Letter to Washington PA Observer-Reporter, November 21, 2016
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Last week I received another call from a distraught mother trying to find an area in Western Pennsylvania where her family would be protected from the adverse health effects of fracking.
The story is the same. The family bought property in an area zoned for residential or agricultural use, not for industrial purposes, yet gas well permits have recently been approved by the Department of Environmental Protection. So the family will move, unwillingly.

Health studies indicate serious adverse health effects from exposure to gas operations: lower birth weights and apgar scores, which measure the physical condition of newborn infants; more difficult pregnancies; premature births; an increase in heart and neural tube defects in babies; asthma; neurological effects; and an increased risk of cancer.

Accordingly, delegrates of the Pennsylvania Medical Society have unanimously voted to support a moratorium on fracking.

Who is going to stand up for the families of Pennsylvania?

Too many politicians have sold out to the powerful gas industry, so only the courts can now prevent further degradation of the environment and increases in adverse health effects. As a volunteer, I only wish I had the power to keep this industrial activity far from the thousands of families who want their children to have the right to develop in a healthy environment.
New York instituted a ban on fracking to protect the public. What will Pennsylvania do to protect our children?

Jan Milburn, Ligonier, Penna.
Milburn is the president of the Westmoreland Marcellus Citizens’ Group

Editorial, Reading PA EAGLE, November 3, 2016

For years, the primary focus of Pennsylvania’s fracking conversation has been upon taxes.

It’s well-chronicled that Pennsylvania remains the only state not to impose a natural-gas extraction tax, and many have long – and thus far unsuccessfully – argued that a larger levy on drilling companies would work revenue-generating wonders for a state that perpetually struggles to balance its budget. Gov. Tom Wolf again pushed that case in February, when he proposed a 6.5 percent extraction tax on Marcellus shale drillers.

Thus far, state Republicans have steadfastly refused to consider the issue, citing an impact fee that drilling companies already pay.

But it may be time for Pennsylvania to permanently shift the fracking conversation away from fees and toward the risks associated with the process.

Fracking, the common term for hydraulic fracturing, is the high-pressure injection of a fluid, usually water thickened by sand or other agents, into a well bore. The pressurized fluid cracks deep-rock formations, freeing petroleum or natural gas, which then is extracted.

Here’s the thing: Reams of evidence and research now speak to the procedure’s inherent dangers.

Fracking foes have long insisted that the process damages drinking water. In June 2015, the federal Environmental Protection Agency issued a report that at least partially backed those allegations. The EPA said fracking has contaminated U.S. drinking water, but qualified its finding by saying there were no widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.

We now know with certainty, thanks to the U.S. Geological Survey and others, that the subsurface injection of fracking wastewater is a prime factor in the worrisome spike of earthquakes in the central and eastern United States.

Oklahoma is the country’s chief example; a September Forbes article was headlined, “Thanks To Fracking, Earthquake Hazards In Parts Of Oklahoma Now Comparable To California.” We needn’t say more.

There are other potential risks, including but not limited to air pollution, toxic-chemical exposure and infrastructure degradation.

All of which plays into the Pennsylvania Medical Society’s recent resolution calling for a moratorium on any new Marcellus shale drilling and fracking.

“We do support a moratorium at this point because of questions that have been raised,” said society President Dr. Charles Cutler. “Those questions now point to the need for a registry and more science and research to give us a better understanding about whether fracking is safe and what the risk is.”

We back the medical society’s call for the moratorium on new drilling, a public-health registry and a full-scale state study of fracking’s environmental and health impacts. We do so fully realizing how unrealistic the moratorium is; political ties, revenue streams and potential new jobs are all hurdles our lawmakers are unlikely to clear en route to a new-drilling cessation.

But Pennsylvanians’ lives and the long-term health of our land may be at stake.

So we hope this will be one of those too-rare occasions when political courage for the public good trumps politics as usual.

See also: http://www.FrackCheckWV.net

From an Article by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams, October 26, 2016

As yet another study links fracking to cancer-causing chemicals, Pennsylvanians opposed to oil and gas drilling in their state are reiterating their call for a statewide moratorium on the practice.

A new analysis from the Yale School of Public Health “confirms that numerous carcinogens involved in the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing have the potential to contaminate air and water in nearby communities,” according to a press statement on Monday. 

The study, which lead author and assistant professor Nicole Deziel said “represents the most expansive review of carcinogenicity of hydraulic fracturing-related chemicals in the published literature,” examined more than 1,000 chemicals that may be released into air or water as a result of fracking.

It found that the majority of those chemicals—more than 80 percent—lacked sufficient data on cancer-causing potential, “highlighting an important knowledge gap,” according to the researchers. Of the 119 compounds for which sufficient data exists, 44 percent of the water pollutants and 60 percent of air pollutants were either confirmed or possible carcinogens, with 20 of those tied to increased risk for leukemia or lymphoma and therefore requiring further study.

The study specifically expresses concern about the potential link between childhood leukemia and oil and gas drilling, noting that the illness “may be an early indicator of exposure to environmental carcinogens due to the relatively short disease latency and vulnerability of the exposed population.”

In Pennsylvania, where the fracking boom is changing the landscape of the northeastern and southwestern parts of the state, the study came as yet another wake-up call.

“Yale researchers just gave Governor [Tom] Wolf the perfect justification for a statewide moratorium on fracking, not that he’s looking for one,” the activist group Pennsylvanians Against Fracking said in a statement on Wednesday. “He has steadfastly ignored the mountain of peer reviewed studies that make a solid case for a halt to further drilling.”

Indeed, recent research has linked fracking to severe fatigue and migraine headaches; low birth weights and other reproductive health consequences; and asthma, among other ills.

“When Governor Wolf was elected, 425 peer-reviewed studies had been done on fracking,” Pennsylvanians Against Fracking said in its statement. “By the time he’d been in office six months, the number had jumped to 550. As of the most recent count in April by Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy, the number had topped 685.”

Still, Wolf “has ignored them all,” the group charged, calling on the governor to immediately “impose a statewide moratorium on fracking and direct state health officials to conduct the studies required to fully understand the risks posed by the carcinogenic chemicals listed by the researchers.”

“If he does any less,” the statement read, “he must be prepared to quantify for the public exactly how many children he is willing to sacrifice to cancer in order to enable the natural gas industry.”

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/10/26/new-study-hand-pennsylvanians-reiterate-call-fracking-ban

See also: http://www.FrackCheckWV.net