Emergency Services Stretched in Pennsylvania’s Top Drilling Counties

Part one of a two-part series. Read the sec­ond report here.

Emer­gency ser­vices in drilling-heavy Penn­syl­va­nia coun­ties face a trou­bling para­dox: even though their pop­u­la­tion has fallen in recent years, 911 call activ­ity has spiked —  by as high as 46 per­cent, in one case.

StateIm­pact Penn­syl­va­nia sought 911 data from the 10 Penn­syl­va­nia coun­ties with the most active wells last year. Seven of the eight drilling coun­ties that responded saw 911 calls or inci­dents increase in 2010, just as cen­sus num­bers showed a dip in the per­ma­nent pop­u­la­tions of most those communities.

The rise in emer­gency calls is part of a long-term trend for Tioga County, where more than 130 drilling wells are active. Before drilling took off, the county’s 911 inci­dents had been steadily decreas­ing. Tioga han­dled 19,446 emer­gency inci­dents in 2007. That num­ber jumped nearly 30 per­cent, to 25,155, by 2009. (There’s no 2008 data, due to a change in the county’s track­ing software.)

• Emer­gency Ser­vices Stretched In PA’s Top Drilling Coun­tiesStateIm­pact Pennsylvania’s Scott Detrow reportsDown­load

Tioga County’s calls grew another fif­teen per­cent, to 29,007 inci­dents, in 2010, and it’s on pace for another fif­teen per­cent increase this year, with 16,051 inci­dents through June 30th.

Lisa Rice, who runs Tioga County’s 911 cen­ter, said many of the calls stem from the heavy trucks clog­ging the county’s roads. “We’re see­ing more acci­dents involv­ing large rigs,” she said. “Trac­tor trail­ers, dump trucks. Vehi­cles – trac­tor trail­ers haul­ing haz­ardous mate­ri­als. Those are things, two years ago, that we weren’t deal­ing with on a daily basis. It was more two-car accidents.”

Rice said before the heavy trucks came in, 20 traf­fic stops on a day shift was nor­mal. Now, the county sees about 20 stops in a one-hour period. Dis­patch­ers sit­ting in Tioga County’s 911 call cen­ter, located in the county courthouse’s base­ment, say they’re see­ing sim­i­lar spikes. A few years ago, they’d han­dle 15 to 20 calls dur­ing an eight-hour shift. Now, the total is more likely to sur­pass 70.

The increase is tax­ing Rice’s oper­a­tors, espe­cially since many of the calls are com­ing from — and caused by — tran­sient drillers who aren’t from Penn­syl­va­nia, and don’t know the area. Tioga’s call cen­ter is respon­si­ble for neigh­bor­ing Pot­ter County, so emer­gency ser­vices cover an area the size of Delaware. Callers aren’t sure what road they’re on, or what town­ship they’re in. “So that takes up a lot of time,” said Rice. “A call from a res­i­dent – a per­ma­nent res­i­dent – who can tell me in 30 sec­onds where he’s at becomes a 3 or 4 minute inter­view, try­ing to fig­ure out where that caller is at.”

Tioga’s next-door neigh­bor, Brad­ford County, has seen a spike in calls, too. The county, which has about 170 wells, han­dled 16,140 calls in 2008, 18,116 in 2009, and 19,989 in 2010 – a 10 per­cent increase in the last year.

The most dra­matic increase is McK­ean County, where inci­dents jumped 46 per­cent from 2009 to 2010, from 17,002 to 24,983.

Up and Down

Scott Detrow / StateImpactPA/WITF

Com­mis­sioner Mark Hamil­ton at a Tioga County pipeline con­struc­tion site

More calls, more traf­fic but lat­est cen­sus totals show pop­u­la­tion decreases in six of the eight coun­ties over the past decade. At a time when thou­sands of tran­sient drillers have swarmed Tioga County, for exam­ple, its pop­u­la­tion grew less than two per­cent. “In real­ity that is just not true,” said Repub­li­can Com­mis­sioner Mark Hamil­ton. “Numer­ous camp­grounds have sprung up. We have a ton of peo­ple who are liv­ing on well sites. We have man camps that have sprung up. And I don’t think any of those have per­ma­nent addresses,” he said.

Those “campers” aren’t counted in cen­sus totals. Hamil­ton said Tioga County is con­sid­er­ing request­ing a cen­sus recount, but is lean­ing against the action, since the county would need to foot the six-figure bill, and likely wouldn’t see much of a dif­fer­ence in its final totals because of the way fig­ures are counted.

Some Excep­tions

It’s not an across-the-board rise in drilling com­mu­ni­ties. Greene County, which hosts more than 200 wells, held rel­a­tively steady over the last three years: 48,822 calls in 2008, 51,287 in 2009, and 49,940 last year. And while Lycoming’s calls increased five per­cent from 2009 to 2010, they were higher in 2008.

And not every emer­gency offi­cial is as con­cerned as Tioga’s Rice. Brad­ford County’s direc­tor of pub­lic safety, Robert Barnes, said his 911 oper­a­tors are han­dling the increase just fine. “We’re chal­lenged by the impact of the gas indus­try, but we’re cer­tainly not over­whelmed,” he said.

Barnes is con­cerned that traf­fic jams caused by drilling trucks are slow­ing down emer­gency response times. “We’re impact­ing the abil­ity of the vol­un­teer emer­gency respon­ders to get to the fire­house to get their equip­ment to go to emer­gency calls,” he said. “I can’t tell you exactly how much time we’re adding to a call, but prob­a­bly a minute or two, per­haps. Which can be a lot.”

Doing More With Less

To make mat­ters worse, the county has lost 911 oper­a­tors over the last few years, going from 20 to 15 staffers. Rice is con­fi­dent the decrease is an indi­rect con­se­quence of drilling, which is flood­ing the com­mu­nity with high-paying jobs.  Peo­ple are leav­ing their county posi­tions for the big­ger paychecks.

Tioga County’s Lisa Rice she stood in the mid­dle of the dimly lit call cen­ter and pointed to Sheila Delosa, one of the county’s most senior dis­patch­ers. “Our abil­ity to keep peo­ple like Sheila is going down, as the indus­try is com­ing in and tak­ing peo­ple that would stage for the wage we’re able to pay. Young folks like our trainees can prob­a­bly go some­where else and make more money.”

Click here to read about how Tioga County offi­cials are wor­ried they’ll need to hike prop­erty taxes to bol­ster their stretched resources, and whether an impact fee on nat­ural gas drillers would solve the county’s problem.