Monday
November 16, 2009

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Trout fishermen opposed shale fracking under current plans

PORT EWEN – The New York State Council of Trout Unlimited, a coldwater fisheries conservation organization, has gone on record opposed to an “exploitation” of the Marcellus shale gas deposits until “crucial issues” are resolved.

Chairman Ronald Urban said the group is concerned about the fracking water and the possibility of it getting in the streams and rivers contaminating the waterways.

Urban said he believes the state DEC, which has drafted a preliminary environmental impact report on the extraction of natural gas from the shale in Sullivan County, the Southern Tier and other areas of the state, will in the end, do the right thing and resolve the many unsettled questions.

The DEC has extended comment period for a month until the end of December, but Urban would like to see it go longer than that.

“For the hundreds of thousands of years that the gas has been developing down in the shale layers, I don’t think another six months, a year or two years even is a lot to ask to make sure we are safe for the future and protect the future,” he said.

Fracking is a procedure of forcing liquid at high pressures into the shale in order to extract the natural gas from it.

 

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