Cabot Oil & Gas Corp faces a civil trial on Tuesday after two families accused its drillers of contaminating their well water with methane in northeastern Pennsylvania. The families are currently trying to persuade a federal jury to hold the Cabot Oil & Gas Corp accountable.
Attorney Leslie Lewis, who represents the two families, told a six-member jury that the company had shown "reckless disregard" for the safety of her clients and other residents in the area, as Reuters reported. Opening statements were made at the outset of the trial, which pits residents in the village of Dimock against one of the largest natural gas driller company in Pennsylvania.
While Cabot Oil and Gas Corp consistently denied such allegations, regulators from the state blamed their faulty gas wells' drills for leaking flammable methane into Dimock's groundwater. Philly reported that numbers of plaintiffs received a settlement from Cabot, but the two families opted to take their claims to the federal court. The community became an arena for environmental advocates fighting against the extraction of huge volumes of natural gas and oil from rock formations deep underground, a technique which is also known as fracking.
Monica Marta-Ely, one of the plaintiffs, said outside the court that "their village haven't had clean water since her son was in kindergarten."
According to Yahoo News, many critics stated that fracking is responsible for excessive noise, environmental damage, and even earthquakes. Dimock and Cabot became infamous after an Oscar-nominated documentary entitled "Gasland" was released and shown to the public in 2010. The documentary film then motivated the anti-fracking movement.
However, a lawyer of the Houston-based Cabot, Stephen Dillard, said in his opening statement that the town's groundwater already contains natural occurring methane and that residents cannot be harmed by methane-laced water. "Those can be treated, but it's not toxic," Dillard added.
The lawsuit filed by the two families is said to be the first one alleging water contamination from fracking to reach a federal jury. The trial is expected to last for two weeks.
