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Protect PT Legal Fund

The Facts

Protect PT is a nonprofit community organization working to protect the safety, security and quality of life for residents in Penn Township, Trafford, Level Green and surrounding areas.

Please join us in our new crowdfunding campaign. Your donations will be used to help fund our legal efforts as we continue to fight fracking near homes, schools and playgrounds.

We have only begun to see impacts on our community in the form of noise, lights and truck traffic from 50-plus wells proposed by Apex Energy, LLC, Huntley & Huntley, Inc., and other sites being permitted in neighboring Salem, Derry, Hempfield and Washington townships.

A legal fund will help us fight the December 5, 2016 decision by Penn Township Commissioners to settle an overreaching $380 million lawsuit that allows three previously denied permits to proceed even after the Zoning Hearing Board denied them. Furthermore, Apex has threatened to refile the suit if their remaining, previously unheard permits are not approved, holding the township hostage for ransom.

Can They Be Trusted?

Your donation during this campaign will be used to pay legal fees in order to take back the power of our local Zoning Hearing Board to rightly deny these unconventional well applications and to strengthen resident protections by challenging the Mineral Extraction Overlay (MEO) we worked so hard to eradicate.

Adding insult to injury, on December 1st, residents near the Quest site (drilled 600 feet from an assisted living facility by Apex in 2015) reported a “rotten egg smell,” which was found to be the additive mercaptan. DEP told Protect PT they didn’t know mercaptan was being used or that the well was tied to Dominion Peoples Transmission’s pipeline. DEP cited Apex for failure to have a site-specific Prevention, Preparedness and Contingency (PPC) plan “prior to using, storing or generating regulated substances on a well site.” (Lack of a site specific PPC plan is also an issue at Huntley & Huntley’s Poseidon site.) In reviewing Apex’s sites for Penn Township, we’ve found that they plan on dumping waste at Westmoreland County landfills that include Valley Landfill in Penn Township.

On January 12th, Dr. Ranajit Sahu, an engineering expert hired by Protect PT, testified before Penn’s Zoning Hearing Board, condemning Huntley & Huntley’s plans for the Poseidon Well Site.


Sahu stressed the importance of site-specific testing and modeling, which has not been done. He also addressed concerns about lead leaching into groundwater from a firing range near Poseidon and Huntley & Huntley’s lack of oversight of this issue. Sahu said that Huntley & Huntley’s expert testimony, which cited that residents are exposed to ubiquitous toxins already in the air, is “irrelevant.”“That is different from facing involuntary risk; risk that is impacting me for which I get no benefit. One has a risk benefit attached to it, the other has only risk and no benefit attached to it, and you cannot commingle the two.”

Organizer

Gillian Graber
Organizer
Trafford, PA
Promote Pt
 
Registered nonprofit
Donations are typically 100% tax deductible in the US.

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