DIMOCK, Pa. (AP) — Meeting with a man whose well water has been polluted for years, officials in the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office asked him whether he’d consider accepting a treatment system from the gas driller charged with fouling his aquifer.
Highlights
- Dimock, Pennsylvania, is one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S.
- drilling and fracking boom.
- Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock.
- Residents want to be hooked up to public water — itself a controversial idea in their rural community, one that state environmental officials talked up more than a decade ago but ultimately abandoned.
- Some residents reject individual water treatment systems as inadequate and unworkable.
- The pushback illustrates the delicacy of the attorney general’s task in a place synonymous with the fracking debate, where acrimony and distrust are the default.