Dozens of Activists Arrested in Battle Against a Fracking “Gateway Drug” in New York
November 21, 2014
Dozens of Activists Arrested in Battle Against a Fracking “Gateway Drug” in New York
Residents of New York’s Finger Lakes argue that gas projects would spell ecological and economic disaster for the region.
BY Molly Bennet
Tens of thousands of years ago, as massive sheets of ice moved across river valleys in what’s now west-central New York, they cut 11 deep grooves that eventually became the Finger Lakes. Some 390 million years before that, in the sea that once covered the Appalachian Basin, algae and other organic matter mixed together with mineral particles and settled, a black sludge that was transformed over millions of years into the Marcellus Shale, the gas-rich rock formation that stretches from New York down to West Virginia. And as the sea dried up, it left behind huge deposits of salt, which began to be mined in the nineteenth century, creating a honeycomb of hollowed-out caverns deep underground.
Today, this geological history is at the heart of a battle being waged by Finger Lakes residents to stop two proposed gas storage projects they believe pose a grave risk to the ecology of region and the people who live there—projects that, in the words of biologist and author Sandra Steingraber, threaten to “turn us into an extraction colony for investor profits.”
On Wednesday evening, Steingraber was taken away in handcuffs from the small town hall in Reading, New York, alongside 86-year-old Roland Micklem and Colleen Boland, a retired Air Force sergeant. All three had pled guilty to trespassing on the property of Crestwood Midstream, a Houston-based natural gas company that stores fracked methane in giant underground salt caverns along the western shore of Seneca Lake, the largest of the Finger Lakes.
Steingraber, Micklem and Boland, who each chose to spend 15 days in jail rather than pay the $250 fine, are among more than 50 people who have been arrested over the past four weeks during a series of blockades to protest Crestwood’s plans to expand its methane storage in the salt caverns by a third. (Micklem ended up being released Thursday due to health concerns.)
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http://inthesetimes.com/article/17394/new_york_finger_lakes_fracking