What a frackin' jerk.
Posted on 12/02/2011 9:47:55 AM PST by Erik Latranyi
State police arrested a man who worked at a Marcellus Shale drilling site in Bradford County for dumping 800 gallons of dangerous materials.
Troopers says Josh Foster, 27, from Georgia admits he dumped the chemicals on state game lands in Warren Township.
State police said the man worked for Talisman Energy at one of its drill sites near the dump location on Regan Hill Road. Troopers said Talisman was cooperating completely with the investigation.
In arrest papers it said a drilling superintendant from Talisman met a state trooper at the scene of the spill. He told the trooper that someone intentionally dumped the substance used in drilling and said that substance is dangerous. It looked like an area of black sludge on the ground. That superintendent estimated about 800 gallons were spilled.
An internal investigation by Talisman led them to Foster. A passenger in a truck with him said he told Foster not to dump the chemicals because it wasn't right, but Foster did it anyway.
The arrest papers said in an interview with State Police, Foster admitted to the crime.
He is charged with "scattering rubbish." He is locked up in Bradford County on $100,000 bail.
That happens to me all of the fracking time. I wonder what kind of fracking fluid it was though. The other day I spilt fracking Coke on my pants at the drive through. Frack.
Funny thing is that the punishment would be exactly the same if he had dumped milk or vegetable oil.
Perhaps it’s a... “lubricant”?
Knowing that this can occur, the industry should have procedures to track those materials. It shouldn't be necessary when the problem is this loser dumping inappropriately, but the enviros are likely to set up more dumping incidents, whether this was real or staged, and the industry needs the procedures for self-protection.
Wow. We don't fool around in PA with scattering rubbish. $100K bail ain't chump change. I am guessing that this nitwit was in a rush to get to the bar. Why else would you do something so outrageously stupid.
They do. That is how they pinpointed it to a particular driver.
Oh, Frack!
It should be fairly easy to adopt a procedure that when somebody leaves the drill site with X amount of waste, that the site gets an email or text message when he arrives at the approved disposal site with it.
In NJ, mob-run waste management companies used to roll out tankers on rainy nights, with the valves open, and just cruise the highways until empty. Maybe they still do.
A friend in South Carolina bought an old farm. He found two 55 gallon drums of used motor oil. After taking it to several county dump sites and being turned away, he ran a hose into each on and through the bottom of the truck bed and drove around with the oil dripping out until it was all gone. He said, “I couldn’t dump it on my property as it would contaminate the well. I couldn’t get anybody to take it and I tried everywhere. What was I going to do with it?”
The dump site in my county told me they wouldn’t take the two 8’ florescent light bulbs and I’d have to take them to the larger dump site which is a 90 mile round trip. (This beside the fact that they had six old fashioned tube TV’s sitting in the recycle area and last week had a huge load of florescent tubes there as well.) I brought them home, wrapped them in tape, crushed them, and put them in the trash bags for the next week’s delivery.
I’m as interested in the environment as the next guy, but they want me to take certain types of AAA batteries to the main dump too. Sorry. Ain’t gonna happen.
Internal tracking at the company level is evidently in place, as is the case at most fracking operators. Tracking at the government or "accredited agency" level is nothing more than a feel good waste of resources.
Think of all the "certified" e-waste recyclers out there. Although there is a "tracking system" for electronic disposal and accreditation process for companies wishing to gain lucrative gov't contracts endorsed by feel-good environmentalists, do you know where all this e-waste ends up? I'll spare you the details, but it sure as hell isn't improving the environment and likely is doing further damage than landfill disposal in the first place. The only difference is: some lib got rich in the handoff.
Maybe he owns the truck? When I worked in the oil field in the late 70s early 80s, I heard about independent guys doing this kind of stuff all the time with fluids hauled off the lease. Usually it was just salt water with other oil and crap mixed in. It wasn't unusual to go down a back road and see a trail miles lone where he cracked a valve and drove off. It saved him paying for disposal.
It got so bad at one point, under cover cops, working with my company would follow the waste haulers all the way to the disposal site where they pumped it back into dry holes. One scumbag was backing into what looked like a turn around but behind it had a fairly steep hill that ran down into a reservoir. They caught him, but an entire hillside was wiped out for years. It was apparent that he'd been dumping there for some time.
Fracking fluid from deeper down, however, we're not so sure about.
Flat out sabotage. They need to do better job screening these jobbers...I hope they do background checks.
This isn’t the first time this happened in my area. Probably won’t be the last.
Thanks. I wasn’t looking at it from the economic standpoint. I immediately went to someone being lazy. Saving cash makes way more sense.
What a frackin' jerk.
The guy is an idiot, pure and simple. Had to know he would be caught. State even has eye witness to testify against him.
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