Partnering with Cabot Oil & Gas

THE CABOT 3rd ANNUAL COMMUNITY PICNIC

The Harford Fair Grounds were hopping again this year as Cabot Oil & Gas hosted its 3^rd Annual Community Picnic on July 21^st in Susquehanna County.  For the third year in a row attendance was up sharply, from 3,000 the first year to 5,000 in 2011 and upwards of 7,500 attended this year.  For the third year in a row, Linde Corporation was proud to be a part of the day’s festivities.  And if the lines in front of our booth were any indication, we were a popular stop!

At a more serious level, the Cabot Community Picnic also marked the end of the fund-raising efforts to support the Cabot/EMHS Community Match Fund to support the new $5.6 million Physicians Clinic being constructed outside Montrose.  Please read more below.

Cabot hosted their first Community Picnic in 2010, with the hope to turn the Harford Fair Grounds into a place where industry, community partners and academia could mix employment, education and entertainment for a day.  United Way, Red Cross and the Farm Bureau were on hand, as were Penn State, Johnson College and Lackawanna College.

Linde was one of dozens of companies invited to participate and there is no chance we would miss this event.  Over the last 3 years, Cabot Oil and Gas has hired Linde for tens of millions in projects. In fact, Cabot was our first and is our longest-standing client in the Marcellus region.  On top of that, this is a GREAT day!

Many of the companies came with the idea of providing food and drinks to the crowds.  The lines seemed long, but there were so many folks feeding us that it seemed no one was hungry or thirsty for more than a few seconds.

Linde Corporation does a “Spin and Win” wheel each year.  You simply spin our wheel and you WILL win something, be it a T-shirt, tote bag, baseball cap, drink ‘cuzzi, Frisbee, cup, key chain light or pen.  People were invited to get back in line and spin again—and again—and again.

The festivities are supposed to start at 10, but it never works like that.  We were set up by 9 and people started arriving shortly afterwards.  Soon, we had a line nearly 40 people deep, each waiting for their chance to “spin and win.”  The line in front of the Linde booth was dozens of people deep from the moment we opened until we—literally—ran out of everything just before 2 in the afternoon when the festivities ended.

Linde gave away hundreds of items to lots of happy people.  For us it’s a huge day with a fun benefit: we saw dozens of our Linde shirts worn by fans at the Pocono 400 NASCAR race a couple of weeks later.

THE EMHS HEALTH CLINIC COMMUNITY MATCH

The picnic entertains thousands a year, but Cabot is also at the center of an arguably more important movement which will directly impact and improve lives all over Susquehanna County.  Linde is proud to play an important role in the new Critical Care Clinic of the Endless Mountains Health System (EMHS).

The original EMHS complex has sprawled from its original space and needed new facilities to help it serve the county.  New facilities require new money.  Quite simply, this multi-million dollar project would not have become reality without Cabot’s leadership.

It happened like this.  First, Cabot started the fund drive with a $1 million contribution.  Then they reached out to companies which had directly benefitted from Cabot’s efforts to extract natural gas from the Marcellus shale.  The fund drive was called Cabot’s Community Match.  Rain for Rent, the Diaz Companies, The Montrose Chocolate and Wine Festival and Linde Corporation were among many groups which donated to the EMHS project.  Sure enough, when community efforts totaled $1.2 million, Cabot matched that amount and exceeded the goal set by the campaign by raising over $4.4 million in four months from natural gas industry partners, other regional businesses, foundations and members of the Susquehanna County, PA community.

All of the impressive amount of funds raised in this campaign, coupled a $1 million grant from the Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Foundation and other EMHS dollars, now fully funds the Physician’s Clinic at $5.6 million. The goal is to have the clinic open with the new hospital; which had its groundbreaking on January 20,2012. The new hospital project represents the largest and most expensive expansion in health care services in the Northern Tier.  As always, Linde Corporation was proud to be a part of the Cabot efforts.