Natural gas drilling still creating headaches--and riches--for rural residents

Two recent stories in the New York Times have reported on the local consequences of natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania and New York. Read these stories here and here about drilling in the Marcellus shale formation.

The more recent story, by Jad Mouawad and Clifford Kruass,"Dark Side of a Natural Gas Boom," features the dateline Dimock, Pennsylvania, population 1,398. Its focus is on pollution caused by the drilling, in particular, groundwater contamination. In Dimock, 13 wells have been contaminated, and one blew up. But the story also touches on pollution of other sorts, like noise pollution. Here's an excerpt:

The hills around Dimock have been bulldozed to clear the ground for dozens of drilling pads the size of football fields. Eighteen-wheelers thunder down narrow country roads, kicking up dust and fumes. Recently, a helicopter buzzed overhead while dangling heavy cables used for seismic tests.

The dateline for the earlier story, "At Odds Over Land, Money and Gas," by Mireya Navarro, is Chenango, New York, population 11,454. This story appeared in the Environment section of the paper, but it has a significant human interest angle. Navarro observes the complex, mixed reactions in the "rural communities above the shale," concerns similar to those across the state line in Pennsylvania.

Some residents welcome the drilling as a modern-day gold rush and salvation from the economic doldrums that they say have chased jobs and young people away from their area. Others express concerns about the environment and quality-of-life issues like noise and heavy-truck traffic.

In some cases, the issue has pitted neighbor against neighbor or spouse against spouse.

Read more here, and don't miss this earlier post about drilling in the Marcellus shale.

Growing old in rural America

Don't miss Kirk Johnson's story, "For Elderly in Rural America, Hard Times Get Harder," in the New York Times. The dateline is Lingle, Wyoming, population 510, and some of the other elderly folks he interviewed live in places like Oshkosh, Nebraska, population 887, and Torrington, Wyoming, population 5,776.

Johnson notes the debate among those who study rural America regarding whether rural elderly can stay put during these tough economic times, when many programs serving them are being cut. He quotes Teresa S. Radebaugh, director of the Regional Institute on Aging at Wichita State University, in support of the position that the "fortitude of the rural elderly simply runs too deep" for them to leave their homes. Radebaugh says, “The people will remain, because they’re rooted and anchored to the land. They'll stay no matter what.”

Here's an excerpt from the story that I found particularly interesting, even heartening:

It is in fact quite easy to find older people who take comfort in the surroundings they have known since they were young, however difficult things have become. Memory is everywhere, and hardship has been the norm in life, many say, so what’s new?

But an equally important reality, gerontologists and psychologists say, is that people who have managed to reach great age in a tough environment have, in turn, been toughened by the experience.

Attachment to place and hardship are among a range of characteristics associated with rural places that are reflected in the story, which is very poignant and well worth a read. The photos accompanying it are very powerful, too; see them here.

NPR ran a story today that picked up some similar themes, e.g., aging and population loss, but also happier ones like entrepreneurship and hope. It is here.

NB: As of noon on the day Kirk Johnson's story appeared in the print edition, it is the fifth most emailed story at nytimes.com.

Federal government to pay $3.4 billion to settle Indian trust claims

Read this report by Charlie Savage in the New York Times. This settles a class-action lawsuit filed in 1996 and in which 300,000 American Indians have a stake. Savage explains the suit's basis--essentially that the federal government mismanaged trust accounts of which Indians were beneficiaries:

The dispute arises from a system dating to 1887 under which the government set up trusts to manage tens of millions of acres of land owned by individual American Indians and by tribes. The acreage is scattered across the country with the heaviest concentration in Western states.

The Interior Department manages leases on the land for activities like mining, livestock grazing, timber harvesting and drilling for oil and gas. It then distributes the revenue raised by those leases to the American Indians.

One aspect of the problem is that ownership of the Indian lands has become "fractionalized" with each successive generation. Savage gives the example of a 40-acre parcel of land worth $20,000 in which 439 persons have an interest. Fees to manage so many trusts are as much as $40,000, which eats into the prophets the shareholders might otherwise enjoy. The settlement will seek to alleviate this problem, in part by establishing a $2 billion fund to buy out those who are willing to sell their interests.

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part XLII): Property crime on the rise

The top story in the December 3, 2009 issue of the Newton County Times is "Thefts reported on increase in area." The lede is:

Local authorities investigating a number of vehicle thefts in Harrison, Carroll County and Newton County, although it wasn't immediately clear they are all related.

The story, however, focuses on a single incident of vehicle theft and sighting of the stolen vehicle in two neighboring counties, Boone (population 36,482) and Carroll (population 27,299). It then notes two other car thefts and a motorcycle theft in neighboring Boone County.

Other crime news includes these stories on the paper's back page:

"Middleton faces federal drug charges." This story is a follow up on earlier reports of Middleton's arrest for drug charges; see blog post here. This report indicates that Middleton has been charged with four felony counts of distributing methamphetamine "after a multi-agency arrest that included a chase with a helicopter" in early November. The story does not make clear why the charges are federal rather than state.

"Hunting violations lead to felony arrests." This story reports that the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission was investigating "road hunting" in the Shiloh community when he noticed the odor of marijuana on two people he was interviewing. The county sheriff subsequently arrested the men, a father and son aged 47 and 21, for possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, possession of drug paraphernalia, simultaneous possession of drugs and firearms and numerous game and fish violations.

Distance as an obstacle to health care delivery in Indian Country

A story in the New York Times earlier this week proclaimed good news for American Indian health care in the form of stimulus dollars and other federal funds flowing to the Indian Health Service. Describing a meeting in Washington last month between Obama and the leaders of 564 tribes, Pam Belluck writes that health care was at the top of leaders' wish lists. Obama is quoted as acknowledging disparities in health care delivery for American Indians, and specifically the high rates at which this population die of a range of illnesses, e.g., diabetes, alcoholism, pneumonia, influenza, and even tuberculosis. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota calls for an appropriate federal response to the “full-scale health care rationing going on on Indian reservations.”

While a great deal of the "rationing" described is due to lack of funding and staff shortages, the story also makes frequent mention of distance as an impediment to delivery of health care for Indians. Interestingly, it also provides two specific illustrations of challenges to Indian health care delivery in urban contexts. Here are some excerpts regarding rural locales and attendant spatial challenges:

Too few doctors. Too little equipment. Hospitals and clinics miles of hardscrabble road away.

* * *

Money shortages, bureaucracy and distance can delay treatment of even serious conditions for months, even years.

* * *

Treating large swaths of the Hopi and Navajo reservations — the Navajo alone is the size of West Virginia — is inherently difficult.

* * *

Ruby Biakeddy’s six-sided hogan, a traditional Navajo home, without running water or a phone, is an hour’s drive on a dirt road from drinking water, and even farther from diabetes and blood pressure medication.

* * *

Patients contribute to the frustrations. Nearly a third do not show up for scheduled surgery at Tuba City, often citing distance or cost.

Of course, better funding can alleviate some of these spatial challenges by enabling the provision of care in more places and with longer opening hours. Funding won't, however, solve all of the problems if, as Belluck observes, "providers and insurers, daunted by the alarming health problems, continue avoiding Indian Country."

New study finds greater than expected rural prosperity, mostly in the Plains and Midwest

Yahoo.news ran this story yesterday under the headline, "Rural America Surprisingly Prosperous, Study Finds." The study, by a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign economist, is based on 2000 data. It (or at least the yahoo news report of it) proclaims good news for rural America based on a finding that one in five rural counties is more prosperous than the nation as a whole. But I have a hard time getting excited about that 20% figure. That sounds more like bad news than good news for rural America. Furthermore, the degree of "prosperity"--or lack thereof--varies dramatically by region. The rate of prosperous rural counties was much higher in the Midwest (Illinois, Iowa, Indiana and "parts of six states surrounding them" were mentioned) than in the South and Southwest. In those latter regions, just one in 20 rural counties--a mere 5%--are more prosperous than the national average.

The University of Illinois study assessed "unemployment rates, poverty rates, high school drop-out rates, and housing conditions" as measures of "prospering communities." These metrics differ from the growth-oriented measures often used to assess prosperity. The study found that "[p]rosperous rural counties have more off-farm jobs, more educated populations, and less income inequality than other rural counties." According to the Yahoo report, some overlap does exist between prosperity and economic growth. Prosperous counties tend to have slow population growth, as opposed to the higher population growth rates associated with less affluent rural counties.

10-year-old girl "tased" in rural Arkansas

Law enforcement’s improper use of a taser is a concern that occasionally gains media-wide attention. For example, when a police officer used a taser on a 72-year-old great-grandmother during a traffic stop in May, both CNN and Fox News covered the story.

Recently, in rural Arkansas, a police officer tasered a 10-year-old girl. This story also attracted a considerable amount of media attention, including that of Fox News. The officer was dispatched to the rural home after the mother of the child reported a domestic disturbance. The mother reported that the girl screamed, kicked, and resisted when she attempted to get the child into the shower before bed. When the police officer arrived, the child kicked the officer in the groin. At the urging of the child’s mother, the officer then delivered a brief taser to subdue the child. The police report described the taser usage as a “very, very brief stun.” As of last report, the girl was not injured and is being held at the Western Arkansas Youth Center in Cecil, Arkansas.

The opinions of the town’s citizens concerning the incident differ dramatically. Police Chief, Jim Noggle explained the department’s actions and stated, "We didn't use the Taser to punish the child — just to bring the child under control so she wouldn't hurt herself or somebody else." Additionally, he supported the decision of the officer in question. However, the father of the child is outraged the incident occurred. He told the media, "My daughter does not deserve to be tased and be treated like an animal.” Further, the town’s mayor is now calling for either the Arkansas State Police or the FBI to investigate the incident.

Steve Tuttle, a spokesman for Taser, Incorporated defended the use of taser guns and said, “In some cases, a Taser presents the safer response to resistance compared with the alternatives such as fists, kicks, baton strikes, bean bag guns, chemical agents, or canine response”

To me, this story poses a lot of interesting questions. First of all, it seems strange that an unruly child would result in a mother calling law enforcement to her home. Additionally, why did the officer even attempt to subdue a child in the home after he learned of the nature of the “domestic” disturbance? Also, how did the incident escalate to the mother requesting the officer to taser her child; and, why did the officer comply? It seems there is something missing from this story concerning the relationship between the officer and the family. It seems at least possible that an officer would respond in such a manner as a result of his knowledge of the family. At the very least, lack of anonymity could have contributed to this shocking incident.

Rural roads--safer than we thought?

According to conventional wisdom, rural roads are more dangerous than urban and suburban thoroughfares. The very term might bring to mind two undivided lanes of blacktop, miles removed from emergency services and dotted with white crosses and impromptu memorials.

Over at NPR, an interesting piece examines how different definitions of "rural" may have contributed to a misunderstanding of how dangerous rural roads actually are. Specifically, under the broad catch-all definition of rural utilized by the Census Bureau (that has also been adopted by the National Highway Transportation Administration for determining accident rates), over 60% of fatal accidents occur in rural areas.

But as the NPR piece notes, "the portion of fatalities on rural roads drops to just 27%, according to Cromartie's [a USDA analyst] analysis, if only small towns (of less than 2,500) and the low-density countryside are included in the calculation. Throw together the cities, suburbs and exurbs (outer suburbs) and the urban share of fatalities rises to 70%."

According to the NPR piece, this rethinking of the urban/rural distinction with respect to highway safety seems to be taking hold. A new NHTA study revealed that, "a whopping 86% of traffic deaths occur in cities and in the first 10 miles of rural highway adjacent to cities. Just five miles outside of town the number is 73%."

The NPR piece reminded me of another set of stories the Sacramento Bee recently put out in the wake of a terrible accident just north of Folsom.

Drive safely everyone.

End of the line . . . literally

"[T]he old hotel, without a single light, tells you that the best days around here are gone." That's the story of Janesville, Wisconsin (pop. ~60,000), a small rural town that, up until last year, depended heavily on the General Motors plant there for jobs and a livelihood.

The plant closed down one year ago and now many of the town's residents are at a loss for what to do. How will they continue to live without a steady source of income?

Photo: Danny Wilcox Frazier, for Mother Jones

I ran across this article while randomly browsing a magazine in the bookstore. I thought I'd blog about it just because it seems to be such a prevalent occurrence. We've seen so many of these types of stories - manufacturing industry leaves small town, collapsing the local economy and leaving residents in shambles.

The Janesville Assembly Plant was everything in that town--'a birthright, a job for life'--for four generations. People there never wanted to believe that the plant would close. But according to one resident, "[i]t was always in the back of my mind around here...[t]hey can take it away . . . [w]ell, they did. Now what? Can't sell my house. Main Street's boarding up. The kids around here are getting into drugs. You wonder when's the last train leaving this station? I just never believed it was going to happen."

Today, the strip club across the street from the plant is an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting place, the local food bank serves 10 percent more people than it did a year ago, and there are people in the welfare line who never thought they would be there. After the plant closed last winter, unemployment in Janesville was among the highest in Wisconsin, but lately has gone down to 11%.

Photo: Danny Wilcox Frazier, for Mother Jones

Most factory workers who were laid off draw their salary for one year, and one-half their salary for the second year, but then they're out of luck. "We took it for granted," says Nancy Nienhuis, 76, a retired factory nurse who farms on the outskirts of town. "The rumor would start, they're talking about closing the plant. No one would believe it . . . [t]he manager and the worker sat next to each other in church, you see? They went to high school together. Understand?," said another. Richard, a former plant welder, laments, "I'm 62 and I'm delivering doughnuts. What am I going to do? . . . [i]t's a discouraging thing." Another resident, 61, says, "It was the lifeblood of this town. It was the identity of this town. Now we have nothing, nothing but worry."

While the lost income is a serious consequence of the plant closing, in a way, it also sheds light on a 'grass is always greener' kind of scenario. The folks in Janesville yearn for those monotonous, dangerous factory jobs they lost. However, thinking back, one resident described it, "You're a machine." [He put bumpers on trucks - three bolts, three washers, three nuts - every minute for eight hours]. "You just went home thinking nothing except the work tomorrow and your whole life spent down in that hole. And you thinking how you're going to get out. Well, now it's gone and alls we're thinking about is wanting to have it back." Maybe this is a call for redevelopment of cleaner industry. At the risk of sounding overly optomistic, when a town suffers a loss such as this one by GM, it's an opportunity to start over, to build up from ground level using new technology that will be kinder to both the mind and the body.

For now, Janesville's largest employers are Mercy Health System and the Janesville School District. There remains some hope that the old GM plant could re-open, retrofitted to produce new, greener technology like wind, solar and electric. Yet, it is a distant hope. Earlier this year, another GM plant in Michigan beat out Janesville as the site to produce GM's new subcompact small car. However, the Wisconsin state Democrats recently announced a program that would create jobs, particularly in green retrofitting for manufacturing industries. The Wisconsin Connecting Opportunity, Research, and Entrepreneurship (C.O.R.E.) Jobs Act is a comprehensive economic development package that builds on successful job creation programs and capitalizes on state strengths. It's top priority is to "rebuild Wisconsin’s economy, and put our men and women back to work." Hopefully, residents of Janesville will benefit from this C.O.R.E. program, should it be successful. The economic recession may have had a small lump of good in it - in that it has caused policymakers to take a second look at rural areas and see what kinds of renewal are possible there that will help both the local and national economies. There may be potential for Janesville plant if demand for green technology increases. Until then, Janesville remains on standby.

Mexican pot gangs infiltrate Indian reservations in U.S.

In keeping with a recent theme to the blog posts, I offer a second chapter to my earlier post regarding crime on Native American reservations, this Wall Street Journal article on how Mexican marijuana growers have taken up shop on the more rural Native American reservations. According to the article, tighter border control has lead Mexican drug dealers to move closer to their prospective customers. Until recently, their favorite hiding places were national park lands and national forests. While this is still a growing trend (the article states that officials raided pot “grows” in 61 national forests in 2009 up from 49 in 2008), drug enforcement is finding an alarming increase in major marijuana operations on Indian land. In Washington State, more than 225,000 pot plants were seized on Indian land in 2008, a ten-fold increase from 2006.

The Mexican drug cartels are picking Indian land for a few simple reasons: it’s closer and cheaper to produce their product and get it to market, many reservations have a sizeable itinerant population that includes migrant agricultural workers, and reservation economies are so bad many Indians, as well as illegal migrant workers, are getting paid to tend the crops. The police chief of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation (located in central Oregon, the reservation is 1,000 sq. miles over half of which is forested, with a population of around 3,700), stated that the cartel operating on the reservation was paying its "tenders" up to $2,000 a month. As the article points out, these payments have created an economy in these rural areas where few employment opportunities exist. Last year, Warm Springs law enforcement confiscated 12,000 pot plants, with an estimated value of $10 million dollars. Given the median annual salary of most rural Native Americans is $6,667, the drug jobs could be considered extremely desirable employment.


Photo: pot “grow” on tribal land in Washington


Perhaps the most important aspect for the cartels is the extreme rural nature of many reservations accompanied by a dearth of law enforcement. For example, the Colville reservation in north central Washington covers 1.4 million acres, has a population of around 5,000, but only 19 tribal police officers. On the Yakima reservation in south central Washington (2,185 square miles with a population of around 31,000), drug runners are believed to have planted hundreds of acres of marijuana and have even begun running weapons back to Mexico. The gunrunning from tribal lands in Washington has become so prevalent, Washington now ranks fourth in the Nation behind Texas, California, and Arizona, respectively.


Photo: Tribal lands are often so rural, helicopters must be used to get to the “grows.”


The article offers no answers. Answers may be more difficult to find than the marijuana. Is more federal involvement needed? This could create serious problems with jurisdiction and tribal sovereignty. Is the answer simply more money? More money for tribal law enforcement and better tribal economies would certainly help but these reservations are so vast and so rural, the cost of enforcement may exceed the benefits of that enforcement. Would legalizing marijuana perhaps be the answer? It may bring these cartels out into the open, or perhaps the legal market would destroy the need for these illicit operations much the same way the end of prohibition was the death knell of the rumrunners.

Bad basketball and rurality

A rather odd article in The New York Times, entitled "In Rural Indiana, Even Basketball Suffers," discusses the challenges that face a high school basketball team in Medora, Indiana, population 538. The challenges the article discusses really run the gamut - everything from rural poverty, low school and town morale, drug use, crime, low levels of education, broken families, female-headed households, to the dying economy.

The article focuses on the Medora Hornets, Medora High School's basketball team, and its first year coach Marty Young, who at 23, is the youngest head coach in the state. No other high school basketball team has as dire a record as the Hornets do. Last season, the Hornets were 0-22 and the school has won only one championship in its whole history - 1949. What I found so strange about this article was that it is not at all what I expected. In just the first few paragraphs, the article has all the ingredients for the "uplifting" sports success story: a group of "misfits," flagging morale, and a history of failure, etc. Add the unconventional young coach who motivates and supports the kids and you have the formula inspirational success story right?

Wrong. Just as I thought this article was going in the vein of The Mighty Ducks or The Benchwarmers, I got to the part of the article that reports that the young coach is not expecting "many, if any, on-court victories" this season either (emphasis mine). Even if the team's prospects are bleak, that's a very negative thing for a coach to say. I was a little taken aback at this point, but then Young redeemed himself with the next line of the article: "But he counts wins and losses differently from most. 'If they're in the gym these two hours, then I know they're not in trouble,' Young said."

Reassured by that quote, I was ready for the rest of the "inspirational" story, but the article just continued to be what I felt was unnecessarily negative and very subtly condescending. For example:

"In these depressed times, there is little to cheer but the high school basketball team. Except that it does not win."
...
"Medora, about 65 miles west of Milan, could be this generation's anti-Hoosiers." (Referring to the 1986 film Hoosiers, which was based on Milan's 1954 small-town team winning the state championship.)
...
"A few had natural ball-handling ability and smooth shooting touches. Most looked like extras from gym class."

The article also rather incoherently highlights some odd facts. It says that Medora HS is a small school (its senior class has only 16 members) and that the town's economy has been declining since the late 1980's when many of its largest employers began closing. It then goes on to quote Penny England, one of the students' mothers, as saying, "That's when, basically, Medora started falling apart." This quote is immediately followed by another block of strangely thrown-together facts:

"Now, Powell said, she is leery to be alone downtown where boys loiter. ('There ain't much to do in this small town,' Wes Ray, a senior basketball player, said.) She lives 'out in the boonies,' she said, where a neighbor was a 'meth head.' The home's three children (born to three fathers) sometimes ran over the hill to her house to escape his abuse. They are now in foster care. One is on the basketball team."

This strange hodgepodge of facts left me with a lot of questions. Is the author saying that the team's performance suffers because of its school's small size? Is it because the town has a poor economy? If it's the poor economy, which began declining in the late 1980s when the town started to "fall apart," why was the state championship just as elusive between 1949 and the late 1980s? What is the relationship between a poor economy and a high school basketball team's poor performance? Not enough funds for a good coaching staff? Good equipment? An adequate practice space? The article never really says.

And then there was that bizarre transition to Ms. Powell reporting that she is afraid to be downtown alone and the parenthetical quote from Wes Ray that there's not a lot to do in small towns. Is the implication that because there's not a lot to do in Medora, high school boys somehow prey on lone women in the downtown area for lack of something better to do? What does this have to do with basketball?

The author uses the reference to the "meth head" and the child in foster care as an opportunity to discuss the epidemic of broken families among the basketball players. He notes that several of the students see their coach as a father figure. Is the implication here that lack of a father figure results in poor sports performance? Or crime and drug use and lack of motivation? Perhaps not, but I found even that subtle suggestion offensive. Throughout the article, the author just seems to lay out facts and then fails to draw any connections between them.

Furthermore, the article casts Coach Young as a minor hero among a town of drug addicts, criminals, young hoodlums, and lazy adults - the author is sure to differentiate him from the rest of the Medora residents. Though Young himself grew up on a farm, the article notes that he did so "comfortably," attended a much larger high school, and even attended college. Here are a couple more excerpts that very clearly differentiate Young from the poor, uneducated Medora crowd:

"'I've been to college,' Young said. 'I've seen a lot of stuff. But these kids that I'm teaching in sixth grade know more about what goes on in the street than I ever thought of. This small, rural town.'"
...
"Young thought his best player last year, a senior who scored nearly half the team's points, was good enough to play in college. He used connection to get him tryouts. The boy did not show up for them, and now works at a nearby logging mill. 'It's a struggle when they're given a chance and don't take it,' Young said."

Nevermind trying to figure out what that student's reasoning for skipping the tryouts was - no money for college? Family to support? Who cares, right? At least the articles doesn't seem to. And whatever the connection is between having "been to college" and knowing "what goes on in the street" is beyond me. The only purpose I see in that quote is just another opportunity to highlight the coach's college education.

Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive about rural bias after having taken this class, but the article really seems to be unnecessarily and unfairly negative, not just about the basketball team, but about rural Medora as well.