Oct. 23--The state Department of Environmental Protection announced on Thursday that it has fined Cabot Oil and Gas $56,000 for three polluting spills at one of its natural gas drilling sites in Susquehanna County.

The fine comes a little more than a month after the spills, which all occurred within a week of each other at the Heitsman well in Dimock Township and totaled about 8,400 gallons of fluids. Some of the liquid, which was a mix of mostly water and a gel that facilitates the drilling process, drained into an adjacent wetlands and Stevens Creek.

"The department presented a number to us and we thought under the circumstances that it was appropriate and not something that we wanted to fight about," said Ken Komoroski, Cabot spokesman. "We're just going to move forward."

Within a few days of the spill, DEP ordered Cabot to halt hydraulic fracturing -- the process that caused the spills -- and submit an engineering analysis about what went wrong and how it will be avoided in the future.

Cabot's report said the failure was caused by pressure surges and that significant elevation differences between where the liquid was stored and where it was being pumped to contributed to the problem.

The report includes a list of corrective actions that Cabot has agreed to take, among them providing better containment and pressure-regulating valves for sites where elevation is a factor.

DEP approved the report on Oct. 16 and allowed Cabot to resume "fracking." The process forces water, sand and a mix of chemicals into the rock layer that contains the gas, causing fractures that release the gas up the well.

Gas drilling has boomed in the Northern Tier since fracking and horizontal drilling technologies have made it financially feasible for companies to drill into the Marcellus Shale, a layer of gas-laden rock that runs about a mile underground from New York into Virginia.

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