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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