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Kate Wofford: Congress should accept Valley’s caution on gas drilling

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A dozen Shenandoah Valley residents and I went to Washington last Friday, where I served as a witness at a congressional oversight hearing. The focus was a U.S. Forest Service proposal to ban a controversial natural gas drilling technique – horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing – from more than one million acres of public land in western Virginia.

We listened to members of the U.S. House of Representatives, gas industry lobbyists, and even Virginia’s own deputy director of natural resources, insist that horizontal gas drilling would solve the nation’s economic and energy woes with no threats to local water supplies or communities.

There’s just one problem. In the conservative Shenandoah Valley, elected officials and residents studied gas drilling in other regions and are skeptical of this rosy scenario.

Three Valley counties and two cities – Augusta, Rockingham, Shenandoah, Harrisonburg and Staunton – specifically asked the Forest Service for restrictions on this type of gas development on the George Washington National Forest, at least until increased federal and state regulation and oversight are in place.

So last Friday, I found myself defending the importance of local communities’ voice in public lands management planning to members of Congress insisting they know what is best for the Valley.

At issue is the draft management plan for the GW National Forest, which represents 29 percent of all the land in Augusta County and 24 percent in both Rockingham and Shenandoah Counties. The forest provides public drinking water to 260,000 residents in and around the Valley. The management plan will have a major impact on local land use and water supplies for at least 15 years.

In 2007 (three years before natural gas drilling emerged as an issue here), the Valley’s elected officials started asking forest planners to identify and protect drinking water sources on public lands. Forty local governments and civic organizations, representing 340,000 residents, adopted resolutions urging the Forest Service to manage public drinking water quality and supply. The Forest Service included improved protections in the draft management plan.

In early 2010, Rockingham County supervisors were faced with a zoning request for the state’s first proposed natural gas well to horizontal drilling and hydrofracking. The process involves injecting millions of gallons of water and chemicals more than a mile underground to break up Marcellus shale and release natural gas.

The Shenandoah Valley has no history of, or strategy for, intensive energy development on its rural lands. In fact, local governments have long-supported rural economic development based on productive working farm and forest lands and robust tourism and recreation sectors. Water supplies are limited, with planners looking for ways to cope with future shortages.

So Rockingham County officials drove five hours each way to visit Wetzel County, WVA, where this type of gas drilling is in full swing. In West Virginia, they saw farm land bulldozed for wastewater holding ponds and drilling pads, narrow rural roads chewed up by heavy truck traffic, extensive pipeline development on farm and forest land, compressors that run all night, and mountain streams sucked dry to provide millions of gallons of water used for horizontal drilling. They talked to landowners and emergency response crews. Not one person came back from that trip and said, “This is an industry we’d like to develop in the Shenandoah Valley right now.”

Local landowners are just as wary. Joining me at the Congressional hearing was Everett May, Jr. of Rockingham County, whose family has farmed land next to the national forest for several generations. He signed a lease for gas drilling in 2006, thinking it would be a simple vertical well. Then he learned about impacts of hydrofracking in other farming communities.

Mr. May told me that he would give that shale gas lease back if he could. But he can’t. So he, and many of his neighbors, asked elected officials to take a conservative approach to hydrofracking on private lands and to make sure the Forest Service didn’t open up adjacent public lands to this industrial land use.

The U.S. Forest Service listened. The “preferred alternative” in the plan for the GW National Forest permits smaller and less intensive vertical gas wells on nearly a million acres, but would ban horizontal drilling to protect drinking water supplies and traditional uses of forestland. The restrictions are just for the George Washington and can be revised when the risks are better understood and managed.

The draft GW National Forest plan reflects careful analysis by the Forest Service, as well as the priorities of Shenandoah Valley local governments and residents. This cautious approach to one type of gas drilling in one place is not a precedent for other parts of our nation.

Virginians need to reassure the Forest Service that the agency is doing the right thing in listening to the locals. Send your comments to: [email protected] by September 1st.

Kate Wofford is director of the Shenandoah Valley Network of citizens groups working to preserve rural lands and communities and strengthen the Valley’s rural economy.

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