This page has the most recent posts listed according to date, most recent first.

The archive of all the posts is at sootypaws.livejournal.com.

Recent posts in the archive:

A Few Winter Photographs
13 December 2009

Buckeye Creek Update
28 November 2009

One Thing After Another
28 November 2009

Communities
17 October 2009

Getting Ready for Winter
13 October 2009

Risk Assessment, Part One
3 October 2009

Risk Assessment, Part Two
3 October 2009

The Numbers
26 September 2009

Buckeye Creek
26 September 2009

Collecting a Sample for Laboratory Analysis
18 September 2009

40 Years
12 September 2009

Wetzel County
6 September 2009

Coalbed Methane
29 August 2009

Turtles
8 August 2009

Chloride
2 August 2009

Bits and Pieces
25 July 2009

Chloride in the Woods
19 July 2009

Bobo
5 July 2009

Chloride Testing
13 June 2009

Kitty Boy Outside
6 June 2009

A Pretty Picture?
31 May 2009

A Busy Week
23 May 2009

Kitty Boy
16 May 2009

Pulpits and Drill Pits
9 May 2009

The Bhopal 25th Anniversary Survivors’ Tour
3 May 2009

Pits
28 April 2009

Pit Liners
26 April 2009

Bookshelves
23 April 2009

Fracturing Chemicals
18 April 2009

A Short (Very Short) History of Fracturing
18 April 2009

Bulging Boreholes!
18 April 2009

What Happened at Fernow
17 April 2009

SAR
17 April 2009

New Content on Website
4 April 2009

Liming the Pit
28 March 2009

Fernow Experimental Forest
28 March 2009

Oops!
27 March 2009

Around Home

Around Home
21 March 2009

Math Problem
14 March 2009

Spring
10 March 2009

More New Content on Website
1 March 2009

New Content on Website
23 February 2009

Wind Storm
17 February 2009

A Good Job
8 February 2009

Grades and Slopes, 2
7 February 2009

Where We Live
26 January 2009

New Content on Site
25 January 2009

Grades and Slopes
14 January 2009

Nuts to Winter
2 January 2009

Kablooie!
20 December 2008

The Toxic Well
6 December 2008

Land and Air
4 December 2008

New content on Sootypaws
29 November 2008

Bobo and His Human
22 November 2008

Culverts
November 2008

Research
9 November 2008

Dozer Tracks
22 November 2008

Walk Through the Asbury Property
26 October 2008

Fracturing
8 October 2008

Last Saturday
29 September 2008

Local Wells
27 September 2008

Clovis
21 September 2008

A quick update
17 September 2008

The Woods
15 September 2008

From beauty to desert "It's all about money"
12 September 2008

The Gas Well
9 September 2008

News!
6 September 2008

Posted 25 February 2010

The Lost Hollow

We're hoping to post some photos taken in the hollow here back in the good old days. Changes have constantly been taking place over the years and what is old has been quickly disappearing.

Our neighbor, Wanda Lane, let us scan some photographs she had that were taken in the 1960s of Harmon's Creek Road where it climbs the mountain -- to the ridge where we live. Back then the road was dirt. When we bought our property in 1984 the road had been graveled. In the 1990s it was tarred and chipped though that has deteriorated badly over the years -- damaged severely by heavy trucks bringing equipment and materials for the gas wells drilled around here.

The school bus doesn't go up the mountain. There is a turnaround at the base just before my mother's property.

		This is looking down the road to the base of the mountain. The barely visible roof on the right is for a spring house. My mom bought this property in the 1980s and the spring house was modified to create an apartment. Her house is just below, nestled between the hillsides, next to a creek. The black dog is typical of the area where all the dogs have big smiles. Up in the woods to the left is a rock outcropping that looks just like a dog's head. Up there, also, is where stone was quarried for foundations and chimneys of area homes by the family who lived here in the 1890s. This is also where we took photos in our A Walk Through the Asbury Property post.
		The road up the mountain has a steep grade with only one short level spot and a hairpin curve. Ruts in a dirt road like this, especially on a grade, help keep vehicles from sliding off the mountain side.
		Even further up the mountain. This is the level area, with a short pull off spot in the foreground just before the hairpin curve.
		In this photo, looking up the mountain road, we're nearly at the top. It's possible to see in the photo how the road is in a gully. Dirt/mud roads tend to do this on slopes because of erosion and runoff and also because of the way traffic uses the road, shifting from side to side trying to find a spot that offers good traction.

More soon!

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Posted 9 February 2010

2009 Gas Well Study Is Available

We've put the finishing touches on the 2009 Gas Well Study and it is available now for download. We're hosting it at Docstoc since the file size is much larger than we like to have on our free website. You don't need to be a member of Docstoc to download the document, though we've placed a copy up there for that site's members to view and download.

The 2009 Study is much larger than the 2008 Study and covers more topics. There is the analysis of well sites we've looked at the past year like before and we saw the same range of problems. Over half of the wells we looked at weren't in compliance with federal and state regulations.

New to the 2009 Study is a section on the three environmental assessments we did in 2009 and the 2009 Study provides summaries of our finding at three well sites. Another new section is devoted to waste management. We did our own study last year of the effects of high-chloride liquids on woodland vegetation (we have a blog post about it -- Chloride in the Woods) and the 2009 Study has photos and details. We also examine briefly the lack of regulation in the state for the disposal of the large quantities of solid waste generated during drilling a well. That this waste is contaminated during drilling and sometimes during fracturing is a concern as is the fact that the waste can have high concentrations of heavy metals and radioactive materials from geologic sources.

The 2009 Study can be downloaded using this link or you can go to the section of our website devoted to wells we examined in 2009 and find a link there for download as well as links for downloading the three environmental assessments we made.

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Posted 9 February 2010

The Woods

I keep on hoping to be able to make more frequent entries on the blog but winter has been keeping us busy lately. We've begun cutting firewood for next winter, but the frequent snowfalls have made it hard to stay at it.

		The tree we're working on now is a large oak that's blown over just above the Sheep Rocks, large exposed sandstone boulders.
		The oak is on a hillside and we've had to tie a rope around each bolt before cutting it free. When the bolt is cut free it jumps down the hillside and is snapped short by the rope. The bolts are 24 inches in diameter and are too heavy for us to lift. I can barely tip one over to its side.
		Usually we have to cut and split firewood and carry the split pieces up hill to the roads that run along the ridge. In this case the tree is on a hillside above one of these roads. Getting firewood to the truck won't be such a chore.
		We started cutting about 10 feet up the log. The 24 inch bolts are about as much as we can handle with our chainsaw. There's lots of firewood in this tree even if we leave a log behind.
		Most of the past couple of months we've had snow on the ground. That's the large shed in the middle of the photo. When the snow sticks on the trees like this it makes the woods look like fairyland.
		This is a view of some of our buildings in the snow. The shack is in the center of the picture. The house is behind and to the left of the shack and the shop and large shed are to the right.

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Posted 6 January 2010

Hunkered Down for Winter

The past couple of weeks have been cold and there's been lots of snow at times. Too much the weekend before Christmas. In the midst of all this winter weather Bobo and Kitty Boy have been enjoying, if the weather outside is too nasty, time together -- either playing or, as in this photo, napping.

Molly and I have been busy since the beginning of December trying to tie up all the loose ends for our 2009 Gas Well Study. We've completed the reports for two environmental assessments, have been revamping the website to update the material on the wells we looked at last year, and are working on the report for the 2009 gas well study.

The revamped pages for the 2009 Study can be seen from here. There are links to the environmental assessments on that page. The new assessments are for 47-039-05714 (here's the web page for that well) and 47-079-01492. The assessment for 5714 deals with a well with exposed pit waste. Another well on our website has many similar features -- exposed pit liner and large areas bare of vegetation.

We had plans to visit more wells but weather and time didn't allow that. We already have a number of wells marked on our maps for visiting this year. Some are older wells with newer homes built close by -- within 50 feet or so of the dwelling.

We hope to have the 2009 Study finished and available in February and there'll be more here about that in future posts.

We hope everyone is already having an exciting (in a good way) New Year!

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