Location: James Monroe High School Auditorium

Date & Time: November 22nd, 2010 at 6:30pm

Description: The Monroe County Commission in partnership with WVU Extension presents an Educational meeting on Gas Drilling on November 22, 2010 at 6:30pm at James Monroe High School Auditorium.

Presentations by: Monroe County Planning Commission and the WVU Water Research Institute

Summary of Planning Commission’s fact-finding trips into the gas fields of West/Central Pennsylvania and North Central and Northern WV.

Presentation by WVU Water Research Institute on hydraulic fracturing fluids.

Questions and Answers follow presentations.

Location: Senior Citizen Center in Union, WV

Date & Time: Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 @7pm

Description: Friends of Second Creek and Indian Creek Watershed will have a workshop on Tuesday, October 26th, at 7pm at the Union Senior Citizen Center. Fred Ziegler and Rocky Parsons will be presenting information about the geology of this area. Refreshments will be served. If you are interested in learning more about what lies beneath us in Monroe County and what impact deep gas drilling might have on our water supply, please attend.

I did go to the meeting on the 14th, led by Dale McCutcheon and Howdy Henritz.  They gave out the one page from the regulations about what drillers must do re your water–you could get a copy of it from Dale (his office number is the same as that for the Monroe Health Center).  Basically, they cannot drill within 1000 ft of an existing well (meaningless in karst) and they have to give notice to land owner–various ways detailed.

Dale and Howdy have made arrangements with REIC (a water testing lab in Beckley) to test for the basics that would show up from a well contaminated by drilling–cost $200.  The samples must be collected by a “licensed person”–Howdy and Dale qualify, and not by landowner.  They are collecting names so they can do it by areas.  If you don’t have a baseline test done, you’re out of luck if your well or spring is polluted.  On the other hand, if your well is polluted, the drillers are not going to do much–maybe bring you bottled water the rest of your life.

At the meeting also were Rocky Parsons and Dennis White.  Rocky had maps of the karst showing the lineament–a crack though the area marked by many sinkholes and which cavers believe may contain fabulous caves–pretty much unexplored.  (He also had marked on it the flow length and direction of the known dye tests.)  Cavers say that drilling MUST NOT be done anywhere near the lineament.  The first well planned is right near it.

Merri Morgan

Presentation to The Office of Oil and Gas | DEP Charleston Headquarters | 601 57th Street S.E. | Charleston, WV 25304 | Coopers Rock Training Room | July 28, 2010

I am Ba Rea, a resident of Monroe County.  I am speaking for the Indian Creek Watershed Association, SavetheWaterTable.org, and many individual Monroe County citizens. We are concerned about planned drilling in our county for gas from the Marcellus Shale formation.

Monroe County is a beautiful rural area in southeastern West Virginia. Much of it rests on karst formation.

The Greenbrier limestone formation dominates the landscape lying over the Marcellus Shale in Monroe County. It accounts for over 70 square miles in the center of Monroe County including Union, Pickaway, Sinks Grove, and parts of Greenville and Wolf Creek.  Swopes Knobs is a remnant of the Bluefield formation comprised of red and green shale with a few thin limestone lenses.  It rests on top of the Greenbrier formation, draining onto the Greenbrier karstland to the north, east and west.

Monroe County karstland is one of the world’s densest sinkhole plains, with an average of 18 sinkholes per square kilometer. This limestone also hosts the largest, deepest, and most complex caves, the largest karst basins, the largest number of caves, and one of the largest karst springs in West Virginia.

The 1925 West Virginia Geological Survey listed 49 caves in Monroe County. Hundreds are known today, including the extensive Scott Hollow cave system found in 1985.  Scott Hollow drains an area of at least a fourteen square miles and possibly much more. Mystic River, the underground river flowing through the Scott Hollow cave system, stretches five miles from deep under the Knobs to within two miles of the Greenbrier River. Twenty-eight miles of cave passages have been mapped so far in Scott Hollow.

Modern day Monroe County was shaped by the Appalachian Orogeny roughly 270 to 225 million years ago. This area was uplifted, deposition of sediments ceased, and erosion began taking place. Marcellus shale outcrops can be found along the southeastern boundary of the county as a result of folding. In front of modern day Peters Mountain, older rock overrides the limestone and shale that dominates the rest of the county.  Erosion from this ancient uplift ultimately exposed the Greenbrier formation and also cracked and rippled it creating synclines, anticlines and lineaments as well as many smaller fractures.  This structure, in addition to erosion makes the underground paths of our water even harder to predict. In addition to caves, our karst formation also has many cracks tunnels and fissures, some dramatic.  The monitor lineament is an easily spotted straight line across the Monroe county landscape.  On close observation it is a six-mile long string of sinkholes, likely caused by water flowing along an ancient fracture and slowly dissolving the limestone, causing it to collapse.  Cavers doing dye testing and expecting that water would follow the Monitor lineament were surprised to find the dyes had crossed the lineament and ended up in Second Creek.

Monroe County is a rural community. Though public water is available in Union, Greenville and Peterstown, most of the county depends on springs and wells for water. Since Monroe County does not have streams with the capacity to provide for public water supply sources, almost all residents rely on groundwater for their water consumption needs.  The public supplies available, which provide for about half of the county usage, primarily rely on springs or wells for their intake.

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• The karst forming unit in Monroe is the Lower Carboniferous Greenbrier Limestone which covers about 70 square miles centered around Union, Pickaway and Sinks Grove, with smaller patches around Greenville and Wolf Creek.
• A count of 168 large sinkholes was determined from the central zone giving a density of four per square mile.
• No surface streams occur over much of the karst except near the margins where the flow can be shown to be underground during dryer seasons, confirming that underground flow occurs most of the time.  This is true of Indian Creek and its tributaries, Laurel Creek and Hans Creek around Greenville.
• The Greenbrier Limestone has low porosity so polluted water entering the cave system would not benefit from the natural filtration effects of the groundwater table, but would pass directly into wells and beyond into the Greenbrier and New Rivers.
• The Greenbrier karst phenomenon is limited to Monroe, and adjacent Greenbrier Counties and to a smaller extent, Pocahontas County.  (Caves are present in the folded rocks of the Valley and Ridge Province of the Appalachians but are mostly limited to the much older Cambro-Ordovician formations which are not subject to deep drilling.)
• Surface exposures of the Greenbrier Limestone are riddled with fissures so the general picture is of an anastomosing meshwork of large and small caves which continue to be discovered and mapped but have not been fully tested with die tracers to determine flow patterns.
• The conclusion is that the Greenbrier Limestone poses a major challenge to proposed gas drilling.
• Questions arising are:
  • How could wells be adequately cased in such a formation?
  • How could failures of the highly pressurized “fracking” process be avoided?
  • How will the containment ponds be designed to avoid rupture?
  • How will trucking accidents be avoided on the narrow, switch-back roads typical of Monroe County?

Fred Ziegler | Geologist | Professor Emeritus, The University of Chicago

Since Monroe County does not have streams with the capacity to provide for public water supply sources, almost all residents rely on groundwater for their water consumption needs.  The public supplies available, which provide for about half of the county usage, primarily rely on springs or wells for their intake.

Due to the karst topography which underlies much of the county, underground streams, as indicated by numerous dye tracing activities conducted over the years, may travel for several miles.  Further, unlike in other subsurface environments such as sandstone wherein natural filtration takes place, karst aquifers do not receive this benefit.  This lack of filtration and substantial migration is, in the opinions of most authorities, the primary reason that about half of the water samples taken by the Monroe County Health Department over the last decade have been found unsatisfactory due to bacteriological contamination.  Thus a localized contamination event, such as might occur from a drilling error, has the potential to effect a hundred or more wells over a large area.

Although, as mentioned above, a number of dye tests have been undertaken at various locales throughout the county, there is still a substantial lack of information related to our underground aquifer system.  Much more testing and cataloging of results into a coordinated framework is needed to establish flow patterns and contamination potentials before we may understand the full potential of a contamination event.

Dale McCutcheon | Registered Sanitarian, Masters Degree-Environmental Science | Monroe County Health Department

Source : Mountain Messenger

Excerpt from Peggy Mackenzie’s article in the Mountain Messenger:

We are seeing profit-hungry motivated behavior mount as gas drilling companies scramble for leases in karst country. Like any “gold rush,” the money is so good.  Karst topography is a landscape created by groundwater dissolving sedimentary rock such as limestone, according to the website watersheds.org. Karst makes our Valley especially vulnerable when it comes to drilling.

As information streams in concerning the use of hydraulic fracture drilling for natural gas in the abundantly rich shale fields around the country and especially the Marcellus shale which lies beneath West Virginia and other states in the eastern US, it has been pointed out that natural gas is cleaner that coal and oil. Lawmakers, and members of the oil and gas industry along with the media have jumped on the bandwagon touting natural gas as America’s latest clean energy effort.

But, as Myles Yates of SaveTheWaterTable.org says, “Get it straight: Natural gas extracted by way of hydraulic fracture is NOT clean energy.”

Yates, a Monroe County resident, states firmly that “…it is important to note that those statements refer exclusively to the BURNING of natural gas. It does not and cannot possibly refer to the process of extraction, or hydraulic fracturing – a largely unregulated process that exists in its current format solely because the companies that perform it have been exempted from the Clean Water Act.

“Make no mistake,” Yates goes on to say, “contaminating our water supply in the process of harvesting a clean-burning fuel is NOT CLEAN. Spraying a mix of water, sand, and nearly 600 chemicals (including carcinogens and nuerotoxins and more) into the ground by the millions of gallons (only to recover 10-50 percent, leaving the rest deep in the ground) is NOT GREEN.”

All this has bearing on the health of our watersheds in West Virginia. Water is the real gold. We have it in abundance and take it for granted.

According to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), there are more than 500 gas wells in the state targeting the Marcellus shale formation. Like most states where such gas drilling has occurred, West Virginia has experienced its share of contamination problems and other issues linked with fracking operations.

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