Department of Environmental Protection Secretary John Hanger's defense of his department against a recent ProPublica article demonstrates his problem ("DEP Will Remain Vigilant to Protect Waterways," Oct. 16). Under considerable pressure from the governor and the Republican-majority Senate, Mr. Hanger has accommodated the gas exploration industry while still attempting to protect the environment.

The gas industry is almost totally deregulated from federal environmental laws. DEP is the only hope for us, who fear our region's ruin by an industry unaccustomed to any restraints. Mr. Hanger's schizophrenic approach has earned him our distrust.

The industry played him. After his best efforts to accommodate it, it has used its considerable clout in Harrisburg to have DEP's budget cut by 27 percent, three times that of other departments.

The Marcellus Shale has the lowest extraction cost of any shale deposit in the country. It contains high-quality gas that fetches an additional premium for being near its end users on the East Coast. We can expect an explosive ramping up of drilling activity just at a time when DEP will need to cut hundreds of employees, likely including oil and gas staff.

Secretary Hanger's responsibility is to Pennsylvania's environment, not the gas industry's bottom line.

JON BOGLE
President
Responsible Drilling Alliance
Williamsport, Pa.

DEP's nonsolution

While it is encouraging that the Department of Environmental Protection's "permanent solution" to managing the wastewater from gas drilling will take effect on Jan. 1, 2011, when new regulations kick-in, I would like to know what the DEP intends to do with all the wastewater from drilling over the next 14 months. At over a million gallons per frack, that is a substantial amount of pollution that DEP apparently intends to address according to the false logic that "the solution to pollution is dilution."

If the recent disaster on Dunkard Creek has taught us anything, it is that continually dumping these types of wastes into our waterways is just plain deadly.

I challenge Secretary John Hanger and DEP to respond to a recent article's claim that regardless of the arrival date for regulations, facilities for managing total dissolved solids simply do not exist yet in Pennsylvania. The earliest build-out is not expected to be complete until 2013 and the commonwealth would need 50 just like it to manage the wastewater from Marcellus drilling expected in 2009.

No regulation can make up for this obvious technological gap, and on this point I hear silence from DEP and Mr. Hanger. Until we have the facilities to process waste from hydraulic fracturing, the mandate of the Pennsylvania DEP is to protect the environment by stopping the practice. The gas will still be there when the treatment facilities are finally ready. Better yet, since this is a scarcity-based economy, the price of gas will likely be that much higher by 2013.

CASSANDRA McCRAE
Mt. Lebanon

The Marcellus facts

The Post-Gazette's efforts over the past month to try and connect the natural gas industry to water concerns in the Monongahela River and Dunkard Creek have, in turn, generated letters that misrepresent the process of developing natural gas from the Marcellus Shale. These errors must be refuted with facts:

Natural gas produced from the Marcellus Shale formation is a clean-burning energy source that is extracted safely and regulated stringently by the commonwealth.

The Department of Environmental Protection lists 19 different sources that contribute to total dissolved solids in the Monongahela River. On the other hand, the department acknowledges that more than 90 percent of the TDS loading results from coal mining and at no time did oil and gas wastewater contribute more than 5 percent of the river's TDS loading. The Post-Gazette continues to focus on wastewater from drilling activity, when the state has limited sewage treatment plants' intake of this water to 1 percent of the plant's total flow.

Hydraulic fracturing has been an integral part of oil and natural gas production for more than 60 years. DEP and other states have stated there have been no known impacts to groundwater from hydraulic fracturing. Claiming otherwise is simply fear-mongering.

The theory that golden-brown algae "hitchhiked" from Texas or some other state on drilling equipment has been advanced solely by the Post-Gazette. None of the regulatory authorities investigating the Dunkard Creek incident has supported such a theory as anything more than one of countless other theories.

Claims of streams "sucked dry" have no merit. Water withdrawals must be permitted and are limited to less than one-half of 1 percent of a stream's average daily flow.

Finally, coupling DEP's budget situation to concerns about natural gas development, as the paper did in a recent story, ignores a very important fact: The state has hired almost 40 additional oil and gas inspectors in the past several months through permit fee increases.

We encourage readers of the Post-Gazette to get the facts at www.pamarcellus.com.

TOM LOPUS
Executive Vice President
Appalachia Quest Eastern Resource LLC
Warrendale
The writer is a member of the executive committee of the Marcellus Shale Committee, a coalition of businesses involved in developing natural gas in Pennsylvania.

Making history

When the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation was founded in 1964, it was little more than a handful of concerned citizens who believed that historic preservation should be the center of economic development.

They made a name for themselves in Manchester, the Mexican War Street neighborhoods and the South Side, on occasion standing in front of bulldozers to prevent the loss of architecturally significant and historic buildings. They were labeled obstructionists and troublemakers, yet they remained true to their mission.

Urban planners fought them at every turn, even though the group had proven that a smaller preservation-based Main Street development approach was reinventing Carson Street on the South Side.

To prove their model could work on a larger scale, PHLF leased and eventually acquired the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Rail Road complex and turned it into a $100 million-plus development with a net public investment of less than $700,000 -- and it paid taxes. After PHLF sold the property with preservation easements in place, it invested sale proceeds in its preservation programs. Today we continue to benefit from Station Square.

This year the Coros visiting fellows cited PHLF as Pittsburgh's leading non-profit innovator. On Nov. 11, the Western Pennsylvania Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals will recognize PHLF as its 2009 Outstanding Philanthropic Organization.

Recently, sports and politics have brought us international attention, but we owe some of our quality of life to the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation for its never-wavering commitment to protect the places that make Pittsburgh home.

JACK MILLER
Director of Planned Giving
Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation
Station Square

Public option will shred insurance jobs

Out of all the nonsense that we've heard from President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on health care and their obvious push for a government option, I've yet to hear anyone say a word about job losses.

I'm talking about the job losses that will be in the hundreds of thousands if not more in the health-care industry if a bill passes with a government option. Despite all the talk we all hear from these Democrats about how they're for working families, I've yet to hear one ounce of concern from them about the working families that will be impacted by the destruction of private insurance companies.

The government option will cause a death spiral to the private industry. As they begin to lose business they will be forced to raise premiums on their accounts that remain while cutting administrative costs, meaning employees. As these premiums rise they will lose more and more business to the government option, meaning they will have to lay off more and more employees. This cycle will continue until the companies eventually go under.

I guess the Democrats will accomplish their goal of a single-payer health-care system, while at the same time causing countless numbers of working families to join the ever-growing list of unemployed. I'm sure they'll just blame George Bush.

JASON JOHNSON
Munhall

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