Excerpted from Baltimore Sun’s article above on Cove Point, MD

In the rolling hills of Susquehanna County in Northeast Pennsylvania, a Houston-based drilling company is working to fulfill a contract with one of Dominion’s biggest customers. The Cabot Oil & Gas Corp.’s fracking operation has transformed the small farming communities nearby — whether for better or worse.

There are several fracking well heads near Kim Grosso’s farm in Dimock, PA. Grosso says the water well on her farm was contaminated by Cabot Oil and Gas, which was fracking for natural gas beneath the property.

Crossroads like Montrose, pop. 1,500, are now essentially gas towns, their local economies thriving thanks to the many men and women who work the drilling rigs and drive the trucks that service them around the clock.

At night, the 100-foot rigs glow white against the thick rural darkness of the surrounding crop fields. Big white pick-ups fill the parking lots of roadside hotels and bars. A nearby Holiday Inn Express & Suites serves a partial breakfast starting at 3 a.m. for all the contractors whose rig work begins early.

By 6:30 a.m., a line of traffic on a dark two-lane road crawls by a digital sign that reads, “HEAVY TRUCK TRAFFIC. PLEASE SLOW DOWN.”

By 5 p.m., happy hour at The County Seat Tavern has already ended, leaving behind a handful of locals playing “Screw Your Neighbor” with bar owner Jan Rosenkrans, 37, who pours the beer and deals the cards.

“I’d say 90 percent of the town supports it,” Rosenkrans said of Cabot’s major presence. “Why not?”

Cabot and other drillers have provided jobs, supported the growth of local businesses and given struggling farmers and other folks a shot in the arm through royalty checks for the gas beneath their land — including Rich and Pam Fisher, 71 and 66, two of the card players at the bar.

He’s retired from the local phone company, she as a jailhouse cook. They have seven acres of property nearby, and when they signed a subsurface lease with Cabot a while back, they got about $2,000 an acre plus royalties they’re still receiving. “We needed it,” Pam Fisher said. “It helps.”

Cabot has tens of thousands of acres leased in the area, and Jeff Hutton, a Cabot vice president, said his company tries to do right by the community.

The company has a whole page on its website devoted to good work it does, with posts about a community picnic, repairs to local roads and scholarships for local students. In one video, Adam Diaz, owner of a local subcontracting company, says work for Cabot in hauling, disposal and other ancillary services allowed him to grow his company from 30 employees to 120 over the course of a year and a half.

Jeremy Weber, a University of Pittsburgh economist, says residents living in Pennsylvania’s gas-rich regions received about $1 billion in natural gas royalties in 2018. And Rosenkrans says much of that money stays local.

Cabot workers and their families, some of whom have become friends, buy beer and $5 pizzas from her bar, she said, and patronize most of the other businesses in Montrose, too. “It’s amazing what they’ve done for this town,” Rosenkrans said.

Others in the area, while acknowledging the perks, say there is a darker side to the gas.

In 2009, Cabot was fined $120,000 after the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection identified a raft of violations in the neighboring township of Dimock — including the contamination of water wells and an explosion caused by an underground methane leak. The company agreed to stricter-than-normal regulations moving forward, and was temporarily barred from operating in Dimock.

More than a dozen families sued the company, some alleging their wells had been contaminated with so much methane that their tap water could literally be lighted on fire. Without admitting any wrongdoing, Cabot paid a settlement to many of those families in 2012 and settled with others in 2017.

Later that year, Cabot was again found to have violated the law. The company acknowledged failing to submit compliance reports about “air quality violations related to equipment at natural gas wells throughout Susquehanna County,” according to state regulators. The company paid a nearly $100,000 civil penalty. George Stark, a Cabot spokesman, said the problem was that “paperwork just wasn’t done properly.”

Many residents who took cash settlements agreed not to discuss their experiences. But some who never settled with the company will talk, including Kim Grosso and Ken Morcom, hog farmers in Dimock.

“It was right after the fracking that the water went bad,” Grosso said over hot coffee on a cold winter morning as an old pug, two Jack Russell terriers and three “house pigs” came and went through the kitchen.

Sometime around 2011, the couple were happy. They had just built a new barn and had plans to expand their farm. They had signed a sub-surface lease with Cabot, meaning they would receive royalties. And when other people started complaining about contaminated water, Grosso said they scoffed. “We actually thought all these people were crazy, for the fact that our water was fine,” she said.

But not long after Cabot began fracking on a new site nearby, the dogs and then the barn animals started refusing the farm’s well water.

Kim Grosso’s dogs and pot-bellied “house” pigs wait for treats in the kitchen of her Dimock, PA, home. Grosso says her water well was contaminated by Cabot Oil and Gas, which was fracking for natural gas beneath her property.

“That’s how we discovered it. It’s not like we just woke up one day and said, ‘Well let’s just say our water’s bad,’” Morcom said. “When your animals won’t drink the water, something is up.”

Morcom said he had someone come out to test the well, and the readings were startling. Their water was flammable, he said. It was also disgusting, Grosso said, pulling a jar of it from storage to show all the sediment within.

Ever since then, Cabot has delivered water to the farm on a daily basis. The company has offered to buy the property so they can move, but Grosso says it hasn’t offered enough for them to purchase a similar property elsewhere. Meanwhile, her royalties have dropped from nearly $300 a month to less than $100 as gas production on the property has ebbed.

That’s how we discovered it… When your animals won’t drink the water, something is up.” — Ken Morcom, hog farmer in Dimock, Pa.

Of Grosso’s claims, Stark said Cabot “has worked tirelessly with both the property owners and the regulators to resolve and settle this matter.” Company officials, he said, are “committed to a resolution and have made every effort to find a solution agreeable to all parties.”

But Grosso says she feels stuck — in a house with no water, on a property that’s been devalued, in a rural town that’s lost its charm amid the constant industrial activity and traffic. “When I first moved up here, it was the tranquility, the quiet,” she said. “It was beautiful, and all the sudden this stuff comes. There’s no longer peace and quiet.”