Town of Danby, NY : Gas Drilling

2010-09-03 12:26:40.28

The Danby Gas Drilling Task Force has developed two surveys. The first survey is an on-line version of the questionnaire about water wells, gas wells, and land in Danby, that was published in the December 2009 edition of the Danby Area News. You can find it at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YourLandAndWater. The second survey was designed to learn about what people know, think, and feel about the development of natural gas. You can find it at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YourViews. These surveys take only a few minutes to complete. Please share them with your friends and neighbors so that we hear from as many Danby residents as possible. Thank you!

The draft SGEIS was released on September 30; comments are due to the NYS DEC by December 31.

The dSGEIS document is available from the NYS DEC web site.
There is a cover page which has links to each section (15 separate PDF files) or you can fetch the entire 809 pages in one big file.
In addition, the Final Scope document, a precursor to the dSGEIS, gives some background on how the dSGEIS was prepared.

Printed copies are available at NYS DEC offices, and some libraries may have them as well, but your best bet is via the web. If you download the "one big PDF", it'll be more easily searchable for key words and phrases.

Danby has prepared an official response to the dSGEIS, along with an appendix containing land use maps of Danby.

The Danby GDTF has also prepared an informative flyer highlighting gas drilling issues.

Two documents comparing Greenness / Emissions of Natural Gas with other energy sources:

Howarth Gas-vs-Coal Draft Document

How Green is Natural Gas

Alphabet Soup, expanded...
SGEIS	== Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement
DEC	== Department of Environmental Conservation
NYS	== New York State

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We have prepared three letters that you can send to our congresspeople. They talk about a law that will provide at least some Federal supervision of the type of gas and oil industry operations expected in the Danby area.

We hope you'll send the three letters and, if you can, it would be great if you could add a personal sentence or two to each letter. In addition, to make this effort more effective, please tell your friends (whether in Danby or not) about these letters and ask them to do the same.

This way, the people in Washington, D.C. will feel pressure from us to get this bill through Congress. Thank you.

Here's a little bit of background about these letters:

• FRAC Act: Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act of 2009
• Bill Numbers: H.R.2766 and S.1215
• Summary from the Congressional Research Service:
  Amends the Safe Drinking Water Act to: (1) repeal the exemption from restrictions on underground injection of fluids near drinking water sources granted to hydraulic fracturing operations under such Act; and (2) require oil and gas companies to disclose the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations.
• New York State Representatives Hinchey, Maloney, Hall, Massa, Tonko, and Arcuri are co-sponsors of the house bill; Senator Schumer is a co-sponsor of the Senate bill.
• The bill has been referred to committees for consideration and action (House: Committee on Energy and Commerce; Senate: Committee on Environment and Public Works). In addition, Senator Gillibrand is a member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
• Links to complete status information about each bill
• House Bill H.R.2766
• Senate Bill S.1215

Document List
Document Type	Date / Number	Description / Links
SCHUMER	20091001	HTML | PDF
HINCHEY	20091001	HTML | PDF
GILLIBRAND	20091001	HTML | PDF
FLYER	2009	PDF