The Green Scarves of Protect our Parks

by Jo Resciniti

My family took a hike in a park near our home one Sunday at the beginning of January. We could hear something as soon as we entered the woods that day. It sounded like the train we often hear on weekday mornings, but unlike a train, the sound never passed by. A little further on, we started to smell diesel fuel and engine oil and then something acrid that was accompanied by a foul taste.

My husband, Tim, and I hike daily with our little dog, often at Deer Lakes Park. On weekends, our whole family chooses a park, often an Allegheny County Park, as the setting for a longer hike. On that Sunday, January 8, 2023, we’d settled on the Orange Trail at Deer Lakes Park.

Alarmed by the noise and the smell, I checked the noise level using an app on my phone. The sound level was 55 dB. Tim looked up the distance to the Gulick well pad, a fracking site constructed to extract methane from our park. We were 2,300 feet away. We passed by the Gulick site as we continued on the muddy Orange Trail. By the time we could see the drilling rig and a continuous flare at the site, my nose burned and my daughter’s eyes were watering. We all felt sick for the rest of that day, whether from breathing those fumes or from the anxiety of thinking about the damage caused by breathing fracking pollution.

In 2014, Allegheny County was faced with a proposal to lease subsurface mineral rights to Range Resources to extract gas that would be accessed by a well pad next to one of its nine parks. County residents banded together to form Protect Our Parks (POP). POP spent countless hours advocating for county council to protect public lands. Under extreme political pressure to give Range and other fracking companies a foothold in Allegheny County, the council voted in favor of the lease. The Gulick well pad was constructed along the eastern border of Deer Lakes Park.

It was years later when Tim and I got involved with Protect Our Parks, a group I noticed while watching hours of public comment recorded and uploaded to YouTube. POP members wore bright green scarves to the many information sessions and public hearings that preceded the vote to frack next to Deer Lakes Park. We were looking for any help we could find to protect our home from two planned well pads in West Deer Township where we’ve lived since 2009, so when I recognized one of the “green scarf” people, I reached out.

A few POP members helped to prepare our community group, Concerned Residents of West Deer (CROWD), for hearings about the first of two well pads in our community. Relying heavily on the experiences of POP and other community groups, CROWD was able to shine a light on significant deficiencies in the operator’s plans. The West Deer Township supervisors denied the application for the Dionysus deep well site at the end of December 2021.

In 2022, with the Allegheny County Council composed of many different members than the council that voted to frack Deer Lakes Park years prior, a bill was introduced that would ban industrial activity in county parks. POP came out in force to testify to the harm caused by drilling under Deer Lakes Park and the need to protect the other eight parks from resource extraction. The group had two monumental wins last summer when Allegheny County Council voted in favor of the ban and then voted again to override County Executive Rich Fitzgerald’s veto of the ban. It was too late to protect Deer Lakes Park as the bill could not cancel existing leases, but Protect Our Parks was able to preserve Allegheny County’s precious green spaces in eight other communities.

At the end of 2022, POP again organized to protect Deer Lakes Park from further harm. Range Resources plans to add a compressor station to the Gulick well site requiring a minor source air permit from the Allegheny County Health Department. Tim and I were working with the group to review the air permit application when our family had an unexpected encounter with Gulick well site, an industrial operation that county residents were assured would never impact the park.

Range Resources is drilling three additional wells at the Gulick well pad this winter. PA DEP lists the spud dates (drilling start date) in September, so our January encounter was quite unexpected. We’d been seeing a strange bright light above the tree line as we approach Russellton, the little town at the entrance to Deer Lakes Park. It wasn’t until we witnessed the drilling that we realized the bright alien light is the drill rig, shining ominously over West Deer.

A handful of POP members attended the Allegheny County Health Department’s public hearing for the Gulick well site compressor station air permit on January 18 in person with many others providing written comments. The meeting was held in a large cafeteria-type space at a Goodwill in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood. The HVAC system was loud and the ductwork was banging. ACHD didn’t bring a microphone, so POP members had to stand at the front of the room and yell their comments. Three Range Resources employees sat huddled at a table in the back. ACHD representatives appeared unmoved by personal stories and a detailed review of Range Resources’ air permit application deficiencies. The health department hearing officer thanked us for our interest in the air permit. The whole thing was over in less than 30 minutes.

It’s unclear how we’ll be notified of the result of the air permit hearing, whether we’ll get a follow-up email from ACHD or if we’ll hear and smell a compressor station one day while hiking in the park. The Gulick compressor station was the first involvement most local activists have had with ACHD permitting for a gas compressor because fracking has been slow to infiltrate Allegheny County. Whether it’s more difficult to find appropriate sites in areas with higher population density or the Pittsburgh fracking ban provided a temporary protective buffer, fracking has only been able to push into the margins of the county. We’re only now seeing an uptick in compressor station applications that will likely give us more opportunities to review air permit applications and use our outdoor voices to belt comments into poor acoustic environments.

Resident oversight of applications for air permits and new fracking infrastructure is critically important. Protect Our Parks continues to monitor Allegheny County parks and surrounding communities to hold industry accountable to environmental standards and ensure that any new developments follow all municipal, county, and state regulations. Almost ten years into the fight to protect Allegheny County parks, there have been wins and losses. Green scarves have been misplaced. Members have drifted in and out of the group. Through it all, POP is building solidarity to advocate for the health and well-being that we know is possible in Pennsylvania. We encourage you to get involved where you are to protect a park or a stream or a tree and don’t be afraid to be loud when you do it.

Reach out to info@concernedresidents.org to be put in touch with Protect Our Parks. Subscribe to Allegheny County Environmental Health Public Notices here.