by: Steve Corson and Jonathan Mandell | 3/2/2009

A house blows up in Ohio. A family in Alabama turns on the faucet and instead gets “long, oily strings” and a “strong sulfur smell.” A farmer in Texas discovers his goats and llamas dead. These are the kind of scary stories that may soon be coming to New York. It would be an exaggeration to say “courtesy of Dick Cheney,” but it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate.

It turns out that New York State may have the largest deposit of natural gas in the world, trapped beneath a huge rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale, which is spread out through some 28 counties in the state (and several other states as well, from West Virginia to Pennsylvania.) Unfortunately, this includes the five counties that make up New York City’s “watershed,” the pristine area where we get our drinking water.

The gas is as deep as 7,000 feet beneath the surface, so deep that it needs a special drilling technique, horizontal hydraulic fracturing,  which could have grave consequences for the NYC watershed.  Our report, “Uncalculated Risk” ( really big pdf file)  details the checkered history of hydraulic fracturing, including a widely disputed endorsement by the Environmental Protection Agency and over two dozen instances of leaks, spills, contaminations and explosions in nine other states.

“When it comes to the watershed, there’s no room for mistakes, and frankly no room for compromise,” said Craig Michaels, watershed program director of Riverkeeper  said at a press conference in front of the Central Park Reservoir.

And where does Cheney come in?  Reports  said his office resisted attempts by the staff at the Environmental Protection Agency to include concerns about hydraulic fracturing's  effects on the environment. Before he was vice president, Cheney was the head of Halliburton, one of the companies most invested in the drilling.