Tagged: dec

The past few days have been busy ones in the world of natural gas extraction:

• New hydrofracking rules from the Department of Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were met with complaints from both sides.
• A New York environmental group is questioning whether the state's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) believes wastewater is a real concern.
• And the EPA withheld a study on aquifer contamination in Wyoming at the request of the governor - who then used the delay to prepare a smear campaign.

Here's details on each:

The city of Rochester just completed work on its first ever "green roof."

The roof of City Hall's Building B is now home to 8,700 square feet of succulent plants.

"It's basically for storm water management," says Anne Spaulding, the city's sustainability manager, during a rooftop tour. "All of the rainwater - instead of running into the storm system - is consumed by the plants on the roof."

Spaulding says the thick carpet of sedum can reduce storm water runoff by up to 90 percent, depending on the amount of rainfall.

The goal is to reduce the amount of pollutants that flow into the region's streams, rivers and lakes.

The Cuomo administration announced Monday it will spend $102 million on flood control projects across the state.

But the repairs aren’t necessarily in response to last year’s flooding.

Projects in the Southern Tier, which suffered severe flooding after tropical storms Lee and Irene, will receive $26.7 million.

About half of that - some $13 million - is going to Tompkins County. That’s in spite of reporting just $2 million in costs from September’s flooding.

Pending well permit applications for high-volume hydraulic fracturing (2007-present):

If New York State allows hydrofracking, where would it happen?

With the help of officials from the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), we used the agency's searchable online oil and gas database to find out precisely where drilling companies have applied for hydrofracking permits.

So what does this map mean?

The Department of Environmental Conservation's (DEC) hydrofracking advisory panel is supposed to meet with the agency every few weeks*, but their meeting scheduled for tomorrow has been postponed.

This is the third time one of the panel's meetings has been called off since mid-October.

The group was also supposed to issue preliminary recommendations by early November, but failed to do so.

The announcement comes on the same day that the DEC is officially closing the public comment period on its review of hydrofracking, known as the Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS).

That document will determine if and when New York moves forward to allow the controversial natural gas drilling technique.

*Update: An earlier version of this story reported that the agency meets biweekly - that is incorrect.