Two Dimock Water Samples (2016)

New Federal Report Shows Dimock Water Was Unsafe to Drink After All

From an Article by Sharon Kelly, DeSmog Blog, June 3, 2016

Back in 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made a startling announcement, shaking up the battle over fracking in one of the nation’s highest-profile cases where drillers were suspected to have caused water contamination.

Water testing results were in for homeowners along Carter Road in Dimock, Pennsylvania, where for years, homeowners reported their water had turned brown, became flammable or started clogging their well with “black greasy feeling sediment” after Cabot Oil and Gas began drilling in the area. The EPA seemed to conclude the water wasn’t so bad after all.

“The sampling and an evaluation of the particular circumstances at each home did not indicate levels of contaminants that would give EPA reason to take further action,” EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin said in a press release.

The drilling industry crowed. “The data released today once again confirms the EPA’s and DEP’s [Department of Environmental Protection] findings that levels of contaminants found do not possess a threat to human health and the environment,” Cabot said in a statement.

“It’s obviously very good news for the folks who actually live there and pretty squarely in line with what we’ve known up there for a while now,” Energy in Depth told POLITICOPro. “It’s not very good news for the out-of-state folks who have sought to use Dimock as a talking point in their efforts to prevent development elsewhere, but I’m sure they’ll be working hard over the weekend to spin it differently, notwithstanding the pretty clear statement made by EPA today.”

Now, a newly published report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), part of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), puts EPA’s testing results into an entirely new light. The water was not safe to drink after all, the ATSDR concluded, after a lengthy review of the same water testing results that EPA used back in 2012.

“ATSDR found some of the chemicals in the private water wells at this site at levels high enough to affect health (27 private water wells), pose a physical hazard (17 private water wells) or affect general water quality so that it may be unsuitable for drinking,” the ATSDR’s health consultation—launched in 2011 and published May 24—concludes.

The new report lists 10 contaminants, including arsenic, lithium and 4-chlorophenyl phenyl ether, that are “chemicals of health concern,” at the levels found in Carter Road wells, found that five homes were at “immediate risk of fire or explosion” because of methane in their water and another dozen showed lower, but still worrisome, levels of methane and found that the water was laced with elevated levels of metals, salts and total dissolved solids.

The underlying data isn’t new to the residents of Carter Road. The EPA provided it to them individually back in 2012, which is why the EPA’s announcement that the water was safe was so baffling at the time.

“I’m sitting here looking at the values I have on my sheet—I’m over the thresholds—and yet they are telling me my water is drinkable,” Nolan Scott Ely, one of the Carter Road homeowners, told ProPublica when EPA made its announcement. “I’m confused about the whole thing … I’m flabbergasted.”

Opposite Conclusions?

So how could two different agencies look at the exact same data and come to opposite conclusions?

“Although the same data set was used, the EPA as a regulatory agency specifically looked at whether or not it was required to take action under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, more commonly known as Superfund, which governs responses to environmental emergencies,” StateImpact, a National Public Radio project, explained. “The ‘health consultation’ looked at the entire data set from a public health standpoint, assessing whether or not it was safe to drink the water.”

In other words, EPA’s findings, which seemed to show that the water was “safe” and which were promoted by drillers as proof that nothing was wrong in Dimock, instead represented a very carefully parsed legal finding that the water did not reach Superfund levels of contamination for the specific substances EPA focused on.

And the EPA’s 2012 findings had left out some of the very contaminants that had caused locals the most concern—including the natural gas or methane, itself. “EPA’s investigation does not include an evaluation of the risk posed by elevated levels of methane—which continue to exist in some homes in Dimock—and which, at extreme levels and if unaddressed, can lead to explosions,” Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Attorney Kate Sinding wrote in a blog post at the time.

The EPA’s strained official interpretation of the data perhaps shows why EPA staff remained concerned even after the agency dropped its Dimock investigation in July 2012, just months after its testing results had been announced in March and April.

In 2013, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that EPA’s own staff had disagreed with the agency’s public statements that the water shouldn’t be considered hazardous. An internal EPA Powerpoint presentation, later obtained and published by DeSmog, showed that agency scientists had concluded that the drilling and fracking process “apparently cause significant damage to the water quality.”

The ATSDR’s new report very specifically notes that it does not look at whether the water hazards stem from drilling or pre-date Cabot’s arrival in the area. In part, that’s because of a lack of pre-drilling testing for gas and other common fracking-related chemicals in the water. “It is important to note that methane was not assessed in residential water wells prior to the initiation of natural gas drilling activities in the Dimock area,” the ATSDR wrote.

Cabot Oil and Gas emphasized their belief that methane in the water was “naturally occurring” and pre-dated their arrival in a statement provided to StateImpact. “This data is consistent with thousands of pages of water data collected by both Cabot and the Pennsylvania DEP and does not indicate that those contaminants detected have any relationship to oil and gas development in Dimock,” Cabot said.

The ATSDR report does often note when substances discovered in the Carter Road water are known to be associated with hydraulic fracturing or drilling industry activities, but does not reach any conclusions about whether the chemicals came from Cabot’s operations.

“It’s not their job to look at who caused whatever contamination there is,” Bryce Payne, a Pennsylvania environmental scientist, told E&E News. “It’s their job to see if there are health implications. They did that and concluded there are health implications.”

The new report is also limited to data from four years ago—and conditions have changed, the ATSDR noted, in part because a state moratorium on fracking along Carter Road was briefly lifted after the EPA dropped its investigation and locals quickly reported more changes to their water, including higher levels of methane.

Cabot Oil Settles

In August 2012—right around the time that EPA abandoned its investigation—Cabot Oil and Gas announced it had settled the vast majority of lawsuits against it by Carter Road residents for an undisclosed amount of money and under terms that barred the plaintiffs from speaking negatively about their experiences with the company.

This March, a federal jury handed down a $4.24 million verdict to the remaining two Carter Road families, concluding that the water was in fact contaminated because of the negligence of the drilling company. Cabot has begun the process of appealing that verdict.

But while the legal filings and agency reports continue to stack up, the problem on Carter Road remains the same as it has for many years now.

While those who settled with Cabot had water treatment systems installed by the company, locals familiar with those systems say that even the treated water seems too contaminated to drink and the water treatment systems break down frequently.

The ATSDR’s report provides recommendations that water should have been treated to address dangerous contamination levels—but those recommendations are not binding and the agency noted that while the state government collected samples more recently, the ATSDR did not have access to the newer data.

Community organizers are still calling for the federal government to resume an active role, arguing that the groundwater remains undrinkable. “We’re demanding that they reopen the investigation,” Craig Stevens, a local organizer, told DeSmog after the March verdict was announced, “and also get water to these people.”

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Contaminated Water from Dimock, PA

In ‘David vs. Goliath’ Fracking Case, Families Handed Major Win

From an Article by Deidre Fulton, Common Dreams, March 10, 2016

The 10-person jury in court on Thursday handed down a $4.2 million verdict — and vindication — to two Pennsylvania families who refused to settle in a case pitting homeowners in the village of Dimock against a Houston-based fossil fuels company.

After a two-week trial at the U.S. District Court in Scranton, the federal jury found that Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., one of the largest natural gas drillers in Pennsylvania, had polluted the families’ well water.

As Common Dreams reported last month, neighbors Scott Ely and his wife, Monica Marta-Ely, and Ray and Victoria Hubert were the only remaining litigants in a lawsuit that began in 2009 with more than 40 plaintiffs—most of whom settled in 2012.

According to news outlets, the Elys were awarded $2.6 million and their three children $50,000 each. The Huberts were awarded $1.4 million, with another family member awarded $50,000.

The verdict drew praise from anti-fracking activists including filmmaker Josh Fox, who featured Dimock’s brown, odorous, and flammable water in his documentary Gasland and told Greenwire that he was “overjoyed” by the news. “People say this was like David and Goliath,” he said. “Well, we just got a reminder of how that story ends.”

Still, the problem with fracking is much bigger than two families or one small town, said anti-fracking advocate and biologist Sandra Steingraber, science advisor for Americans Against Fracking. “$4.2 million will not bring back drinkable well water to the long-suffering families of Dimock, Pennsylvania,” she told EcoWatch.

“No amount of money can do that,” Steingraber said. “Once groundwater is polluted, it’s polluted forevermore. But what this important jury decision does do is strip away the mirage of omnipotence that Cabot and other gas companies operate behind. Fracking poisons water. That’s what the science shows. The frackers will be held responsible. That’s what this court decision shows.”

Cabot Oil & Gas said Thursday it would appeal the ruling, accusing the jury of ignoring “overwhelming scientific and factual evidence that Cabot acted as a prudent operator in conducting its operations.”

But as EcoWatch reported, an NPR StateImpact report prior to the trial revealed that Cabot Oil & Gas had already accumulated more than 130 drilling violations at its Dimock wells, yet insisted that methane migration in Dimock’s water is naturally occurring. The company is currently banned from drilling in a 9-mile area of Dimock but is trying to lift the ban.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

EPA releases last Dimock water tests

Laura Legere (Times Shamrock) has written this article which appeared in the Towanda Daily Review, in northcentral Pennsylvania.

The final round of test results from federal regulators’ investigation of Dimock Twp. water supplies did not give the Environmental Protection Agency reason to “take further action,” the agency said in a statement Friday. One of the 12 water wells contained an elevated amount of methane and EPA informed the resident, state regulators and county emergency officials about the finding, the agency said.

On Friday and with each of three earlier rounds of sample releases, the agency said the results gave it no cause for either “immediate” or “further” action. In statements accompanying the first 31 results, it said the sampled water did not pose a health concern. One well in the previous set of samples contained arsenic at nine times the safe drinking water limit and did pose a health threat, the agency said, but a resident refused offers of replacement water.

Elevated levels of methane, barium, arsenic and sodium were detected in other wells but the agency said they were either successfully treated or did not pose a health concern. Twenty of the wells had methane above the state’s reporting threshold and five of those were at or above the EPA’s “trigger level” or the point when dissolved methane begins to escape into the atmosphere.

The agency has said it has not done any detailed review to determine the cause of any contaminants. Cabot Oil and Gas Corp., the drilling company most active in the township, said it is “pleased that EPA has now reached the same conclusion of Cabot and state and local authorities resulting from the collection of more than 10,000 pages of hard data – that the water in Dimock meets all regulatory standards.”

Natural gas industry critics and supporters of Dimock families who contend the water is contaminated called the EPA’s interpretation of the results misleading. Ronald Bishop, Ph.D., a chemistry lecturer at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, said detections of methane, oil and grease and 2-methoxyethanol, as well as elevated levels of sodium, arsenic, barium, lithium and manganese, “suggest that many of these homeowners’ water wells are significantly contaminated with a variety of pollutants in concentrations which are of concern to public health professionals.”

The EPA began testing water wells in a 9-square-mile area of Dimock after the agency’s review of past tests by the state and other groups raised concerns about contamination. The rural township has been a key battleground in the debate over the safety of natural gas drilling since 2009, when state officials determined faulty Cabot gas wells allowed methane to seep into Dimock water supplies – a finding Cabot and its supporters dispute. A few more samples are to be taken. Once all of the sampling is completed, the agency plans to do a “comprehensive review” of all of the test results to determine if there are any trends or patterns in the data as it relates to home well water.

Cabot wants to resume drilling and fracking for natural gas in Dimock, Pa., one of the locales featured in the acclaimed documentary Gasland.  But residents are not satisfied with the measures that Cabot has taken to remediate the contamination of their drinking water.  Residents noticed problems with their drinking water three years ago, and tests confirmed that the aquifer was contaminated with thermogenic methane gas from Cabot’s drilling and hydrofracking activities.  The contamination is attributed to faulty well casings.

Below are excerpts from the Wall Street Journal on October 15th entitled “Tests: Pa. gas drilling town’s water still fouled.”

After a series of false starts, Cabot, one of the largest drillers in the Marcellus, said it has met the state’s Oct. 17 deadline to restore or replace Dimock’s water supply, installing treatment systems in some houses that have removed the methane.

Residents who have filed suit against Cabot disagree, saying their water is still tainted and unusable. Another homeowner claims the $30,000 treatment system that Cabot put in failed to work.

As recently as May, DEP said nearly half of Cabot’s wells in the Dimock area — 20 of 43 — continued to leak methane, including 14 that DEP said were of the “most concern.” In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Craig Lobins, regional manager in DEP’s oil and gas program, wrote to Cabot that the leaking wells indicate faulty construction and that Cabot had “yet to achieve full compliance” with DEP mandates.

Cabot wants to resume drilling and claims that the company has satisfied its obligation.

Click here for full story.

In the news, Dimock, PA may be included in a 2-year EPA fracking study.  18 wells were contaminated with methane there.   Full story.