Drilling Resumes In Allegheny National Forest

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 25, 2012 | 11:30 AM

Natural gas drilling has resumed in the Allegheny National Forest, according to the Tribune-Review.

The oil and gas industry has resumed drilling in the 512,000-acre Allegheny National Forest while several court challenges against the practice work their way through the federal courts, an industry lawyer said on Tuesday.
Matthew Wolford, an attorney representing the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association and the Allegheny Forest Alliance, said an Erie federal judge’s December 2009 order made it clear that companies don’t need the U.S. Forest Service’s permission to drill.
“That’s been the law in Pennsylvania for over 100 years,” Wolford said.
Joe Walsh, a national spokesman for the Forest Service, declined to comment.