Impressions

On what I later found out was his birthday, Kyle instigated tequila shots. After a distastefully large number of them, I closed out the evening by including the following in an email to an old friend:

 I'm in Pennsylvania working to save the Frackers. Its like saving the whales, except they're mostly mexicans and hicks. 

I'm working for a mountain safety company, whose name I'll keep off of my blog, doing rope rescue for seismic workers in technical terrain. You are correct to think that there isn't a lot of technical terrain in Penn, but safe ground-based extraction from the hills around here does require a team that can arrive on scene quickly and do industry-standard rope rescue in remote areas. This is our job. But nobody ever actually gets hurt, so we spend a lot of time sitting in trucks or driving around getting to know the roads in order to be near the crews. In this time I've gotten a pretty good look at a tiny little slice of Pennsylvania.

Practicing a lower with the dummy, Hosé

Looking up from attendant position on a two-rope lower.

A newt, I believe.

But none of that is what this blog post is about. Seismic? Industrial? Pennsylvania? My west coast environmentalist friends are certainly asking themselves, hackles up. What is he doing, exactly?

Fracking. We're under contact of shell oil.

Before you wonder what my opinion of fracking is, I'll tell you that I don't have one. I do, however, have an opinion about proceeding with caution when using new technologies, whose environmental ramifications are not well known or understood, to extract fossil fuels.  And though I know almost nothing about what is going on in capitals and corporate board rooms, I can offer the anecdotal observation and uninformed opinion that things in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania don't have the feel of moving slowly. And that is what this blog post is about.

Seismic has nothing to do with the actual extraction of gas, but simply exploration. First come the mappers who make maps of the area. Then the surveyors who fill the woods with flagging and spray paint (later meticulously collected) to tell the other crews where to go. Then the drillers come in - we've mostly worked with the heli drillers, who sling their drills around with the aid of a Bell 212. They drill holes approximately 20 feet deep, put about 2 pounds of dynamite in the bottom, refill the hole with packed gravel, and move on.

A foggy morning while I was out hiking around to find one of the line crews.

Next the recording crew comes in, putting geophones on gridded lines throughout the area. Then the shooters come in and detonate the dynamite, and the geophones record data about how the sound traveled though the earth. A helicopter then flies over and wirelessly uploads the data from the geophones. The data are used to draw a picture of the underground rock strata, the morphology of which reveals the gas's location, a fact that had been secret for tens of millions years. And the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.

A creek-crossing practice that probably doesn't meet Shell's rigorous safety criteria.

I watch all of this from the front seat of a pickup truck, waiting to run if anyone gets hurt.

And I've been fascinated. Its interesting and its fundamentally weird. Though watching the pilots sling the drill rigs into the dense mixed hardwood forests without breaking a branch is a remarkable demonstration of skill, its fairly normal. The weirdest thing is how much all of this happens right in people's backyards.

A proper photojournalist could come out of here with great photos. If you know any, tell them to start a blog. I'll post what few photos I've taken here, and I'll try to do better in the future.

Strange things include seeing the geophones sitting between the road and the sidewalk in wellsboro and watching the helicopter sling drill rigs into fields right behind people's houses.

Tapping the sugarbush.

The whole place has the feel of being over run by an invading army. Men (almost exclusively men) in high visibility vests drive pickup trucks that fill the roads. And cement trucks. And water trucks. Fuel trucks. Welding trucks. Supply trucks. And trucks with other trucks in the bed.

One of Shell's countless safety rules is that you have to back into every parking spot. So when you go to restaurants and hotels, you can get a good idea of what percentage of the traffic is oil related.

But invading armies aren't usually welcomed (much to the surprise and chagrin of a recent secretary of defense). Which maybe makes the feel a bit more like being on the front end of a gold rush than an invasion.

All this, and people seem to love it. My sampling has been unscientific and highly biased, but people have actually stopped to tell me that we should put a well on their property, as though I have anything to do with it. One good natured fellow told us that the quarry right by his house (unrelated to oil) muddied his well, so they drilled him a new one. "There's gas," he said, "you couldn't drink the water there was so much gas. The water actually caught fire. Damndest thing," he said, "boy I'd never seen that before. And it smelled terrible."

"yep," he said. "you'll want to put a well here. I could use the money, too."