A Concept Appropriate to Our Times – “Legal Thieves”
FrackCheckWV
A Concept Appropriate to Our Times – “Legal Thieves”
An insight with more truth than fiction is “legal thieves”
Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV, June 4, 2015
As you drive North on I-79 by the Jane Lew Exit, you go over a small hill and across an overpass. Then if you will look right you will see a red barn with the sign “Consolidated Gas Legal Thieves” It was put there originally by my neighbor, Jack Shock. How it got there is an interesting story.
When Consolidated Gas (now Dominion Resources) decided to build a storage field in the Fink area of Lewis County, the geologists thought they had it confined to the Fink area. Storage fields are usually exhausted gas fields, but since they may be pressurized beyond the original source gas, geologists have to be careful to see that the gas bearing material runs into something else that is not porous. In this case they misjudged and it leaked out somewhere on Kincheloe, moving north. The Fink storage field needed to be abandoned, unless the storage could be extended to some new area where it could be confined.
So they went back to the maps and well logs and decided on an area to be called the Lost Creek Storage Field. ...
Jack was the mainspring of an organization called Concerned Land and Natural Resources Owners, Inc., which came into being in the 1970?s. To conclude the story about the Lost Creek Storage Field, it leaked, too, and that brought in to existence what was once called the Bridgeport Storage Field. Today the combined fields has become one of the largest in the United States. {I read years later that the Gantz Sand, in which the storage field is located, was a series of sandbanks along a great river which ran from the area of the Catskills to the inland sea that was located in what is now the center of the continent.}
... The term “Legal Thieves” implies using law to steal. It is recognition that ethics and what is legal are not the same. ...
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... For a group to be using influence and money to advance its own interests is not unusual. It may, in fact, be the most common mode of law change.
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