Capstone Cultural Event 1 "It's a gas" Gasland presentation

As part of their "Documented: Recent Political Documentaries" film project, the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies presented the film Gasland.

Gasland by Josh Fox, is a documentary about the pollution of the United States by natural gas drilling.  Needless to say, he was not for pollution.  He started out the movie just investigating the pollution in Pennsylvania, but soon ended up going across the country investigating towns that had reports of severe pollution.

The first place he went that looked really bad was Dimock, Pennsylvania.  The drilling/fracking process had poisoned the local water, making the tap in people's home produce yellow and brown water.  He had the water tested and they found natural gas contamination along with chemicals used in drilling.  I thought that evidence was pretty damning, but the companies stated that the natural gas could have just contaminated the water well naturally.  And didn't have anything to do with the recent drilling...  At all.

The entire movie was a back and forth between the director and the gas companies, except without the forth.  None of the natural gas companies would talk to him (which is understandable) but that reduced the movie to mere speculation.  There were good points, and he made the gas companies look like they were hiding something in their silence but the companies probably just didn't want to respond to some random guy making a documentary about pollution.  Chances are good he wouldn't paint them in a good light, not to mention he's not really a big trusted name in the industry.

At the end of the movie Dr. Ed Snyder held a question and answer session.  Ed Snyder is the Shepherd University Environmental Science professor and worked for 8 years at Shell.  He didn't think natural gas was as bad as the movie made it seem and insisted that natural gas was still a cleaner alternative than oil-based fuel and a much safer alternative to coal.  He also mentioned that a lot of the chemicals found in the Dimock water was harmless to humans and just passes through the body naturally.  Most of the questions were asked by only two people.  But most Q&A sessions are like that.

The one thing that Gasland and Ed Snyder only touched on briefly was the air pollution that came from the drilling.  Josh Fox used a thermal device to show a leak in one of the tanks holding the used water.  Fracking forces water into the ground and creates intense pressure that pushes out the lighter natural gas. The used water; containing drilling chemicals, natural gas, and whatever other minerals from the ground is stored in tanks and open sludge pits, and those tanks were leaking something into the air.  People living nearby were complaining of intense migraines and nausea and one farm was constantly bombarded with thick white mist.  People can stop drinking tap water, but they can't do anything about the air.  Though it wasn't as dynamic as brown flaming water so I guess it wasn't important.