Urgent Help Needed

As shale gas drilling and development inches closer to encroaching on the Delaware River Watershed, public concerns are growing for the safety of water supplies, air quality, the natural environment and communities that will be affected. The 15 million people who rely on the Delaware River for water, including New York City, Philadelphia and millions of residents of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware will all be directly effected if the water resources of the high quality upstream River is degraded.

The practices that are used by the gas industry to extract and develop shale gas involve dangerous techniques such as hydraulic fracturing that inject chemicals--many of them hazardous, toxic and/or carcinogenic--and millions of gallons of water into each gas well.

The polluted flowback that erupts back up is contaminated with additional pollutants from the deep geology, such as radioactive materials, and is stored in large open pits on the well site until it is trucked away to a wastewater plant (even though there are not enough plants to handle the wastewater and the few used do not remove most of the pollutants--many of them in PA).

Well sites have huge well pads, usually 5 acres, containing up to 10 gas wells each, miles of roads and gas pipelines and change forested hillsides into urban, industrial conditions. Wells can even be drilled in floodplains in both NY and PA.

Communities across Pennsylvania where gas drilling is charging ahead at a frenzied pace are experiencing pollution incidents, accidents, water well contamination, stream degradation and ruined farms.

Join with the growing number of people who want to take action to defend our region from the degradation of shale gas drilling. We can't let this happen here--we cannot sacrifice our water and environment to gas companies.