the areas of northern PA where my friend’s family owns lots of land – well it’s gorgeous, untouched, and a last bit of beauty. however, they’ve been approached to lease their land for fracking, and while it hasn’t been touched yet, they will lose their vacation home where their families grew up, all the memories, trees, houses, animals, all GONE when fracking starts. all for a few hundred bucks a month? not worth it. maybe for the people who live there and earn very little.

please do yourself a favor and watch Gasland. yes, it’s quite biased, but it also gives a lot of great information that will open up your eyes.

xoxo!

I too wonder what will happen to my town. I imagine almost like a mini Detroit, just a disaster.

We also had an energy boom in the 80s that went bust. My parents said their were pickup trucks for sale on every corner becuase people could no longer afford the gas. People lost their houses, many sat vacant for years.

We Currently have a huge energy boom going on in Western North Dakota (Bakken Formation) right now. The town I live in was about 15,000 pre-boom, now I would guess 25,000. We simply don’t have the proper infrastructure in place right now, it all just happened so fast.

Housing Prices have more than doubled in the last 5 years. One bedroom no frills apartment that used to rent for $500 is now going for $1300. Even if you are willing to shell out a large amount of cash for rent each month it is very unlikely you will find a place to live. Many people are so desperate for housing that they are living in their cars.

Our help wanted section in the newspaper takes up 3 full pages. Fast food places are so desperate that many are starting at $15 an hour. These restraunts are having to reduce their operating hours becasue there is no one to staff them.

I don’t know how people who lived on a fixed income are getting by. Many are being forced to leave this town that they have called their home for decades because they simply can not afford to live here.

I live in the Poconos and many people/companies/etc have been offered money and have signed contracts/leases with gas companies. Other people I know were in negotiation to sign contracts and the gas companies backed out because they found out that there were more deposits of shale in Western PA and the companies moved there instead. I guess this just goes to show that these small towns don’t know when everything will “dry” up and like I said before I am interested in what, if anything, these people are doing to prepare for the inevitable.

And I have to wonder if an accident related to fracking could result in a similar situation to what happened in Centralia. Probably not exactly the same, with the underground fires (I don’t know that much about the details of fracking though, so maybe?), but widespread contamination of the water could conceivably render an entire town unliveable, particularly if the majority of the town relies on well water, which seems to be common in a lot of the rural areas near me. Are these companies willing to pay to relocate the residents of an entire town should this happen??