Finger Lakes fracking: An idea whose time has passed
The chance remark came during a 2011 reporting trip to Pennsylvania to observe the impact of the natural-gas drilling boom.
Vincent Matteo, a business leader in then-thriving Williamsport, was as big a booster of hydraulic fracturing as we encountered in Pennsylvania gas country. But toward the end of an interview, Matteo mentioned that he was a frequent visitor to New York's Finger Lakes region.
He raised his eyebrows and said, almost sheepishly, that perhaps fracking might not be the best fit in the picturesque Finger Lakes.
Matteo's remark resonated. Two months before photographer Shawn Dowd and I reported on Pennsylvania fracking, I'd written another story for the Democrat and Chronicle that documented the large number of upstate New York landholders who had already signed leases with oil and natural-gas companies in anticipation of a fracking boom here.
That story pointed out that 810,000 of those leased acres were in the Finger Lakes region. There were hot spots ready for drilling near Canandaigua, Keuka, Seneca, Cayuga, Owasco and Skaneateles lakes. The story drove home the fact that hydraulic fracturing, then on hold in New York as state officials studied the environmental and health impacts, could well take place in Rochester's backyard.
Rochester eventually became something of a hotbed of opposition to renewed high-volume fracking in New York. Some Rochesterians were disappointed when the Cuomo administration announced it would ban that form of gas extraction, but many others celebrated.
A year after New York announced that ban, Tom Wilber, the Southern Tier journalist who has done a marvelous job chronicling the natural-gas boom (and bust), has written a series of stories for Gannett's New York newspapers, about lessons to be learned from the fracking experience in Pennsylvania.
And here, I'll offer the best lesson I picked up on that 2011 sojourn to Pennsylvania gas country: To my mind, the most significant impact of unfettered high-volume fracking may be not economic or environmental, but social.
When a huge industry drops anchor in a new locale, especially in small towns and rural areas, the social impact is stunning. Farmers become millionaires overnight. People in support businesses prosper. Restaurants and hotels pop up like mushrooms. There's plenty of cash. Among some, goodwill predominates. There's a bounce in their step.
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But at the same time, roads clog. Diesel fumes fill the air. Arrest rates climb. Rents soar and homelessness erupts. That may have been the most surprising thing I heard — that people were being left homeless, in need of emergency shelter, because all the rental units were snapped up by gas-company workers armed with healthy housing stipends. Those people are beaten down.
We saw and heard evidence of these things and more as we drove Route 6 just a few dozen miles south of the New York border. A trio of boroughs (villages) with populations of about 3,500 — Wellsboro, Mansfield and Towanda — were in the epicenter.
Towanda hosted the biggest influx of industry money and workers, and was the most affected. I heard from some New Yorkers who'd gone on a fact-finding trip to Towanda about how they'd happened upon the local police at shift-change time. They were carrying military-style rifles to their cars. The New Yorkers told me they asked the officers why they were so heavily armed. The officers responded that Friday night loomed and they needed the rifles to break up the impending bar fights.
As I thought about Matteo's remark, I pictured Wellsboro, Mansfield and Towanda recast as Hammondsport, Penn Yan and Watkins Glen. Tanker trucks, emergency shelters, and semi-automatic rifles in the land of wineries, farm stands and sailboats.
Had Gov. Andrew Cuomo allowed widespread high-volume fracking, the southern-most part of the state centered on Binghamton likely would have been drilled first. But it's entirely possible the Finger Lakes would have been next in line.
Like Matteo, even those who were fans of hydraulic fracturing might have found that an unappealing prospect. For now, anyway, and for the foreseeable future, it's not one they'll have to gaze upon.