Upcoming Waterdog Training

The Waterdog training will be held Tuesday, September the 29th, at the Penn Tech north campus on Rt 6 outside Wellsboro at 7pm. Please call 570.724.1801 ext:118 and let Erika know if you are planning to attend. They would like to have an idea of how many attendees to expect.

Waterdog training is a class put together by the Pine Creek Headwaters Protection Group and they aim to educate local residents about the equipment and vehicles used for gas well drilling and operations. You will be  instructed on how to identify various vehicles and what their purpose is and with that information you are asked to keep an eye out for vehicles carrying waste water that may be parked near local streams and waterways. If you see anything suspicious you are expected to report it to the correct authorities. All the details will be covered at this training. The general idea is to make sure there are local folks who are educated about the tools these companies are using so we can make sure they are doing what they are supposed to be doing in regards to the safety of our water. There are a lot of well sites in our Tioga County alone and it will be tough for the DEP to have personnel all over the county at the same time.

FYI, taking this class will not make you a secret agent or anything…just hoping to educate those that are concerned for their homes and local environments.

Violations of Water Pollution in Wellsboro, PA

I found a link to this site:

http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters/polluters/pennsylvania/16901

of course I immediately typed in my zip code for Wellsboro to see what would come up. PA currently has 8,264 facilities that have permits to discharge pollutants. If you go to the site you can see the map it pulls up. there are a couple of blue dots surrounding Wellsboro. These dots represent those facilities that are permitted to discharging pollutants. There is one orange dot that represents a site where at least one violation has occurred….and this seemed to involved the sewer treatment plant just inside Wellsboro on Route 6. If you zoom in you can run the mouse over the dots and the name of the person who has the permit will come up. Pretty interesting.

I just have to add, if you click on PA from the listing of states on the left it will pull up a map of the whole state and the sites. I’m happy to say that almost every single site in PA is blue, which means there have been no reports of violations. Only a few were orange and I hope we can keep it that way.

Tioga County Meeting

Hi folks,

I am going to set up a meeting about the oil and gas drilling. Most likely the meeting place will be in Wellsboro and remain that way unless I get a lot of folks asking it be elsewhere. The first meeting will take place at Wild Asaph Outfitters after store hours. After that we can decide on a meeting place.

I am asking people to vote on a day to meet so we can get the most folks here at one time and make some decisions about how we’d like to proceed. Evenings open for the vote are Tuesday Sept. 15th or Thursday Sept 17th. The meeting can happen anytime after 6pm. Please let me know which day works better for you and if you can come.

I also want to clarify that if you come to this meeting or any of the future meetings you will not be obligated to be involved in any way unless you want to. Please feel free to come if you are curious or are just hoping to find more information or have questions. We will attempt to answer any questions or make note of them and find answers. If you want to be involved I highly encourage you to attend.

Thank you,
Liz