As Drilling Ramps Up, So Do The Lawsuits

Gary Andreis’s house in Chartiers-Houston is just downhill from a natural gas compressor station which he says has flooded his yard and poisoned his well, forcing him and his family to live on bottled water. “My water well’s contaminated,” says Andreis. “I got bad arsenic problems, other chemicals in my water well.” Andreis blames runoff from a containment pond adjacent to the compressor station and has hired an attorney to take the owner and operator, MarkWest Energy, to court. “We’ll be filing a suit against MarkWest,” said Charles Kurowski, Andreis’s attorney.