OVERVIEW

Imagine this: An old house with a full porch, clothes on the clothesline blowing in the breeze. A perfect place to sit and sip lemonade, listen to the birds. But you don’t sit out there anymore because across the narrow country road is a gaping pit with 24-inch pipe spewing muddy water and making noise enough to drown out the sounds of summer. 

Imagine this: A grassy hill with a view stretching across miles. Your family worked hard to buy this land, and you were planning on building a house there to retire in. But that dream is shattered because now, no matter which way you turn, you see a drilling rig, and the hum of the natural gas compression station below never stops. 

Imagine this: You bathe your son in your farm’s well water and he breaks out in a rash; your dog begins to lose its hair; your lambs begin to die. You used to make hay, but the fields lie fallow. Now you have to drive miles to the Walmart to buy bottled water.

Imagine this: A once-paved, quiet road reduced to gravel and barely visible through the cloud of dust raised by the hundreds of trucks that pass your home every day. 

And this: 18 truck accidents in one winter morning because the drivers don’t know how to handle winding WV roads. 

And this: a punctured liner releasing drilling waste into the stream at the bottom of the hillside where your grandkids like to catch crawdads. 

And this: your property value dropping and the bank loan manager turning away because someone else decided to allow drilling near your home.

The folks in Wetzel County and others throughout West Virginia don't have to imagine this; they're living it.  As time goes by, more and more folks will be living with these problems and with these, dramatic changes in their everyday lives. Where are the regulations for Marcellus drilling and horizontal hydro-fracking?