Over the summer, something sprang up in the view from Dorsey Johnson’s back deck north of Denver, where she watches sunsets over Colorado’s front range. It was a noisy, towering rig, drilling a new oil well. “There was clanking. There were trucks going by,” she says. All she wanted was for the rig to go away. Across the U.S., new oil and gas wells have turned millions of people into the petroleum industry’s neighbors. For many, the oil and gas companies are welcome newcomers bearing checks. Others consider the new arrivals loud, smelly and disruptive. The drilling boom is firing up resentment in some communities when one person’s financial windfall means their neighbors abut a working well. The Wall Street Journal analyzed well location and census data for more than 700 counties in 11 major energy-producing states. At least 15.3 million Americans lived within a mile of a well […]