The Dansville Fish & Game Club will host speaker Craig Stephens tonight, Thursday, Oct. 11 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Stevens is a four-time national award-winning National Rifle Association master trainer, and advocate for clean water access as a right, he lives in “gasland” — Susquehanna County, Pa. He recently spoke at a Tea Party meeting in Vestal.
He is a sixth-generation landowner in Silver Lake Township, Pa., and fifth-generation Oswegonian (New York). In January 2010, soon after his father passed away, he moved back into his ancestral home, eight miles from the New York state border and just 15 miles from Dimock, Pa., where the water of 19 homes was contaminated on Sept. 11, 2008. The state found that Cabot Energy’s faulty Marcellus shale gas wells caused methane to contaminate those families’ water. Although Cabot denies this, the company had been supplying water to those families for two years until state environmental regulators decided last October that the drilling company no longer needed to provide them with fresh water. Eleven of the families whose water was contaminated appealed the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection decision on the grounds that state law requires drillers to permanently restore or replace water supplies they poison.
Craig Stevens has been one of the foremost critics of the regulatory-state collusion with gas companies and has been a leader in the fight to restore clean water to his neighbors in Dimock. The state, Stevens said, has “turned its back on the people of Dimock.” In December he put out a call for volunteers with tanker trucks to deliver bulk water to the families, with a goal is to get at least 20 volunteers to commit to one day a month each. He bought a truck, hired a driver, and secured access to a water hydrant. He is getting donations to help with the deliveries from the Pennsylvania-American Water Co. in Lake Montrose, a municipal water supply several miles from Dimock.
Since then the fracking contamination has moved closer to Stevens’s home; it’s now right down the road in Franklin Forks, a mile from his home. He has now expanded the water delivery to Franklin Forks.
Stevens is an entrepreneur with his own marketing and public relations firm. Having seen his beloved Pennsylvania be fractured by the new unconventional drilling known as fracking, he does not want to see the damage spread even farther. He has been speaking in many New York towns to warn New Yorkers what is in store should we allow drilling to begin in our state.
The Dansville Fish & Game Club will host speaker Craig Stephens tonight, Thursday, Oct. 11 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Stevens is a four-time national award-winning National Rifle Association master trainer, and advocate for clean water access as a right, he lives in “gasland” — Susquehanna County, Pa. He recently spoke at a Tea Party meeting in Vestal.
He is a sixth-generation landowner in Silver Lake Township, Pa., and fifth-generation Oswegonian (New York). In January 2010, soon after his father passed away, he moved back into his ancestral home, eight miles from the New York state border and just 15 miles from Dimock, Pa., where the water of 19 homes was contaminated on Sept. 11, 2008. The state found that Cabot Energy’s faulty Marcellus shale gas wells caused methane to contaminate those families’ water. Although Cabot denies this, the company had been supplying water to those families for two years until state environmental regulators decided last October that the drilling company no longer needed to provide them with fresh water. Eleven of the families whose water was contaminated appealed the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection decision on the grounds that state law requires drillers to permanently restore or replace water supplies they poison.
Craig Stevens has been one of the foremost critics of the regulatory-state collusion with gas companies and has been a leader in the fight to restore clean water to his neighbors in Dimock. The state, Stevens said, has “turned its back on the people of Dimock.” In December he put out a call for volunteers with tanker trucks to deliver bulk water to the families, with a goal is to get at least 20 volunteers to commit to one day a month each. He bought a truck, hired a driver, and secured access to a water hydrant. He is getting donations to help with the deliveries from the Pennsylvania-American Water Co. in Lake Montrose, a municipal water supply several miles from Dimock.
Since then the fracking contamination has moved closer to Stevens’s home; it’s now right down the road in Franklin Forks, a mile from his home. He has now expanded the water delivery to Franklin Forks.
Stevens is an entrepreneur with his own marketing and public relations firm. Having seen his beloved Pennsylvania be fractured by the new unconventional drilling known as fracking, he does not want to see the damage spread even farther. He has been speaking in many New York towns to warn New Yorkers what is in store should we allow drilling to begin in our state.
