Marcellus Shale Press Coverage

ITHACA -- They stood on different sides of the podium on Thursday, but their message was the same: if the people lead, politicians will follow.

You might not expect the favorite in the polls to be the next governor of New York to be greeted by many protesters.

But that was the scene in Ithaca Thursday as Andrew Cuomo stopped through town on the campaign trail.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the building where Cuomo was scheduled to speak.

They insist that the draft general environmental impact statement, or DGEIS, would not fully protect the Southern Tier if and when hydro fracking is allowed in New York.

"Reject that draft, get rid of it, eat it, send it back to the drawing board," said Walter Hang.

"It's woefully inadequate," said Ellen Harrison of Caroline, NY.

Gubernatorial candidate to campaign in Ithaca, Montour Falls Thursday

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is scheduled to visit Tompkins County on Thursday as part of a statewide tour to support his campaign for governor.

Anti-drilling protesters greet gubernatorial candidate in Binghamton

According to data from the Minerals Management Service compiled and analyzed by Toxics Targeting, a firm that documents pollution and contamination, at least 324 spills involving offshore drilling have occurred in the gulf since 1964, releasing more than 550,000 barrels of oil and drilling-related substances. Four of these spills even involved earlier equipment failures and accidents on the Deepwater Horizon rig. Thousands of tons of produced water — a drilling byproduct that includes oil, grease and heavy metals — are dumped into the gulf every year. The discharges are legal and regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

BINGHAMTON -- In the highly polarizing debate about the natural gas rush in the Southern Tier, environmentalists and landowners don't agree on much.

On Monday, they were nearly unanimous in their opposition to a proposed lease deal between Broome County and a Denver energy company. Of 22 people who spoke at a public hearing on a $16 million land deal before the county legislature, 18 were against it.

The segment in the transcript below starts at 11:00 minutes into the video.

A catastrophic oil spill was waiting to happen.

That's what one expert who has studied government data on the huge and growing number of Gulf of Mexico spills is saying.

"There have been thousands of spills from 1990 to 2009," said Walter Hang, head of Toxics Targeting, an Ithaca, N.Y., company that tracks and analyzes federal hazardous spill reports.

While many were small, the sheer number of incidents is mind-boggling, Hang said.