As fracking operations are exploding across the country, so is the promise of big money – in royalties and bonuses – for property owners who allow gas companies to drill on their land. Think (in concept only) "Beverly Hillbillies," the 1960s TV sitcom featuring a backwoods family that moves to a lavish Beverly Hills mansion after striking oil in their backyard. It all worked out pretty well on TV, but for a growing number of real-life landowners in a growing number of states from New York to Colorado, the promise of quick, big payouts has ended in disaster. New York Times reporters Ian Urbina and Jo Craven McGinty shed light on this fallout from the fracking boom in a recent piece entitled "Learning Too Late of the Perils in Gas Well Leases": After Scott Ely and his father talked with salesmen from an energy company about signing the lease allowing gas drilling on their land in northeastern Pennsylvania, he said he felt certain it required the company to leave the property as good as new. So Mr. Ely said he was surprised several years later when the drilling company, Cabot Oil and Gas, informed them that rather than draining and hauling away the ...
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