Comments On Fracking Regs Flood New York Environmental Regulators

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.

January 9, 2012 | 3:24 PM

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has asked the state's Department of Environmental Conservation to draft new gas drilling regulations

How many people have written to New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation, as is weighs new rules allowing hydraulic fracturing within the Empire State’s slice of the Marcellus Shale?
More than 18,000, according to Gannett.

ALBANY — The responses came from Buffalo to Albany, Plattsburgh to Long Island, from across the Southern Tier and from as far away as Nevada.
Everyone from college students to senior citizens sent them in. A 6-year-old even responded. They were submitted online and written by hand, from elected officials to everyday citizens and business owners.
They are the 18,100 comments the state has received so far on its study of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, with each submission manually logged by Department of Environmental Conservation staff.