Above: Swimmers and fishermen including Noah Rave, age 11, of Lackawaxen, Pa., enjoy the scenic Upper Delaware River on a hot summer day in River Park in Lackawaxen, Pa.
Above: This view of the Upper Delaware River is at the mouth of Basket Creek, near Long Eddy, N.Y.
The Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River, part of the National Park Service's Wild and Scenic Rivers System, stretches 73.4 miles along the New York-Pennsylvania border.
Above: A natural gas drilling rig run by Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation drills a well on Jean Blaisure's farm in Elk Lake, Dimock Township, Pa. Overall, about 200 gas wells have been drilled in Dimock in the past two years, where drinking water wells became contaminated with methane and other chemicals; Pennsylvania had over 77,000 wells as of 2009.
Left: Craig Sautner of Dimock, Pa., holds a bottle of his contaminated tap water collected in March 2010. Their water problems started in September 2008 after natural gas drilling on their property a month earlier. “Our water smells of diesel fuel,” Sautner says. “In our water, we’ve found aluminum, manganese, chloride, iron, magnesium, sodium, strontium-T, all above the EPA limits, and TDS [Total Dissolved Solids] and other elements we can’t disclose yet.”
Jan. 6, 2011 O-Town Scene 17
