Gas well debate over Indiana County drill site takes a violent turn
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After a career working in various places around the country, Jim Ray retired two years ago to his family's farm in Penn Run, Indiana County, to help care for his wife's parents and return to his rural roots.
"I thought it would be a quiet life," said Mr. Ray, who worked for Marriott in its food service division for 30 years.
Since his family signed a lease to have a Marcellus Shale well drilled near his home earlier this year, it has been anything but quiet.
First, a neighbor complained in March on the first day the driller, MDS Energy of Kittanning, started cutting into the ground. The company got 380 feet into the ground before Indiana County shut it down, informing MDS that the site was within the "conservation zone" around the 2,900-acre Yellow Creek State Park and needed a special use permit.
The ensuing debate that has raged in the county ever since "has been bigger than anything I've seen," said Indiana County zoning officer George Urban, "even bigger than the debate over allowing mining in the conservation zone" in 2003.
That issue resulted in dozens of meetings, letters to the editor and a petition that sought to stop the drilling.
The debate took a nasty turn last week when MDS employees found six shotgun blasts that were fired into the plastic lining of the drill cuttings pit on the well site -- which is just a short distance from the Rays' home. Company officials say it will cost $3,500 to replace the liner.
The timing of the rare act of Marcellus Shale-related vandalism -- coming less than two weeks after Indiana County granted MDS a special use permit to resume drilling and a day after state officials inspected the site -- has Mr. Ray and MDS officials convinced it was meant to send a message.
"The fact that they brought firearms into the equation and it's 100 yards from the landowner's house, we're taking this extremely seriously," said Mike Knapp, owner of Knapp Acquisitions & Production, which acts as the land agent and public relations for MDS. "We take this as a statement of violent intimidation."
First Published September 25, 2011 12:00 am
