Teal told commissioners he came home one day to find five acres of his land cleared and excavated, without any prior word from Chesapeake or its subcontractors. Those five acres, said Teal, included his family’s garden and access to his woodlot.

What commissioners saw Thursday on the site across the road from Teal’s house was a five-acre, graveled well pad with two wellheads, four storage tanks and two large evaporators. Drilling of the two wells was completed about a year and a half ago, said Teal.

"They said once they were through here I’d have homesites and all that, once they were done," Teal told the commissioners. "They said all I would see are these two wellheads. Well, you can see how much stuff you can see here now."

"They also told me I could have free gas," he added, "but that went out the door when they were done drilling. They said, No, you have to have a $30,000 regulator."

But what seems to bother Teal even more than this is what happened to his water.

"They polluted my water and everything else,"

he said. "My pony won’t even drink water out of the well any more. I have to haul water from town. And we just buy our drinking water and haul water from town to wash."

"Drilling for gas is definitely an industrial activity," said Commissioner Martin Saffer. "There’s just no other way to paint it. It’s a big-scale, industrial enterprise, which looks to me to be growing in scale and intensity and seriousness."

"The decision the county has to make is that-is this the kind of life we want to have, or do we want to live in the environment that we presently have and that we all enjoy?" Saffer continued. "Or do we want to become an industrialized community. That’s a choice of lifestyle and a choice of values that we as a community are going to have to make."

"The Pocahontas County Commission is gravely concerned about the impacts to our pristine environmental and rural culture from the impending possibility of hydrofracture drilling in the Marcellus Shale underlying our borders," the letter Tuesday to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection states.