MONTROSE — Residents and activists met Wednesday with officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies to urge the government to step in and keep watch over the rapidly expanding natural gas drilling industry.

More than a dozen people met with a contingent of federal officials in a private home in Susquehanna County, near the spot where a pipeline company was forced to halt work this month after repeated spills of nontoxic drilling mud into one of the state’s most pristine streams.

State environmental regulators said they have detected no impact on aquatic life. But residents told the EPA that Pennsylvania’s environmental agency has looked the other way while energy companies operating in the vast Marcellus Shale formation are ruining their quality of life.

Craig Stevens, who hosted the daylong meeting at his home in Silver Creek Township, told The Associated Press during a break that water contamination, air pollution and health problems that residents blame on drilling were among the topics discussed with the federal team, which, he said, also included representatives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Stevens, an activist who lives along Laurel Lake Creek, where Laser Northeast Gathering was forced to halt construction of a natural gas pipeline after at least three spills of drilling mud, said a state DEP official came to his property and told him “there’s no problem.”

Laser is building a 33-mile pipeline to transport natural gas from Susquehanna County to the Millennium interstate pipeline in New York.