For Immediate Release

January 15, 2021
Contacts:

B. Arrindell, Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, dcs@DamascusCitizens.org

Maya van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper, keepermaya@delawareriverkeeper.org

Wes Gillingham, Catskill Mountainkeeper, wes@catskillmountainkeeper.org

Jeff Tittel, Director, New Jersey Sierra Club, jeff.tittel@sierraclub.org

Doug O’Malley, Environment New Jersey, domalley@environmentnewjersey.org

Tracy Carluccio, Delaware Riverkeeper Network, tracy@delawareriverkeeper.org

From the Organizations Working for the Complete Fracking Ban
Lawsuit by PA GOP to Overturn Fracking Moratorium Decried
Organizations see attack by fracking shills as thinly veiled industry grab
Read more about the lawsuit in PA Environment Digest.
Download the full Press Release as a pdf.

Delaware River Watershed – Organizational leaders denounced a lawsuit filed this week by Pennsylvania Senators Gene Yaw and Lisa Baker, the PA Senate Republican Caucus and Damascus Township, PA in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The complaint against the Delaware River Basin Commission asks the Court to find the current de facto moratorium on gas drilling and fracking invalid, saying that the DRBC overstepped their authority.

A diverse coalition of organizations that have been working for more than a decade to keep the fracking industry out of the Delaware River Watershed criticized the Pennsylvania lawmakers as servants of the fracking industry who are attempting to politicize an environmental and public health issue. The groups vowed to fight to defend the watershed, which supplies approximately 17 million people with drinking water – including New York City and Philadelphia – from any and all attempts to open it up to fracking and its related activities.

“The Pennsylvania Constitution, Article 1, Section 27, the Environmental Rights Amendment, actually places clean water, air and land squarely within that oath of office. By referring to only their optimistic guesses of monetary returns from speculative business ventures and not the actual value of the clean water, air and land guaranteed to Pennsylvanians today and into the future, the plaintiffs in this lawsuit ignore both the known damages caused by fracking (see the Compendium) and the externalization of the costs of liabilities allowed by the exemptions held by the gas and oil industry to major provisions of seven different protective federal laws. The PA DEP has declared over 300 homes and businesses in PA to have had their water sources impacted by gas and oil drilling and this reflects only a portion of those impacted – ones who fit a narrow set of criteria to get to that determination.” B. Arrindell, Director of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability continued, “The DRBC’s appropriate and correct protection of the Delaware River Basin by it’s current moratorium is all that stands between the Basin and costly damages where fracking is being done.”

Background:

The moratorium was put in place by a unanimous vote of all four Governors (PA, NJ, NY, and DE) and the federal representative from the Army Corps of Engineers representing the President in 2010. The de facto moratorium on gas drilling, fracking, water withdrawals, and wastewater discharges from fracking throughout the Delaware River Watershed was nearly ended in 2011 when the DRBC Commissioners were set to vote on gas drilling regulations that would have allowed gas drilling and related operations to start. But the Governors expressed opposition to the allowance of fracking in the hours leading up to the vote, citing water quality concerns, and the moratorium has been in place since then.

Pennsylvania’s support for a drilling moratorium in 2010 by then-Governor Ed Rendell has been carried forward over the last decade, solidified with the vote of Governor Tom Wolf in 2017 for a resolution adopted by DRBC to institute a permanent ban on all fracking throughout the Delaware River Watershed. The DRBC is informed by and decisions regarding the river’s shared waters are made by the state’s Governor, not the Legislature. The concept of watershed-based management that recognizes that rivers unite political jurisdictions and serve shared goals that support water quality and healthy habitats above self-interests was pioneered in the nation when the DRBC was formed in 1961 by President John Kennedy and the Watershed states.

Organizations and the public have rallied continuously since 2017 for a full ban on fracking in the Delaware River Watershed, including a ban on frack wastewater processing and discharges and water withdrawals from the river to fuel fracking anywhere. The final vote on a full ban on fracking and its activities is pending at the DRBC.

The lawsuit can be read here: https://bit.ly/3ny4cG0 .