SRBC Lifts Water Withdrawal Suspensions

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  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.

Last week the Susquehanna River Basin Commission suspended water withdrawals in five counties. That means natural gas drillers were barred from taking water out of the Susquehanna and its tributaries. Since hydraulic fracturing uses millions of gallons of water at a time, this suspension slowed down operations for some companies.
It rained over the weekend, and that was good enough for the SRBC to lift those suspensions, as of today. In a tweet announcing the news, the commission warned Pennsylvania’s water levels are still below normal. The USGS website shows how low surface water is across the state.
Want to know more about what these low water levels mean, and whether or not withdrawal suspensions will go back into effect? Listen to witf’s Radio Smart Talk tomorrow morning at 9. Officials from both the SRBC and the Department of Environmental Protection will be on the show, discussing the drought-like conditions.

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