"You can't say it has had no effect on us," said Stonbraker, a retired school administrator, who nevertheless had only praise for the way EOG has conducted itself, and kept the dirt roads repaired.
After the blowout, the state Department of Environmental Protection said, 35,000 gallons of fluid, mostly saltwater, were collected from the well pad. DEP said tests showed some contaminants that migrated off the well site appeared to be dissipating a week after the spill.
It would not be EOG's first leak. DEP cited the company in August for a spill of drilling fluids from a lined pit at a hunting club well site.
Stonbraker said he was not too concerned. "This thing got blown so far out of proportion, it's pathetic," he said.
The day after the blowout, Stonbraker and another club officer chased away an anti-drilling activist they said had trespassed on their posted private land to collect water samples near the well site. The activist later blogged about his exploits.
"Who knows? Maybe he was trying to put something into the creek," Stonbraker said.
Three miles downstream from the blowout site, Jim Callender, 35, a burly bridge welder from the Pittsburgh area, was hammering a new roof last week onto the outhouse of the vacation cabin his family has leased for 52 years on Laurel Run Road.
He expressed the kind of mixed feelings about gas drilling shared by many here.
"There are a lot of people around here who are going through hard times, so they rely on those gas royalties to survive," he said.
But Callender is also an avid trout fisherman. He draws his drinking water from a spring not far from the hunting club.
"I completely understand why we need natural gas," said Callender. "We can't rely on foreign oil all our lives.
"But I don't want the drilling to pollute the streams where I fish. That would be intolerable."
Contact staff writer Andrew Maykuth at 215-854-2947 or amaykuth@phillynews.com.Staff writer Sandy Bauers contributed to this article.
