"A couple of years ago, Charlie Brethauer started to smell gas in the backyard of his home.
Figuring it was a leak from the service line that heats his garage, he grabbed a shovel and started digging in a patch of blackened soil about 20 feet from the back door of his rural home in Richland Township, Pa., 15 miles north of Pittsburgh.
The shovel struck a plastic bucket covering the end of a vertical steel pipe. As he widened the hole, Brethauer said, chunks of dirt fell into the pipe and seemed to echo and rattle for a long time.
It turned out to be an abandoned natural gas well, 1,800 feet deep and probably drilled in the early 1900s. The company that owned it is long gone.
The well was plugged about a year ago, but Brethauer was unusually lucky. Pennsylvania, where the first American oil was drilled in 1859, is home to between 200,000 and 750,000 so-called orphan wells that have been abandoned and that have no apparent owner."
