Please see related article by Sue Heavenrich, "Proposed Well Draws Concern," in the 1/11/10 issue of Tompkins Weekly, also posted to Wishing Well Magazine. 

Since 1986, Joe and Sarah Osmeloski have owned a 6-acre horse farm on Dryden Road/Route 13, just east of Willow Glen Cemetery and south of the intersection with Irish Settlement Road. Their property and that of the house next door are bracketed by two waterways that cascade down from the steep wooded slopes of Yellow Barn State Forest on the south side of Dryden Road.

On the west side of the Osmeloskis’ land, a small tributary of Willow Glen Creek feeds their front-yard well. Running downslope along the property line, this year-round stream provides necessary clean water for their seven horses. Further downhill this stream joins Willow Glen Creek, which parallels it a few hundred feet to the east. Willow Glen soon joins Virgil Creek, then Fall Creek, and thus to Cayuga Lake.

Until recently the Osmeloskis lived a quiet life focused on horses, chickens and dogs. Responsible landowners, they worked with NYSDEC (New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation) to obey the clean water regulations and laws required of farmers, to keep their stream and Willow Glen Creek clean for those who live downstream.

Imagine their shock when they found out in December 2009 that they were living directly downstream of a proposed natural gas well that is apparently exempt from the regulations and laws that they themselves must obey! On the open farmland slopes uphill between the Osmeloskis and Yellow Barn Forest -- bracketed by the same two waterways -- preliminary work is underway to prepare for the proposed Cook Well, which would, if approved, drill down through the Marcellus Shale to the Trenton-Black River limestone to extract natural gas at that depth.

According to information provided by DEC to the Osmeloskis, the drilling will extend downward at an angle for over 9000 feet to reach the gas at around 7500 feet below the surface. Supposedly, hydrofracking methods and chemicals are not used in Trenton-Black River gas extraction, but neither Dryden officials or the Osmeloskis yet know if this is true, or if an integration order will require surrounding neighbors to cooperate so that this well can be drilled.

Joe and Sarah are worried that their well and their stream are in danger of contamination from drilling operations in the field above, with Willow Glen Creek on the east side and their stream on the west side of the proposed drilling area. Joe says, "Why do I have to cooperate with DEC to protect water quality, and these guys do not? How crazy it that?" Sarah said she is especially concerned if both the well and the stream, "Pack it in at the same time. We have horses, dogs, a garden, chickens, and our house. How will I get clean water to all of them, if our water is contaminated?" Almost a quarter century ago, the couple purchased this land because of its plentiful clean water. They wonder if that era will come to an end soon, for reasons beyond their control.

In the face of these concerns, the Osmeloskis and members of DRAC (Dryden Resource Awareness Coalition) held a New Year Celebration of Clean Water late in the afternoon of December 31, 2009. DRAC members Hilary Lambert, Judith Pierpont and Margaret McCasland were introduced to the seven standardbred horses, the couple's three Tibetan-breed dogs, and got a glimpse of the chickens. The group walked down to the snowy horse pasture, where their stream spills out of a culvert across the ground as a refreshing year-round water supply for the horses, continuing downslope into the woods for its rendezvous with Willow Glen Creek.

After Sarah had hung a set of Tibetan prayer flags above the culvert opening that carries the stream's water into the pasture, Hilary read a Robert Frost poem, "A Brook in the City." This simple poem from the 1920s warns that when a brook is destroyed, the soul of a community is also harmed (poem provided below).

Judith Pierpont sang a song by Appalachian singer and activist Jean Ritchie, "Cool of the Day," about the beauty and value of clean land and water and the necessity of caring for them (words provided below).

Margaret McCasland called for us all to embrace renewable energy resources based on the sun by lighting a beeswax candle, and read the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force's "Statement on Hydraulic-Fracturing" written in March of 2009 (text provided below), before closing with Jake Swamp's "Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message" (published in 1995 by Lee & Lowe).

Strengthened and reassured, the small group walked back across the darkening pasture, past horses, dogs and chickens to Dryden Road where they embraced and parted, to prepare for whatever 2010 may bring.

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A Brook In The City

(c) Robert Frost

The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square

With the new city street it has to wear

A number in. But what about the brook

That held the house as in an elbow-crook?

I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength

And impulse, having dipped a finger length

And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed

A flower to try its currents where they crossed.

The meadow grass could be cemented down

From growing under pavements of a town;

The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.

Is water wood to serve a brook the same?

How else dispose of an immortal force

No longer needed? Staunch it at its source

With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown

Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone

In fetid darkness still to live and run --

And all for nothing it had ever done

Except forget to go in fear perhaps.

No one would know except for ancient maps

That such a brook ran water. But I wonder

If from its being kept forever under,

The thoughts may not have risen that so keep

This new-built city from both work and sleep.

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Cool of the Day

(c) Jean Ritchie

   Now is the cool of the day

   Now is the cool of the day

   This earth is a garden, the garden of my Lord

   And he walks in his garden

   In the cool of the day

My Lord, he said unto me

Do you like my garden so fair

You may live in this garden if you'll keep the grasses green

And I'll return in the cool of the day

 

Then my Lord, he said unto me

Do you like my garden so pure?

You may live in this garden if you'll keep the waters clean

And I'll return in the cool of the day

 

Then my Lord, he said unto me

Do you like my pastures so green

You may live in this garden if you will feed all of my sheep

And I'll return in the cool of the day

 

Then my Lord, he said unto me

Do you like my garden so free

You may live in this garden if you'll keep the people free

And I'll return in the cool of the day

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Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force Statement on Hydraulic-Fracturing

March 4, 2009

http://www.hetf.org  

The Haudenosaunee consist of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora Nations. The Haudenosaunee Nations and its people have a unique spiritual, cultural, and historic relationship with the land, which is embodied in Gayananshogowa, the Great Law of Peace. This relationship goes far beyond federal and state legal concepts of ownership, possession, or other legal rights. The Haudenosaunee people are one with the land and all that depends on the land, and consider themselves apart of it. It is the duty of the Nations’ leaders to work for a healing of the land, to protect it, and to pass it on to future generations.

The Haudenosaunee know that every part of the natural world is important and interrelated; when humans tinker more and more with the natural balance, we do so at the peril of our grandchildren. The Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force engages in extensive environmental work on behalf of its people and all people, in the hope that it may hasten the process of reconciliation and bring lasting justice, peace and respect among all living beings – animal, bird, fish, plant and people – who live on Turtle Island.

Clean and abundant water is now the highest priority for human survival. The natural world is the distributor of water, according to the great systems that control our earth and its climate. It belongs to no one person, corporation, or nation. Privatization and pollution of water are fundamental violations of our human rights, and the rights of the natural world. The balance of life is predicated on sharing the Earth’s natural resources.

Our ability to live in unity and in balance with the Earth depends on each and every person at every level, from governmental departments, to property owners, to children volunteering to help plant urban trees. To be a human being carries with it a responsibility to understand our impact on the world around us and the future generations, and to act in ways to make the world better, not worse. Finding solutions that work with nature, instead of against her, is the only rational course of action to meet the challenges of our time.

The Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force believes that the process of hydraulic-fracturing will devastate the natural environment over a large area and for many generations into the future. We also understand that even though the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is able to justify moving forward with this process based on a presumption of the soundness of its written policy, by requiring permits for certain activities and providing regulatory disincentives for violations to its permitting requirements, there will be unintended consequences that DEC cannot prevent.

We need only look so far as the Tully Valley, south of the Onondaga Nation Territory, and we see the unintended consequences of 100 years of solution salt mining on that valley. We look near Parachute, Colorado where a mine sprang a leak, allowing some 1.6 million gallons of fluid to soak into the arid earth. According to state records, the spill migrated underground until it seeped from a cliff side and froze into a gray pillar of ice more than 200 feet tall. When it melted, the fluids dripped into the torrid currents of Parachute Creek and finally dumped into the Colorado River. Colorado state records show that of some 1,500 spills in drilling areas since 2003, more than 300 have seeped into water. In one case, a truck carrying drilling fluids crashed into the Colorado River, where it remained partially submerged for more than three weeks.

In neighboring Wyoming, the Bureau of Land Management found a 28-mile-long plume of benzene contamination in an aquifer beneath a gigantic gas field, caused by hydraulic-fracturing. The aquifer is near a tributary to the Green River, which in turn flows into the Colorado River. More than 1,000 other cases of contamination due to hydraulic-fracturing have been documented by courts and state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force has not been able to create a scenario by which the economic and energy benefits of hydraulic-fracturing will outweigh its known dangers and risks. DEC is one entity delegated the authority to protect our Earth and waters against contamination caused by hydraulic-fracturing by refusing to allow our Earth and its waters to be exploited in this way. We ask that the DEC partner with us to find other energy sources that do not destroy our grandchildren’s ability to live long and healthy lives.

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TAGGED WITH: Clean Water Act, Dryden NY, gas drilling, Haudenosaunee, hydrofracking, NYDEC, Tompkins County NY