The segment in the transcript below starts at 11:00 minutes into the video.

The commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation has asserted that reports of accidents related to natural gas drilling in New York have been overblown and taken out of context.

In a letter to Assemblyman William Parment, D-150th, a member of the Environmental Conservation committee, DEC Commissioner Pete Grannis said that of the 270 incidents highlighted by an Ithaca researcher, more than half have nothing to do with natural gas drilling -- and they occurred while the DEC was overseeing 10,400 wells.

A catastrophic oil spill was waiting to happen.

That's what one expert who has studied government data on the huge and growing number of Gulf of Mexico spills is saying.

"There have been thousands of spills from 1990 to 2009," said Walter Hang, head of Toxics Targeting, an Ithaca, N.Y., company that tracks and analyzes federal hazardous spill reports.

While many were small, the sheer number of incidents is mind-boggling, Hang said.

A tour of Dimock, Pennsylvania, with Victoria Switzer is a bumpy ride over torn-up roads, around parking lots filled with heavy machinery and storage tanks, and past well pads that not long ago were forests. The winter here was quiet, but with the thawing ground came the return of the rigs, the trucks, the constant noise and lights of a twenty-four-hour-a-day gas drilling operation.

One of the natural gas industry's selling points on why New Yorkers should welcome drilling of the vast Marcellus Shale is that the method of choice, hydraulic fracturing, has never contaminated a drinking well or water supply, or caused any environmental mishap in this state.

Never. That's a pretty definitive word, allowing no exceptions. But in this case, it may require an asterisk. Or a bunch of them.

He claims agency files fail to include water contamination cases in western counties.