If the company goes ahead with plugging the well, it will be a cause for celebration, said Stacy Long, chair of the town’s board of supervisors, who has played a prominent role in the fight against the “injection” well. But she is holding back until the work is done.
“We have to see it to believe it,” she said. “This is 10 years, and everyone told us, ‘You can’t fight the gas company.’ We did anyway, and now we have this plugging, and if it happens, I’m going to say whoopee. But I’m not getting excited until it happens.”
Regardless of the outcome, Long said she will continue to educate the public on threats to water as part of a community group called the East Run Hellbenders, which adopted the name of an imperiled local salamander that needs clean water to survive. The animal, officially designated as an endangered species in some parts of the central and eastern United States, was adopted as Pennsylvania’s state amphibian in 2019.
Long said it’s not clear whether the well-plugging plan was really driven by the geological problems, or by the town’s long campaign against it. But she argued that the decision to end plans to site an injection well for frack waste in an area where all residents depend on private water wells vindicates the town’s opposition.
“We aren’t sure why they are plugging a well, but nobody plugs a well that’s working,” she said.
If the plugging plan goes ahead, it will add to the earlier closure of about half a dozen PGE gas wells in the township, leaving the company with no further business there, Long said. Given that, it’s unclear why the company is continuing to pursue its federal court case against the town, she said.
