Toxic Wastewater Dumped in Streets and Rivers at Night

Gas Profiteers Getting Away With Shocking Environmental Crimes

August 15, 2012  |   AlterNet

Ken Dufalla sits at a table inside Laverne’s Restaurant on Route 188 in Waynesburg, PA. The former park ranger, 65, is sporting a camouflaged trucker’s hat and enjoying Laverne’s cream of chicken and biscuits with mashed potatoes. It’s midmorning, between the breakfast crowd and the lunch patrons. Waiters and waitresses are attentive and the coffee is flowing.

Before long, Dufalla is joined by a former Marine and Vietnam veteran, 67-year-old Ken Gayman, who dons a black and gold USMC ball cap. The two former Beth-Center High School wrestling practice combatants sprinkle the conversation with passages from the Constitution and speak about defending land and property. The two men are members of an association, but it’s not the Tea Party.

Dufalla and Gayman are members of the Izaak Walton League of America, one of the earliest conservation organizations in the country and according to the national Web site, “formed in 1922 to save outdoor America for future generations.” If the stereotypical environmentalist is still imagined as sandal-wearing and tree-hugging, Dufalla and Gayman will quickly wipe away such caricatures. They are a couple of blue-collar guys, no different than anyone else in Greene County. They simply see what’s going on around them and they don’t like the looks of it.

Dumping Onto the Streets at Night

On March 17, 2011 Greene County resident Robert Allan Shipman and his company, Allan’s Waste Water Service Inc., were charged with illegally dumping millions of gallons of natural gas drilling wastewater, along with restaurant grease and sewer sludge across six counties in Pennsylvania from 2003-2009. Pennsylvania is one of several states that sit atop the gas-rich underground rock formation the Marcellus Shale. Hydraulic fracturing, the process used for retrieving the gas, is a water-intensive drilling method that not only requires massive volumes of water to unlock the gas, but also generates millions of gallons of wastewater when the drilling is done. 

(More here.)