MUST SEE TV-HBO’S GASLAND

The Costs of Natural Gas, Including Flaming Water
Mike Hale, June 20, 2010 (NY Times)

"Gasland a documentary making its television premiere on HBO on Monday night after winning a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, is maddening in several distinct ways.

"The first is the way its director, Josh Fox, intended…[A] soberly muckracking film about the health and environmental dangers of the current nationwide rush to drill for natural gas, [it] will light a flame in you…[like] the flames Mr. Fox films sprouting from people’s kitchen faucets or from the surfaces of polluted creeks, in places where methane has turned water into a fire hazard."

CAN YOU DO THIS WITH YOUR TAP WATER? from JOSHFOX on Vimeo.

"Mr. Fox lives in northeastern Pennsylvania above the vast Marcellus Shale formation…[into which] energy companies have rushed to sink wells employing the controversial technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which millions of gallons of water and chemicals are pumped underground to extract natural gas trapped in the shale. The film came about, he says on screen, when he received an offer from a company to lease his 19.5 acres with an upfront payment of nearly $100,000. Rather than take the money, he begins investigating stories he has heard of ruined water wells and sickened families…

"…[V]isiting landowners and drill sites in states like Colorado and Wyoming, where fracking has been practiced for years…he finds flammable, foul-smelling water, sick people and animals, and families who no longer use their wells but truck in all their household water (usually bought at Wal-Mart). In some cases oil companies provide the water after settling lawsuits."

Trailer

"The accumulation of stories and sympathetic faces is persuasive; it’s buttressed by testimony from scientists like Theo Colborn and Al Armendariz, named regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency in Dallas…Comparisons to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will be unavoidable…The oil and gas industry has already been busy condemning the film and disputing Mr. Fox’s assertions…[H]e makes it [easy] for the film’s critics to attack him…[and] difficult for sympathetic but objective viewers to wholly embrace him…

"Like a less manic Michael Moore…Mr. Fox shows a general preference for vivid images — bright red Halliburton trucks, beeping but unidentified scientific instruments — over the more mundane crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of investigative journalism… As the film progresses, the lines between fracking and oil and gas production in general become blurred…"