PA Study Finds No Negative Health Impacts from Marcellus Drilling
The Center for Rural Pennsylvania, a bipartisan, bicameral legislative agency that serves as a resource for rural policy within the Pennsylvania General Assembly, has just published the second report in a series. Titled “The Impact of Marcellus Shale Development on Health and Health Care” (full copy embedded below), the report looks at whether incidences of certain health status indicators and demand for healthcare services changed in four heavily drilled PA counties–two in the northeast and two in the southwest–during the years that Marcellus drilling activity increased. Although the report says initial results are “preliminary” and “not conclusive,” so far it seems that heavily drilled locations have not seen an increase in people injured or harmed because of shale drilling. About the only thing that did increase was the number of calls for emergency first responders–which can’t conclusively be tied Marcellus drilling…
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The Joint Landowners Coalition of New York (JLCNY) is a 70,000-member group of frustrated landowners who have had their Constitutional property rights stripped away by a spineless governor. In an effort to get the truth out about shale drilling and its affects–both good and bad–the JLCNY has taken to the airways with a periodic (every 3-4 weeks) radio program that airs Sunday evenings for an hour on Binghamton’s WNBF 1290 AM radio station. This past Sunday night the latest program aired and it was a must-listen program. The special guest was Dr. Theodore Them, MD, MS, PhD, MPH. Dr. Them is a specialist in environmental medicine working at Guthrie, the 19th largest health care system in the United States. Dr. Them lives in Bradford County, PA, within five miles of 100+ Marcellus Shale gas wells. Dr. Them was on the program to discuss the so-called “health impacts” report recently delivered by New York State Commissioner of Health Dr. Howard Zucker (see 
Time to follow the bouncing ball–this is a tad complicated, but we’ll do our best to explain it. In 2008, Chesapeake Energy (under then-CEO Aubrey McClendon) took on a “silent” investing partner for 600,000 net acres in the Marcellus of West Virginia and southwest Pennsylvania. The non-operating partner for the acreage was Norwegian company Statoil, with a 32.5% interest in the acreage. Statoil put up buckets of money and Chessy did the drilling. Fast forward to October of this year. Chesapeake cut a deal to sell most of that acreage–some 413,000 acres with 435 drilled wells (see