Restore this great state with controls on gas exploration

It was refreshing to read that Andrew Cuomo has entered the race for governor of New York, and has aligned himself with the goal of restoring the State to its former greatness.

As both a lawyer and candidate for the New York State Assembly in the 136th District, I have great respect for the job he has done as Attorney General in steering the state away from the decadent policies of “pay to play” in Albany, while helping steer the stock market away from what could have been a more disastrous outcome in 2008.

Hopefully, Cuomo will continue to plumb New York’s past in search of future greatness. One way is by rejecting the proposal for allowing gas well drilling in the Marcellus shale layer of rock underlying central and south-western New York, including Yates and Steuben Counties.

He should align himself  with the strong history of New York in leading the nation in moving to protect our natural resources from the blight of total industrialization.

Gov. Theodore Roosevelt was a pioneer in appreciating and protecting New York’s natural, mountainous environment and its equally unusual waterway systems.

His efforts at the end of the 19th century to preserve our natural wonders were matched 70 years later by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller who led the legislature to pass the N.Y. Environmental Conservation Law, the first of its kind in the nation.

Now the state could risk all those pioneering steps to extricate itself from the depths of a serious financial crisis.

Although the financial shortfall  is likely to last only about one or two years, state officials are considering a quick fix, by allowing the drilling of natural gas by a new method. It allows horizontal pipes to extend underground like the arms of an octopus, out from the original mother well, and under surrounding properties. This untested method of horizontal, high volume, hydro-fracking uses large volumes of water and toxic additives. The process is supposed to bring on a “gold rush” effect in gas well drilling, which in turn is supposed to bail New York out of its financial mess.

I am referring to this method of drilling as untested because its creators and handlers realized 10 years ago that this engineering system would almost certainly cause damage to clean water supplies.They proceeded with a forceful legislative maneuver in Washington in 2005, under the Bush-Cheney regime, to have this new method of gas drilling exempted from both the federal Clean Water Act and also the Clean Drinking Water Act.

This same method has damaged natural water supplies in Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. But because of the 2005 exemption, the gas drilling industry has neither had to collect nor disclose the information about the operation of this method of extraction of natural gas that it otherwise would have been required to make public, until last year.

As a result, scholars and scientists did not have the information to study or test claims about this new engineering technique.  That is why this new engineering technique should still be considered as potentially dangerous to the environment and the public health.

Nobody knows if an accidental spill could cause a toxic spill to reach an underground aquifer, and travel for some distance to reach or pollute Keuka’s or another lake’s waters. Nor, to my knowledge, does anyone know, if this did happen, how to locate such a pollution source at the bottom of a lake, or how to clean up the lake after it occurred.

Hasn’t reliance on engineer’s promises and loose regulation of the drilling industry left us with a perhaps unsolvable oil pollution problem in the Gulf of Mexico? Don’t think something similar couldn’t happen here.

Unfortunately, rational thought could, in this situation, be obstructed by “gold rush” fever, as well as by the desire of irresponsible politicians to shield their respective careers from public disgust about the state’s current weak financial condition.

Andrew Cuomo should resist the temptation to obtain a quick financial fix, and place reliance on scientific and scholarly evaluations of this new method of drilling.

For the good of the general public, he should distrust the ingenious, but potentially dangerous, solutions of engineers searching simply for greater profits for themselves and their corporate employers.

He should support the continuation of the current moratorium on issuing drilling permits by the DEC until the federal government completes its review and re-study of the horizontal, high volume, hydro-fracking drilling process, and makes its recommendations as to the future use of this process.

Mathewson, of Penn Yan, is a Democratic candidate for New York Assembly, 136th District.