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News

   

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:

More YouTube Videos
19 June 2011

Our First YouTube Video
7 May 2011

Flowback
7 May 2011

Shale Gas Drilling in the News
13 March 2011

Big Kittens Now
12 March 2011

2010 Gas Well Study
26 February 2011

Forest Service Report
7 February 2011

Chloride Application Study
17 November 2010

Problem Well
21 November 2010

Cats in Baskets
14 November 2010

Mama Cat and Peach Blossom Indoors
6 October 2010

Mama Cat and Peach Blossom
19 September 2010

Fracture Waste
17 August 2010

Junior Book Goats
14 July 2010

New Content on Website
29 June 2010

Mycotrophic Plants
24 June 2010

RUSLE2
24 June 2010

Gasland
15 June 2010

Kitten Movie
15 June 2010

Cats and More Cats
30 May 2010

Exploding Tanks
16 May 2010

Critters
14 May 2010

The Road
24 April 2010

Spring Flowers
14 April 2010

Cycles
3 April 2010

Walking the Cats
25 March 2010

The Lost Hollow
25 February 2010

2009 Gas Well Study Is Available
9 February 2010

The Woods
9 February 2010

Hunkered Down for Winter
6 January 2010

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 1 January 2012

Winter Garden

Our first attempt at a winter vegetable garden is going well. Molly was able to harvest greens, carrots and radishes on New Year's Day.

The cats normally aren't allowed in the garden. Molly let them in while she was cleaning up the tomato bed for next summer. Kitty Boy explored the winter vegetable bed.

The beds are 16 feet long. This one is 8 feet wide. The winter bed is 4 feet wide, with metal tubing hoops bent to support the plastic cover. We keep the bed covered with plastic when the temperature drops below 35 degrees. When it is very cold (below about 25 degrees) we also cover the plants with spun row cover. When it gets extremely cold, Molly will cover the plants with leaves, then row cover and finally the plastic over the hoops.

It's not all work in the garden. Here Molly is texting while gardening. She's wearing a blaze vest because hunting season didn't end until New Year's.

More soon!

Comments

Posted 24 November 2011

Bobo's Passing

Bobo passed away quietly early Tuesday morning, October 11th. He was in his spot between us, his head on a pillow. He's been such an important part of our lives since 2000 that it's hard to write this, even a month later.

He made it through last winter and even at the end had an amazing spirit. This photo was taken on Sunday when we were out in the "old" garden. We miss him.

The other cats have reorganized their lives without him relatively painlessly. Little Peach Blossom has discovered a new place to go to in the house. She likes to walk from the loft, on the beams above the kitchen, to either the bookshelf above the sink where Molly keeps some of her cookbooks or to a child's chair hanging high overhead.

Before we started this version of Sootypaws News it was entirely on our website. You can still see the old pages from years ago. There are lots of photos of Bobo, too.

More soon!

Comments

Posted 24 November 2011

Gas Well Study Updates

I've fallen behind in our updates so I'll combine everything into one post.

First off, there's a great article from the New York Times that we highly recommend: "The Fracturing of Pennsylvania" by Eliza Griswold. The article appeared in last Sunday's Magazine. It's about the problems some people who have leased their minerals have experienced with Range Resources in southwest Pennsylvania. The health issues are similar to those we've heard about occurring in this state and elsewhere. The company's run-around is also typical.

We've posted a couple of new videos on YouTube (www.youtube.com/GasWellStudy). The most recent is You Get Used To It. We include more of our recorded interview with Paul Phillips (a Kanawha county resident) in this video and for that alone we believe it's worth watching.

In September we presented our comments to the state for the proposed new regulation covering horizontal natural gas wells. We're disappointed with what the Department of Environmental Protection has come up with. What's happening in this state is that while members of the legislature are attempting to create new regulations for oil and gas, industry and the political establishment (e.g., the governor) are blocking it. What we're getting instead are regulations written (more or less, more than less) by industry that do nothing to protect the health and safety of the state's citizens or the environment. Our comments have the state's proposed regulation appended.

We've created a document called Thirty Wells that tabulates the problems we've seen in our area with regulatory compliance and environmental issues such as contaminated drinking water supplies. Industry's awful compliance record in our area is nothing unusual. It's sad that it's these people who get to write their own regulations in this state.

And we've written an interim report titled Fracture Gel's Possible Synergistic Influence for Chloride's Effects on Vegetation. Last summer we made some trial applications on vegetation of fracture gel we made using kerosene, guar gum and water. Those applications with the gel alone showed no adverse effects. When we added 5000 mg/l chloride the adverse effects were much worse than we'd expect from chloride alone. It's possible that fracture gel enhances the negative effects of chloride. We'll be looking at this again next summer. The report discusses the types of organic solvents used in making fracture gel (such as kerosene, diesel, and 2-BE). In West Virginia fracture flowback (including gel) is land applied, except for Marcellus wells.

More soon!

Comments

Posted 3 September 2011

A Visit to the Kanawha State Forest

Last Monday Molly and I took a day trip to the Kanawha State Forest. Molly and her parents had been there years ago but I never had. The Forest is about 8 miles south of Charleston and is beautiful. The CCC set up a camp there (Camp Kanawha) back in 1938 and built trails and buildings in the Forest. We wanted to have a day off, but we also wanted to look at some of the gas wells in the Kanawha State Forest. Just like us, the state, in the case of many of its state parks, owns only the surface. This is true also for the U.S. forest system in this state. Gas companies want to drill in the Monongahela National Forest.

    The Kanawha State Forest is noted for its wildflowers. This is cardinal flower which blooms in late summer. We saw them growing along a well road that was in a hollow running next to (sometimes through) a stream. Cardinal flower likes marshy wet places.
   
  At the end of the well road were two gas wells drilled in the 1960s. One of the wells had a sign warning of hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas that sometimes comes up with the natural gas.
   
 

Molly took this of me while I was making a video record of the site. The second well is visible to the left.

None of the wells we saw had any kind of security, like fencing. That's surprising because of the inherent dangers at these sites, including an unsecured 20 foot high ladder up a tank at this well site.

   
 

We left the well road and walked up out of the hollow on the Beech Glen Trail. Mountain bikes can use this trail going in this direction (up hill). Further ahead we went through a tumble of boulders.

At the top of the ridge we took another trail.

   
  This is a well drilled only a few years ago. Molly is barely visible standing on the edge of the pad in a bare area. We took samples and there was elevated chloride where Molly is standing.
   
  We noted signs of animal visits to the bare area. These are deep scratches made by wild turkey claws. We also saw deer tracks. While we were at the site we saw a group of three finches pecking the dirt in this area, the first time we've seen finches do this, though it's been documented that members of the finch family like salt.
   
  After seeing our last well we took the Wildcat Ridge Trail back to the car. This is another trail used by mountain bikes. The tree lying across the trail is close to 2 feet in diameter. A ramp has been constructed for cyclists to get their bikes over. Cyclists who really like a thrill probably speed up one side of the ramp and down the other. Since it was a quiet day in the park we didn't get to see anyone do this.

More soon!

Comments

Posted 20 August 2011

Two New YouTube Videos

We've added two new videos to the GasWellStudy channel at YouTube (youtube.com/gaswellstudy). In the first, Gas Well Study Cooking Class: Making Fracking Gel, we make a gallon of liquid gel fracking fluid. This results from part of our continuing study of the effects of chloride on vegetation. This year we began applying other components in waste that is normally land applied, in this case fracture gel alone and then with chloride.

The second video consists of two interviews with West Virginians who have lost their domestic water supplies due to the effects of Marcellus drilling. It is titled Bottled Water because once their supplies were poisoned, the only solution now for them is buying their water. The state doesn't seem to intervene when a driller contaminates water. Affected persons must seek redress through the courts.

We're working on more videos and have lots of great interview material from both Bonnie and Paul who appear in Bottled Water.

Once I can figure out how to configure the YouTube embedding for size, I'll start put in the normal video links. Until then, clicking on the titles will get you there, or go to www.youtube.com/gaswellstudy.

Comments

Posted 20 August 2011

Our Garden

It's been such a whir around here the past couple of months I haven't had a chance to write or post anything about a really important addition to our home -- the new vegetable garden. We began clearing just after the first of the year. Originally we thought we'd have to clear a half acre or so but we seem to have been lucky and have achieved our desires with the cutting of a lot less trees.

We have photos of the stages of clearing and creating the garden, but there's not time to present them right now.

This was taken the beginning of July and shows Molly standing between the two raised beds in the garden. To her right are the marigolds and standing even taller are the tomatoes. In front of Molly is the large bed with about 100 square feet planted with soybeans (Molly's harvested the last of these recently and they're drying on the porch before shelling). This large bed will be our fall and winter garden. Molly's already planting seeds.

We'll be having more about the garden and the new space we've cleared. It's become a favorite of the cats and we now have a place where we can watch the sky at night in the summer. Plus we're getting fresh organic vegetables!

More soon!

Comments

Posted 9 July 2011

New YouTube Video

We put up another YouTube video yesterday, titled Natural Gas: Blunders and Numbers.

The state was not able to pass new regulations for the oil and gas industry in the most recent session earlier this winter. That's not really a huge surprise, considering how much pressure the industry was putting on both the legislative and executive branches to do nothing. It's always putting pressure so that nothing is done which is why things are in the shape they are now: contaminated streams and rivers, contaminated ground water, well site accidents, and more.

Our newest video is about what we've seen in our area in respect to industry's compliance to the state's laws. It's not a pretty picture, especially when the numbers get totaled and compared to the 55,000 producing wells in this state. West Virginia has a serious problem.

Attempts now are being made to pass new regulations during an interim session. Our fears are that whatever happens it will be more of the same.

More soon!

Comments

Posted 1 July 2011

Song of the Wood Thrush

We have birds singing in our yard and the surrounding woods year-round, though it is awfully quiet in the winter in comparison to late spring and early summer when migratory songbirds fill our woods.

The slowly changing song of the wood thrush is enchanting. They've been singing for about a month now. For a week or two, one would serenade me from a tree close by while I worked in the shop. Usually they're more reclusive and not that readily seen.

I've used our video camera to record a wood thrush singing in early evening. This one was high in a tree in the woods just west of our home. It was windy when I recorded this and it's impossible to hear other wood thrushes responding, frogs at the small "pond" between our home and the new vegetable garden, or other singing birds.

The segment here is about 90 seconds long (2.3 MB file size).

More soon!

Comments