Free The End of Country by Seamus McGraw

stone that allow the gas to move in the shale—the appreciation of the powerful dynamics that funneled the fuel through the Marcellus was, by modern standards, rudimentary. All that the drillers knew back then was that the gas seemed to collect in pockets. Sometimes they could drill right through the Marcellus with no problem. But on other occasions all hell would break loose.
    A PRIL 3, 1940, WAS ONE of those times. Throughout March and into April, a team of roughnecks led by a veteran oil and gas man named Karney Cochran and working for the Empire Gas and Fuel Company was prospecting for gas underneath the old Crandall farm near Wellsville, New York, just across the border from Pennsylvania. It had been unusually cold that spring, so cold that the hydraulic lines that snaked from the drilling platform to the wheezing diesel engine that powered it kept freezing up, so cold that Cochran feared that the hardened steel bits might shatter in the brittle northern Appalachian stone, but he and his men kept hammering away at the ground, figuring that if they could just drill deep enough, into the porous sandstone layer far underground, they might coax the small pool of remaining natural gas to the surface. It wouldn’t be much, Cochran had figured,maybe just enough for the company to earn a few bucks, and he had no reason to doubt that whatever gas was down there would surrender peacefully, floating up in gentle wisps the way it usually did.
    By the last week of March, Cochran and his men had made it to what they believed was the source rock, a layer of shale 4,800 feet down. A few days later, on April 3, they got their first show of gas. It wasn’t much, but it was something. It was getting late, and Cochran and his men were about to call it a day, loading their equipment into their cars, when almost imperceptibly the ground began to shudder. And then a great plume of gas and salt water roiled up into the sky.
    Cochran, a savvy oilman, was not easily rattled, but even he must have been stunned by the sheer explosive power that he and his guys had accidentally unleashed. Cochran herded his men back to the wellhead and frantically mixed up a jelly plug—a combination of cement, petroleum jelly, and cloth—and attempted to stuff it into the borehead. It was impossible. The gas was roaring up at a spectacular rate, hundreds of thousands of cubic feet at a time—later estimates would put it at nearly 2 million cubic feet a day. For more than a mile around, a gaseous, salty cloud descended on everything. Nearby residents grabbed what they could and fled. They didn’t need to be told what might happen. They had all heard the stories of what can happen when gas goes bad; they had all heard of wells and gas plants exploding in violent, murderous fury. They had to get out of there, but they would have had to do it on foot, many of them pushing their cars or pickups for fear that if they tried to start them, an errant spark could ignite an inferno that would vaporize everything and everyone within hundreds of yards. They could watch from a distance if they had the stomach for it, as the noxious cloud descended on their fields and on their homes, settling into their ponds and water wells, and wonder whether everything they owned would at any moment be wiped out.
    For days Cochran and his men battled the blowout, calling in teams of reinforcements, and finally, on Sunday, they managed to plug the wellhead. But that didn’t stop it. The plugs they set quickly blew off. To make things worse, a few dozen yards away, heads on three shallow wells drilled into higher gas deposits popped one after another like Christmas crackers, and they, too, started spewing great plumes of gas. It seemed all the gasmen had done was get the gas madat them, and now it was on a vengeful tear. Gas started bubbling up through water wells hundreds of feet away from the initial eruption. It started rushing up through cracks in the ground.
    There was no stopping