Last Saturday Molly and I drove to a gas well site several miles east of us. The surface owner met us part way there and led us over narrow twisty roads past farms and houses.

The well we visited was drilled and completed in autumn 2008. This is one of a number of recently drilled wells that have adversely affected local groundwater and soil.

The pad was covered with lush tall clover, except for large bare areas. The owner said the clover is a recent attempt after a number of unsuccessful tries to get something to grow. He didn’t expect it to last.

He pointed out the lack of deer trails through the clover, said that the local deer population dropped dramatically after the well was fractured, with dead bodies being found in the hollow below the well.

Molly noticed right off the numerous dead trees at two edges of the pad. He said that was where the gas drilling crew blew the fracture flowback while they sat in their trucks around a curve, away from the pad. He said that some of the trees’ bark began to fall off within a day.

When there was a forest fire that burned some acres of our woods in the 1980s, it was so hot that all the organic matter in the soil was destroyed. In spite of this, sassafras trees were springing up in the bare soil a year later.

There were no sassafras trees in the blighted area at this well site.

At the well site on Saturday, we took soil samples and in the bare areas on the pad found chloride at 595 parts per million. In one of the bare areas pit liner was visible along about 35 feet.

The surface owner is angry, understandably so. He’s become disabled due to heavy metal poisoning, which he attributes to his tainted water supply.

Flowback is what drillers call the liquid that comes up out of a well after it’s been fractured — a mixture of chemicals, brine, crude petroleum, and naturally occurring substances (like radium and arsenic).

Flowback is also the anger individuals and communities feel because of how they’ve been treated by an oil and gas industry that is more interested in money than people and the environment.

The end of March Molly and I purchased an inexpensive used video camera on eBay along with software so that we can edit what we shoot. We want to make advocacy videos in support of the effort in this state to have oil and gas operations better regulated and also in order to show the problems we are seeing when we look at gas wells.

Of course we’ll also be making videos of cats and the woods, too! And we’re hoping to make some videos showing how we do things in the blacksmith shop for Horton Brasses’ blog where we’ve been posting.

Yesterday we uploaded our first video on YouTube, titled Three Natural Gas Wells. I shot footage while I was looking at gas well sites on 14 April. I gave an impromptu narrative while filming. We’re still novices with the camera and the sound quality isn’t what we hope for. And we’re learning the ropes for the editing software. We’ve since gotten microphones which work great (we bought a camera which had jacks for a microphone and earphones).

We had the camera along with us when we visited the site in the following post and Molly filmed a great interview.

More soon!