Pennsylvania Flooding Didn't Lead To Any Drilling-Related Problems

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

September 16, 2011 | 10:34 AM

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

Flooding at the Governor's Residence in Harrisburg

Yesterday, we reported how drillers weren’t required to tell the Department of Environmental Protection whether or not they shut down operations, due to flooding.
The Patriot-News has taken a look at the larger issue of whether or not flood waters caused any drilling-related damage. Reporter Donald Gilliland’s conclusion? It wasn’t “the fracking mess some people thought.”

Yes, some well pads had standing water.
Yes, some of the storage and transfer areas for drilling materials were inundated with river water.
But the industry plans for severe weather events, representatives say.
The state Department of Environmental Protection said there were no reports of drilling related pollution incidents.
“Almost every operator in northern Pennsylvania uses a closed loop system; we simply don’t have many flowback pits up there,” said Chris Tucker, of Energy In Depth a Washington-based industry group.
“No evidence — zero — exists anywhere indicating that any serious environmental issues relating to Marcellus development came about as a result of this flood,” said Tucker. “Talking to operators, none of them have reported any problems at all.”

The story also detailed a moment of embarrassment for environmental advocate PennFuture, who posted a picture of a flooded well pad on its Twitter account, only to later acknowledge the image came from Pakistan, not Pennsylvania.