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Fernow
Experimental Forest
Fernow
Experimental Forest, located in Tucker county, West Virginia,
is part of the National Forest system. Caves at Fernow are
used by the endangered Indiana bat for hibernation and for
that reason alone there probably shouldn't have been a gas
well drilled there. Like us, the federal government at this
location owns the surface only, but unlike us the federal
government has more options when dealing with natural gas
drilling.
What
makes what happened at Fernow special is that there were government
scientists there when bad things happened.
We've
collected a group of links about the Forest, about the Berry
well and pipeline, and about what happened during drilling.
The
Fernow
Experimental Forest website and research over the last
50 years.
The
Forest Service's decision
to allow Berry Energy to drill the B800 well at Fernow,
along with map
1 and map
2. A similar decision was made to allow
Berry Energy to construct a pipeline, along with a map.
There
are good reasons to believe that the decision to allow Berry
Energy to drill was a bad one. PEER (Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility) on their website provides an
article
with links to background information. Ken Ward, Jr., writing
for the Gazette, has used information from PEER and
has expanded on that information on the Gazette's Sustained
Outrage blog. The March 11, 2008 article in the Gazette
("Forest
Service ignored concerns about drilling") is available
online (we hope -- if anyone has problems, let us know). Ken
Ward's posts are "Ignoring
science at the Forest Service" and "Gas
drilling damage I" (which has a photo of the effects
of landspraying on vegetation). Two other posts deal with
broader gas drilling issues: "Gas
drilling damage II" and "Gas
drilling damage III."
Basically,
Berry Energy, after drilling and fracturing the B800 well
and treating the waste according to the state's program, landsprayed
liquid pit waste. The liquids adversely affected vegetation,
killing some outright. Landspraying was moved to a second
area, eventually, and vegetation was affected there also,
but not so seriously. An earlier event, during fracturing,
occurred when Berry lost control of the well and the resulting
spray killed trees and undergrowth.
The
amount of liquid sprayed on the first landspraying area of
about half an acre was about 80,000 gallons. According to
the company's Discharge Monitoring Report filed with the state,
in total 100,000 gallons of liquid waste was sprayed onto
two acres.
The
next chapter presents information from Berry Energy's Discharge
Monitoring Report.
Go
to the The Discharge Monitoring
Report.
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