But in 95 percent of Carroll County, there’s no sewer. Private septic systems are the norm in rural areas like this where the bulk of energy companies are drilling natural gas wells. And the lack of bigger, public systems for services like water and sewer can be a turn off for businesses moving to the area.

Just ask Tom Wheaton, one of Carroll County’s commissioners.

He says last year plans were moving ahead to build a 300 acre commerce park to for drilling companies and their sub-contractors. But when many of those companies learned they would have to pay to install their own water and sewer lines, some pulled out. Now the project has stalled.

It’s been a roadblock for many of the businesses that come and visit or call that want to come here and they can’t because we don’t have the correct infrastructure for them.

The absence of a countywide sewer system isn’t the only challenge. Outside of the villages, most Carroll County residents rely on private water wells. Internet and broadband service is limited. And cell phone reception is spotty at best.

To alleviate these problems, Wheaton says county officials have started planning for a network of water and sewer lines that would connect to the commerce park. But Wheaton says it’s hard to know exactly how much to build, and how many businesses to plan for.

“We’re almost at the mercy of the oil and gas companies. They’re putting processing plants in locations that we never thought we’d ever have anything but farmland,” Wheaton says.

Being at the mercy of the drilling industry is something rural communities in eastern Ohio are all getting familiar with.

Forty-five minutes outside of Carroll County, Larry Kosiba points out workers digging trenches for pipelines as he drives me out to a natural gas processing facility under construction.

“You can see the tall cranes and the facility being built over here on the midstream area. And as you can see, it’s in the middle of rural Columbiana County. There’s nothing but trees and farm land, and small rural two lane roads out here.”

As the economic development director for Columbiana County, Kosiba regularly clocks long hours fielding calls from energy-connected companies looking to locate to the area. He says the industry moves at such a fast pace, he sometimes feels overwhelmed.

And like his neighbors in Carroll County, he’s concerned about possibly overdeveloping the area.

My role is not only just to attract new companies here, and to attract hotels and retail, but also we have to look at it from a sustainable nature. I don’t need to build, or have five to six hotels built, last two to three years and then have empty facilities. So it’s a delicate balance of encouraging everybody to come.

Some experts advise: it’s better to invest on the conservative side. Mark Partridge is a professor of rural urban policy at Ohio State University.

“Communities having an energy boom tend to over invest. They think this thing’s going to go on forever, and then when the boom ends they’re stuck with all these additional costs.”

Back in Carroll County, Commissioner Tom Wheaton says he’s working with the other elected officials to come up with a new comprehensive plan for the future, but he admits it’s hard to change the pervading small town mindset.

We have to plan bigger, we have to look at our county and ourselves differently.

And if they want to make the most of the boom, they have to do it quickly. The state predicts there will be more than 1000 permits issued for new gas wells by 2015.

Both sides agree on one thing – the act that Ben Lupo is accused of is a bad deed. Michael Cyphert is the attorney for Lupo’s company, D&L Energy of Mahoning County.

Ben Lupo’s a bad person. He intentionally directed someone to put brine down a sewer. He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have done that. But are those actions to be imputed to D&L Energy simply because he’s an officer of the company or was an officer at the time?

Cyphert claims that Lupo runs several companies, including Hardrock Excavating, which does brine transport, storage and disposal, and D&L Energy, which develops and drills injection wells. And Cyphert says isn’t in the brine business. Cyphert says Lupo ordered an employee of Hardrock Excavating, not D&L Energy, to dump the brine – an act he describes as “reprehensible”.

“We don’t know why he did it. Perhaps we will not know until his trial on the federal level and he is able to put forth any defenses that he has and a jury of his peers may decide whether he’s actually guilty or not.”

Cyphert says D&L didn’t benefit from the act but Hardrock might have, since it would have saved that company money on brine storage. And he also argued that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ oil and gas division chief Rick Simmers didn’t have the authority to revoke D&L’s injection well operating permit over what he called “a silly, stupid, intentional act” done by an officer of another company.

“If the chief wishes to issue an order against those who are responsible, it’s certainly within his prerogative to do so. But don’t punish D&L Energy for something it didn’t do.”

Brian Ball is the attorney for the state, and said D&L Energy entered into contracts with companies that were not registered and not maintaining compliance with state law – and therefore the company violated the terms of its own permit. And he says there were three companies working together on this operation – and Lupo was in charge of all of them.

I know the witnesses that the state will present will show that in many times they knew they were talking to Ben because he was the heart and soul and the commonality between the consortium of companies located at this address – companies that were often at least in the three considered – Mohawk, Hardrock and D&L Energy – conspiring and causing unlawful activity with systematic routine practice.

And Ball says it’s clear why Lupo made the choice he did – Ball says Lupo’s company was paid to handle fracking wastewater, and so he ordered the dumping of that fluid into the storm sewer to make money.

“Some of it wasn’t going to go in the ground. Some of it was going to go on the ground. And routinely at night with his direction. And that is strictly the business they were in.”

Bottom line, says Ball, is that the chief of the oil and gas division is allowed to issue orders to enforce the terms and conditions of permits. And Ball says as the head of all three companies is responsible for the actions of any one of them.

“While Mr. Lupo’s acts present personal liability for him. Liability for violations of Chapter 1509 is strict, joint and several. Therefore, as persons, D&L Energy, Hardrock and Mohawk are also all liable.”

Testimony continues in the hearing – a decision on D&L Energy’s continued operations could happen this week.

For 2012, ODNR tallied oil and natural gas production for 87 wells which used hydraulic fracturing techniques. Most of the wells are situated in eastern Ohio counties. 65 wells produced oil and gas. Three wells were dry and then abandoned. 19 others were tested and then capped.

ODNR says reported volumes of oil production, about 636-thousand barrels, was lower than initially estimated by the industry. ODNR says natural gas production from fracked wells is “likely choked back” because of limited pipeline capacity and low prices. ODNR says gas production neared 13-million units last year.

But that’s not changing the minds of activists on both sides of a related issue: whether to hike Ohio’s taxes on oil and gas companies using the drilling technique known as “fracking.”

Click the play button above to hear a full report from Bill Cohen.

That waste can be hazardous to living organisms, unless it’s handled carefully.

Ohio allows drillers to dispose of their waste in landfills. How much of it is radioactive is something state regulators aren’t stringently keeping track of.

Rick Simmers, chief of oil and gas with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, says the state relies on the drillers to keep records of their solid waste—and the state reviews those records on occasion.

The company has to track where they took it, the landfill has to record that they received it, so it would be to verify in an audit or an investigation type situation that that indeed occurred.

Recently, Governor Kasich included a provision in his budget bill that will require gas drillers to test their solid waste for radiation before it gets shipped off. They will also have to share the results with the EPA and Department of Health.

Simmers says that’s a little different from the way companies reported their radiation testing results in the past.

“Historically the test would be done by the company, and then that test would be shared by the company with the landfill,” Simmers says. “The change would require the company to share that test also with the two government agencies.”

Many environmental advocates – already unhappy with the current law – aren’t satisfied that the NEW law will do enough to keep landfills safe. They’re concerned the state isn’t tracking this dirt closely enough.

Ron Prosek is the vice president of NEOGAP—the network for oil and gas accountability and protection. He worries that relying on companies to keep their own records could leave state regulators in the dark if a driller illegally dumps their waste.

Prosek cites the recent case in Youngstown in which a company is accused of dumping fracking wastewater down a storm sewer.

“For example, in the Lupo case in Youngstown, we have a well operator who was also operating a disposal well and self-reporting. The problem with that is you can not hold individual well operators accountable if you have a system like that.

The same thing can happen in solid waste disposal Prosek says.

But it’s not just lax reporting that worries Julie Weatherington-Rice, a biological engineering professor at Ohio State University. It’s the radiation. She says even a small amount can pose a health threat.

It can trigger various kinds of cancer.

Rice says she’s especially concerned that the potentially radioactive dirt gets spread over the top of landfills and could cause a problem if the dirt blows around, or gets wet.

“When it rains on that landfill, or when they use water for dust control, and it works its way down, it mixes into something called leachate which is the liquids that form in the landfill,” Rice says.

“And that leachate gets collected and it gets taken to a waste water treatment plant to be treated. Well now you’ve got leachate that’s radioactive.”

Rice says the fear is that those treatment plants could contaminate the water ways they drain into, like this one in Stark County.

Across the street from the Canton Water Treatment Plant, a giant round drainage pipe dumps treated water into the main branch of the Nimishillen Creek. In a few months, this plant will accept leachate from a landfill several miles south, thanks to Canton City Council’s recent approval.

Eric Akin is a member of NEFCO, the planning agency for Portage, Stark, Summit and Wayne Counties.

There’s 50 feet from the pipe to the creek. So anything that comes from the plant in discharge will impact the creek.

Akin’s group tries to guard the creek from nearby industrial activities. He says there haven’t been any known cases of leachate hurting the creek, but they’re monitoring the creek closely.

“It’s not just local. It all flows downstream. There’s no boundaries. So what we’re doing as a collective community in the Nimishillen Creek watershed affects downstream of that and all the way down into the Gulf of Mexico.”

That’s why Julie Weatherington-Rice says the state needs more information about the radioactive nature of the Utica Shale and until then, the state shouldn’t allow solid waste from the Utica in landfills.

These landfills were never designed and never sited to be low level radioactive waste landfills. It should not be going there.

Over the next few weeks, environmental advocates plan to lobby the legislature to prohibit disposing of radioactive waste in landfills.

But major Ohio environmental groups are calling the new coalition a fraud. Statehouse correspondent Bill Cohen report they say they won’t have anything to do with it. Click the play button above to hear Bill’s full report.

Many states have banned the deep-injection wells that store waste water left behind by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. But Ohio isn’t one of them, even accepting hundreds of millions of gallons of fracking waste water from neighboring states like Pennsylvania.

That’s why the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, along with some allies, is asking the federal EPA to suspend Ohio’s authority to oversee the wells, which are now monitored by the state Department of Natural Resources.

The call to federal regulators follows last month’s indictments of two people charged with illegally dumping waste water into the Mahoning River watershed.

Last year some researchers linked disposal wells to several northeast Ohio earthquakes that shook the region the year before.

The state resumed issuing well permits last November, and drilling industry groups insist waste water wells can be drilled and monitored safely.

Texas-based Anadarko Petroleum obtained the mineral rights to the sprawling Muskingum county property two years ago. It’s home to several conventional drilling wells, but no horizontal fracturing, or fracking. Company officials did not immediately return phone calls, but a short release calls the decision business-driven. It was good news to Nathan Johnson from the Buckeye Forest Council, a non-profit that’s openly opposed fracking.

“We’re glad that the sort of impacts that are associated with high-volume fracking won’t evidently be an issue for The Wilds. That’s a great decision,” Johonson says.

Some environmental groups have linked earthquakes in northeast Ohio to wells that store fracking waste water. Industry leaders insist dee-shale drilling and waste-water storage can be done safely.

Carroll County Sheriff Dale Williams said it happened Monday afternoon at a gas drilling rig near Carrolton, southeast of Canton.

The injured man, 21-year-old Alex Cox, told the sheriff that he and the other victim were using drilling equipment and hadn’t hooked up a safety line designed to keep it from swinging around and striking workers.

The dead man’s name hasn’t been released.

Cox fell backward and suffered a severe laceration to the back of his head.

Media reports said the rig is owned by R.E. Gas Development, a subsidiary of Rex Energy Corp.

The investigation is continuing.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office announced the charge Thursday against 62-year-old Ben Lupo of Poland, near Youngstown. He pleaded not guilty.

Lupo owns Hardrock Excavating LLC. He faces up to three years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a year of supervised release if convicted.

Authorities allege Lupo on Jan. 31 directed that at least 20,000 gallons of drilling mud and brine be discharged into a sewer that empties into the Mahoning River watershed.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources revoked the permits of Hardrock, a brine hauler, and D&L Energy after workers at the companies’ Youngstown headquarters reported seeing the material being dumped.