Philadelphia City Council Wants to Delay Drilling Near Delaware River

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

October 13, 2011 | 4:06 PM

Philadelphia City Council members want the city to join environmentalists and the New York Attorney General’s office in suing the federal government to stop fracking. In May, the New York A.G.’s office filed suit against the Delaware River Basin Commission. The lawsuit seeks to prevent the DRBC from implementing any new gas drilling rules without doing an environmental impact study first. In August, several environmental groups filed a similar suit.
On Thursday, City Council unanimously passed a non-binding resolution asking the city’s law department to file a “friend of the court” brief in support of a continued moratorium. It’s unclear whether Philadelphia’s law department will act on the resolution. The DRBC has a temporary moratorium on natural gas drilling in the Delaware River Basin until new regulations are approved. The Commission is scheduled to take up those proposed rules at a meeting in November.