Fed Up Farmer Uses Pickup to Block Frack Trucks

• Susan Phillips
  BioRecent Stories

  

  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.

For the last several weeks Jefferson County farmer Mike Bennett grew increasingly frustrated watching gas drilling related rigs drive past his farm on a road forbidden to heavy truck traffic. Bennett says the continuous convoy of trucks with Texas plates were heading to a well up the road operated by Dannic Energy. He says the trucks bore the name Pumpco, a fracking company based in Texas.
At a ten ton limit, Sheplar Road in Reynoldsville, Pa., is not built to handle the more than 100 ton trucks carrying water to frack a well. And Bennett says the drilling company did not bond the road. So if it’s destroyed by the truck traffic, it’s up to Henderson Township tax payers to foot the repair bill. Bennett called his elected township supervisors. He spoke to workers at the well site. He got nowhere. So, he then waved down the trucks to tell them they were on the wrong road. They disagreed. He asked for permits. They laughed.
“They were real beligerent,” says Bennett. The problem is, Sheplar Road provides a short-cut that Bennett says shaves 10 to 12 miles off the trucker’s trips. He made calls to the state police, who told him unless they catch them red-handed, there was nothing they could do. So on Friday, February 17, after Bennett watched five trucks drive by, he decided to help the state troopers catch their prey.
“I figured, I had had it,” says Bennett. “I said, dammit, this is it.”
Bennett got into his own pickup truck and drove it onto the road, creating a blockade. He had his wife call the state troopers and his township supervisors. He says the truck drivers weren’t happy.
“I told them they weren’t going any further because the road is not bonded [for their trucks],” says Bennett. “The first truck driver, he says he doesn’t have any papers, then he came up with one. His supervisor came down and he insisted he was going through. I said go ahead, run over my truck.”
Soon, a traffic jam of tractor trailers lined the tiny rural road. The township supervisors arrived just as the trucks were trying to back up. But Bennett says the local pols prevented that from happening by driving their own cars to the other end of the road, and blocking their exit. The state troopers arrived, along with a weight van from the state Department of Transportation. The trucks were weighed, and the troopers issued fines and citations. Then they made the trucks turn around and take the prescribed route.
But Bennett says the troopers didn’t have high hopes for their efforts.
“They told me the company could go to a judge, and the judge would drop the fines,” says Bennett.
Despite his efforts, Bennett also thinks his act of civil disobedience came to naught. “I watched several trucks drive by today,” he said.
Neither Dannic Energy, based in Indiana, Pa., nor Pumpco responded to several attempts to seek comment.

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