs. “They were Connecticut Yankees.”

It’s gorgeous land – pretty much the definition of “bucolic” – with lush, gentle hills and a view of the Catskill Mountains in the distance. Bryant’s a dairy farmer. But he’s also watching a gas company – slowly – move into the area.

“That whole side hill over there is signed up with Cheaspeake,” he says, gesturing to the north. “And like I say, the guy across the road is signed up with Cheaspeake. The guy across the road probably only signed for $1,400. And that guy” — he gestures back to the north — “signed for a couple thousand. But they did get up to about $2,800 here.”

That’s how much the gas companies were paying per acre just as a signing bonus. At that rate, Bryant would’ve earned $728,000 on his 260 acres. And once the wells started pumping gas from under his land, he’d earn a percentage of the revenues.

But he didn’t sign – in part because he and his family have questions about the environmental impact of drilling.

Here’s why: The fuel’s actually trapped in little pockets in the shale. Tom Murphy of the Penn State Cooperative Extension says that to get the gas OUT of those pockets, energy companies use a technique called hydraulic fracturing — forcing millions of gallons of water into bore-holes at extremely high pressure to break open the brittle shale. Then the gas companies pump sand into the holes; the grains prop open the tiny cracks in the rock. Once the water gets pumped out, the gas can flow up to the surface – and ultimately to your furnace.

The thing is, energy companies aren’t pumping just water and sand into the ground. The fluid that they use is actually a soup that contains scores of chemicals – and some of those ingredients are toxic. They can cause brain and kidney damage, even cancer. And environmentalists say, given the track record of operations like this in Texas and across the West, there’s almost no oversight when it comes to disposing of the fluid. So it might end up in the water table, or in lakes and streams, or even evaporating. And because of those risks, they want the drilling to stop.

Every weekend, Joe Levine and Jane Ciphers leave their home in Brooklyn for a barn that they converted into a weekend home not far from Bryant’s farm. It’s where the anti-drilling movement meets to talk strategy.

Levine and Ciphers helped organize a group called Damascus Citizens for Sustainability. A lot of locals think they’re nothing but NIMBYs. But Pat Carullo, another of the group’s organizers, said there’s something much bigger at stake. “This is not our back yard. This is the drinking water source for 15 million Americans.”

As he talks, he gestures out a wall of windows in Levine and Ciphgers’ weekend home with a sweeping view of the Delaware River a couple hundred feet downhill. New York City’s reservoirs are upstream, and Philadelphia and Wilmington tap the Delaware Watershed downstream.

The locals say they understand that – that, as farmers, they’re well aware of the environmental risks, and they’re trying to minimize them. They accuse the city people of being condescending, treating them like ignorant rubes. They say it’s like the two sides aren’t even speaking the same language.

Pat Carullo says he knows what language he’s speaking “I’m speaking English. I don’t exactly know what language someone might be speaking who says, ‘We understand that the gas and oil industry is operating under total Federal deregulation, we understand that there’s going to be a catastrophic result from thousands of gas wells in a watershed which is protected by a sitting act of Congress, and we’re going to proceed anyway.’ I don’t understand – that doesn’t seem to me like English.”

The locals also say that the gas companies are in Pennsylvania to stay; that drilling is inevitable. But Barbara Arrindell – another organizer of Damascus Citizens – says nothing is inevitable. “The inevitability of someone who was born into an African-American, a Negro, or whatever terminology of dark skin – in this country – it was inevitable that they were going to be a slave,” she argues. “Now, that’s not the case today.”

“But it took a war to establish that,” I say.

“Well, it might take a war to do this,” she snaps back, and her fellow environmentalists laugh. “If someone’s only looking at what’s gonna go in [their] pocket, and [they] don’t care about anything else, then that’s the language that they might have to understand – that they will be sued. That there are costs involved in this beyond what is just going to go into their pocket.”

A lot of the farmers in the area just roll their eyes when you mention the Damascus Citizens. They see the environmentalists as carpetbaggers who just don’t understand farm life. Some of the group’s members are “weekenders”; others live in the area full-time. But most of its leaders are New Yorkers – city people. They’re part of a wave of city people who’ve been moving into the area for years now. As they buy and build homes, property taxes rise. And it gets harder to run dairy farms.

Bill Bryant, the farmer whose family’s been working the land here for nearly a hundred seventy years, says he’s tried to adapt to the changes by opening an artisanal cheesemaking operation. But not without some misgivings. “I’m personally maybe a little bit anti-city-people,” he says. “but the cheese thing works better with the city people. So we’re trying to take advantage of what’s happened in the area. Because the trend in dairy farmers is just to keep getting bigger, and we’re almost the biggest in the county now and we don’t wanna get any bigger, so at that point you gotta look to do something else.”

Fort some of his neighbors, “something else” comes down to two choices: Either sign a gas lease … or sell off the land. “And those places are basically in jeopardy of being subdivided, and somebody from the city would get a hold of them,” he says. “So are we better off with those places subdivided and more city people in the area, or are we better off with the people who’ve been here a hundred years keeping those tracts in the family and getting some money from gas to pay their taxes and keep the land? I don’t know which is worse.”

Bill Bryant has time to make up his mind: Gas companies have cut back on signing new leases thanks to the economy. Meanwhile, else where in Pennsylvania drilling’s already taking place. Its opponents are lobbying lawmakers to stop it before it goes any farther.

# # #

Blueprint America — with Weekend America — in a report on modern day gas prospecting in the hills of Northeastern Pennsylvania. /wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2009/01/lsp_icy_lake200100.jpg

In the Hills: Analysis: Marcellus Shale in Northeastern Pennsylvania

tom mcnamara — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:06:15 +0000

Gas exploration has been happening in Pennsylvania since the 1800s. However, a new technology and new price incentives have made possible the exploration of the Marcellus shale. It is a geological formation – the size of Greece – stretching from New York to West Virginia and holding what could become the nation’s most prolific natural gas reservoir. In 2008, Penn State University estimated the economic value of the formation at $1 trillion and that, for every $1 billion in royalties paid to Pennsylvania residents, nearly 8,000 jobs would be created.

The pace of exploration accelerated in 2008 due to increased demand and higher gas prices. Companies rushed to add acreage, expand leaseholds and submit applications to drill the Marcellus shale. In mid-2008, in northeastern Pennsylvania, gas operators were offering landowners as much as $3,000 per acre and 15 percent royalty over the period of the lease. A landowner with a well on his property could expect to make $800,000 in royalties during the first year of production. Thousands of property owners in Pennsylvania signed leases welcoming the extra income in a region that has long suffered from economic malaise.

As Blueprint America correspondent Rick Karr uncovered, not everyone in northeastern Pennsylvania is thrilled about this new gas rush. The main areas of concern relate to the impact of exploration and drilling on the environment and on local infrastructure.

Environmentalists point to the vast amounts of water (one to five million gallons per well) required to extract gas from the Marcellus shale and to the potential contamination of groundwater and watersheds. Drilling is done horizontally and uses hydrofracking – high-pressured water laced with chemicals is pumped into the earth to break the rock and extract gas trapped 7,000 feet below ground. Frac water is then diluted before being released into waterways. Environmental groups are seeking increased oversight and regulation from state agencies.

At the local level, the gas bonanza can put serious stress on a town’s infrastructure. Increased truck traffic accelerates the wear and tear of country roads and bridges. Children of rig workers must be accommodated in local schools. Pennsylvania does not tax gas revenues. Local jurisdictions with natural gas wells face higher demands for services, but receive little new revenues to pay for those services. School districts, county and municipal governments who own land leased for natural gas are looking for ways to receive windfalls from leasing and royalties. At the state level, Governor Rendell lifted a 2003 moratorium on drilling to shore up the state’s ailing finances. Bidding for oil and gas drilling rights on state forest land atop the Marcellus shale was initiated in September 2008. The lease revenues will go to the Oil and Gas Lease Fund which finances park, conservation, recreation, dam repair and flood-control projects.

Gas exploration has been happening in Pennsylvania since the 1800s. However, a new technology and new price incentives have made possible the exploration of the Marcellus shale. It is a geological formation – the size of Greece – stretching from New York to West Virginia and holding what could become the nation’s most prolific natural gas reservoir. /wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2009/01/marcellusshale21200100.jpg

In the Hills: Overview

tom mcnamara — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:00:42 +0000

Over the past few years, prospectors have been combing the hills of Pennsylvania. They’re not looking for gold. The mineral that’s setting off the frenzy is shale. It’s a mile or more below ground, and it’s full of natural gas — maybe enough to fuel the entire U.S. for two years.

The gas rush could make some Pennsylvanians rich. But, it could also pollute the state’s air and water as the gas-grab can put serious stress on a community’s infrastructure.

And, that’s set up a conflict between natives of the area and weekenders — mostly New Yorkers — who own second homes there. Blueprint America — with Weekend America — goes to Northeastern Pennsylvania to look into what’s pitting neighbor against neighbor in what could unsettle the area’s infrastructure.

The gas rush could make some Pennsylvanians rich. But, it could also pollute the state’s air and water as the gas-grab can put serious stress on a community’s infrastructure.

The Bus Stop: Radio: Full Report

tom mcnamara — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:28:00 +0000

Rick Karr, Blueprint America correspondent

[Transcript]

Nobody really likes buses. It’s just that some people have no choice. Like Willie Kimbrough. He catches the bus every Monday through Friday. Willie Kimbrough has no choice because he uses a wheelchair, so it’s tough to navigate long distances on city sidewalks. As he’s leaving his job at a disabled-rights organization for the night, he and a couple of colleagues – one who’s vision-impaired and another in a wheelchair – head to a bus stop. They’ve all got plenty of criticisms of public transit. Take the bus stop across the road: It’s blocked by a trash can, and the sidewalk’s narrow. So when you roll off of the wheelchair lift, you’re likely to end up in a patch of grass, stuck.

“With obstacles like the trash can in the way, blocking the sidewalk,” says Kimbrough, “it’s impossible to get around there.”

Then there’s the waiting – and the weather. There’s no shelter at either stop, so with temperatures in the 40s and a stiff wind, the half hour between buses can seem like a very long time. And on the weekend? Forget it – some buses run every two hours, while others don’t run at all.

On the weekends, explains Kimbrough, “you have to find alternate transportation …you can’t afford to be late, you know!”

After nearly twenty minutes, the number 59 appears in the distance. The bus is finally on its way. But Kimbrough’s in for another annoyance: There are only two spots for wheelchairs, and one’s already occupied. So he lets his colleague roll onto the lift, and the driver checks with his dispatcher to find out how long Kimbrough’s going to have to wait. It’s going to be another half hour in the cold.

Disabled activists say they’d love to see better bus service in St. Louis: greater frequency, more space for wheelchairs, better bus stops. But unless voters actually decide to raise their own taxes – by voting for Proposition M – they’ll have to deal with worse service. Transit officials say a lot of cities are facing the same crisis, stemming from the same causes. First, the monthly cost of fuel for all those buses has quadrupled. Then there’s the Wall Street crisis.

Bob Baer, who runs the St. Louis system, says during the boom, transit agencies tried to improve their cash flow by investing in some exotic financial instruments. They were great until the economy tanked; now they cost money. Finally, there’s federal law, which specifies exactly how transit agencies have to make cuts.

“We can’t just cut buses, or trains, or call-a-ride,” says Baer, “you have to do it equitably. So, in effect, all the services we provide are going to get hit… Everything will be cut.”

Disabled activists worry most about cuts to that “call-a-ride” service – a network of vans that carry disabled riders who live too far away from a regular bus or train stop. Sarah Coyle, for example, who sits in her wheelchair in chilly pre-dawn darkness waiting for the van that takes her to work.

Coyle lives with her parents in a leafy suburb, more than a mile from the nearest bus stop, in a subdivision with no sidewalks. She worries about how she’ll deal with a service cut.

“I’m going to have to rely on my family,” she says. “And I’m very concerned about it, because my parents are getting older, and… it’s going to be harder on them and on me.”

For her, transit means the difference between utter dependence on others and a sense of freedom.

“It’s the ability to get to your job. To get to medical appointments, to participate in community life, without having to rely on other people,” she says. “The chance to be able to just go down the street… and hop on the bus and get to where you need to go.”

A few minutes later, the call-a-ride van pulls up, and Coyle rolls onto its lift.

There’s a button pinned to the back of her chair. It reads, “Vote yes on Proposition M.” As the van trundles off into the twilight, taking her to work, she says she hopes her neighbors are willing to pay a few dollars more in taxes. So that she can get around on her own.

Blueprint America correspondent Rick Karr travels to St. Louis to visit the people who’re likely to suffer the most if transit officials cut service to save the city money. /wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2008/11/busbusbus.jpg

The Bus Stop: Overview

tom mcnamara — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:19:22 +0000

As the 2008 election approaches, St. Louis public transit advocates are making a last push to convince voters to pass Proposition M. It would increase sales taxes by half a cent – about $55 per family per year – to ease a budget crunch. If it doesn’t pass, officials say they’ll have to slash service. According to the American Public Transit Association, about a third of the country’s transit agencies say they’ll need to cut service to balance their budgets. The crisis is especially bad in smaller cities: Eugene, Ore., for example, as well as Milwaukee, Wis., and Providence, R.I.

Blueprint America — with Weekend America on public radio — correspondent Rick Karr takes travels to St. Louis to visit the people who’re likely to suffer the most if transit officials do end up cutting service.

/wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2008/11/busbusbus.jpg As the 2008 election approaches, St. Louis public transit advocates are making a last push to convince voters to pass Proposition M. It would increase sales taxes by half a cent – about $55 per family per year – to ease a budget crunch. If it doesn’t pass, officials say they’ll have to slash service. According to the American Public Transit Association, about a third of the country’s transit agencies say they’ll need to cut service to balance their budgets. The crisis is especially bad in smaller cities: Eugene, Ore., for example, as well as Milwaukee, Wis., and Providence, R.I.

The Leak: Radio: Full Report

tom mcnamara — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:04:17 +0000

Rick Karr, Blueprint America correspondent

Download this audio report as an MP3.

[Transcript]

If you visit Laura Smith’s house on Smith Road in Wawarsing, N.Y. on a crisp, autumn morning, you might think she has it pretty good. The house is cozy, and the setting is gorgeous: Catskill hillsides blazing with fall color, her lawn still green and thick. But then, she opens the garage door that leads to the lower level of her house and you’re nearly bowled over by the ammonia stench of mold and mildew. She steps inside and shows off her nine-horsepower water pump.

“When we know we’re flooding, we get it set up, make sure we have fuel, we get the hoses out,” she explains. Outside, the hose is about 30 feet long and four inches wide. Smith calls it “the Loch Ness Monster.”

All it takes is a few inches of rain, Smith says, and her basement and garage are suddenly full of feet of water. The pump can run for weeks before the basement’s dry. Her water problem got really bad during a storm in the spring of 2005: Flooding knocked out the furnace, so she and her family relied on a wood stove, up on blocks, in the basement. And they worried that the foundation might collapse.

“Sometimes I think maybe it would’ve been best for my house to collapse at that time,” she says, “so I could’ve saved myself the past three years of horror.”

Smith laughs at this. She says she laughs because that’s the only way she can handle the situation. The water is relentless. On the morning that I visited, there hadn’t been significant rain in Wawarsing for days, yet Smith’s basement walls were damp. She and her husband watch the Weather Channel with dread. The neighborhood’s lawns are pocked with sinkholes. They can be big – up to five feet deep – but they start small. At a neighbor’s house a few doors away, on U.S. Highway 209, Smith pointed to a spot in the lawn where, she said, a sinkhole was coming.

“I mean, step in here – look at that!” Smith turns to her husband.

“It’s spongy! Oh, my God! That’s a hole — that’s a sinkhole,” he exclaims, his foot sinking eight inches into the ground. “That’s not just coming – that’s there.”

The source of the sinkholes — and all of the flooded basements in the area – is 700 feet underground. The Delaware Aqueduct is leaking, badly, in two places – one directly beneath Wawarsing. The tunnel loses up to 35 million gallons a day, enough to supply tap water to the entire city of St. Louis. And a lot of it is soaking into the ground beneath the neighborhood, and under Highway 209 – the only highway in town.

U.S. Representative Maurice Hinchey, the Democrat who represents Wawarsing, says there’s a possibility that the structure of the road could erode.

“Without that road, it would be very difficult for people to move from one place to another. And the longer this goes on, the greater the likelihood that there will be larger problems that will come about, and that those larger problems are potentially likely to affect larger numbers of people,” Hinchey says.

For example, sinkholes could topple a high-tension line, or floods could destroy buildings. Hinchey’s been putting pressure on the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which owns the Aqueduct, to fix the leaks. But the DEP won’t confirm that its tunnel is the source of the water – despite the fact that it issued a paper this past June titled, “Wawarsing Leak Report.”

More importantly, Hinchey says, the tunnel’s a symbol of what’s wrong with infrastructure nationwide: It’s decades old and falling apart. If it fails completely, Wawarsing could be inundated – and eight million people in New York City would lose half of their water supply. Sometimes it seems like a problem from hell is seeping upwards from the underworld into the lives of Laura Smith and her neighbors. On a fall night, they gather around her kitchen table to eat zucchini bread and talk.

“Bottom line is, we all own homes that are worthless,” says Richard Eisinger, the guy with the brand new sinkhole in his yard.

“When I bought this home, it was so our daughter could finish school. And eventually we planned on retiring and moving away from the areai¿½ Now we have a couple hundred thousand dollars tied up in something that’s worthless,” Eisinger says.

“Our assets are now liabilities,” his neighbors agree.

His neighbor Julianne Lennon nods. “We’ve done so much work on our home that we’ll never get a return on,” she says. “Never.”

Money’s the problem for government officials, too: It’ll cost billions to fix the leaks, if they can be fixed at all. Some engineers think that the water itself may be the only thing that’s keeping the tunnel from collapsing completely. The neighbors in Wawarsing hope that the leak under their houses won’t get as bad as the other leak in the Aqueduct, like one near the banks of the Hudson River. That one’s turned a small valley into a swamp and seems to be opening up a sinkhole on the shoulder of a nearby road. Water rushes out through a ditch and then flows under a power plant.

This weekend, the DEP will “blow off” the tunnel – in other words, let most of the water drain from it. Residents in Wawarsing say they’ll be checking to see if their basement walls dry out.

The longest tunnel in the world supplies New York City with drinking water – and it’s leaking. Blueprint America correspondent Rick Karr takes a look at the catastrophe that’s unfolding several hundred feet underground. /wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2008/11/ba_leak_thumb.jpg

The Leak: Audio: Extended Interviews

tom mcnamara — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:00:03 +0000

Rick Karr, Blueprint America correspondent

Extended interviews regarding the leak in the Delaware aqueduct.

Paul Rush, Deputy Commissioner of NYC Department of Environmental Protection in the Bureau of Water Supply (Grahamsville, NY).

Jay Simpson, a staff attorney with the environmental advocacy group Riverkeeper (White Plains, NY).

Blueprint America correspondent Rick Karr in extended interviews with the Deputy Commissioner of NYC Department of Environmental Protection in the Bureau of Water Supply and a staff attorney with the environmental advocacy group Riverkeeper regarding the leak in the Delaware aqueduct. /wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2008/11/ba_leak_thumb.jpg

The Leak: Video: Leaky Basement

tom mcnamara — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:55:15 +0000

Julianne Lennon’s basement in Wawarsing, NY, as a result of the leak in the Delaware Aqueduct.

/wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2008/11/ba_leak_thumb.jpg Video of Julianne Lennon’s basement in Wawarsing, NY, as a result of the leak in the Delaware Aqueduct.

The Leak: Overview

tom mcnamara — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:35:06 +0000

The longest tunnel in the world, the Delaware Aqueduct, supplies New York City with drinking water — and it’s leaking. Every 10 minutes or so, the aqueduct will leak at least enough to put a football field under three and a half feet of water. Blueprint America — with Weekend America on public radio — correspondent Rick Karr takes a look at the catastrophe that’s unfolding several hundred feet underground.