Will a push for plastics turn Appalachia into next ‘Cancer Alley’?

From an Article by Emily Holden, The Guardian, October 11, 2019

Critics say ethane expansion will not only prolong fracking but could also trigger a public health disaster.

Construction cranes climb into the sky and sprawl across the massive petrochemical facility that will turn a byproduct of fracked gas into plastic on the banks of the Ohio River, just outside Pittsburgh. Even at a distance, from the car park of a cancer treatment centre on a nearby hilltop, Royal Dutch Shell’s 386-acre site is a behemoth. It will anchor yet more gas, plastics and chemicals infrastructure in the tristate region of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

The plant would solidify demand for fracked natural gas and the ethane that comes with it out of the ground. It would make 1.6m tons of plastic and 2.2m tons of globe-heating carbon dioxide annually – roughly the same amount the city of Pittsburgh is trying to eliminate. The facility would also release hundreds of tons of toxic compounds into the air.

As global demand for plastics grows, the buildout of this industry threatens US progress on the climate crisis and clean air.

Opponents say the vast plastics industry will prolong fracking, even after power companies shift further towards renewable power, such as solar and wind. “To me, it’s so obvious that they are trying to lock us into fossil fuels,” said Terrie Baumgardner, a member of the Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community.

At a time when scientists warn humans must stop pulling fossil fuels out of the ground and spewing plastics into the environment, natural gas drilling is booming in Appalachia and the ethane-to-plastics industry there is just getting started.

In a tall office building on a hazy Pittsburgh day, Matt Mehalik, the executive director of a public health collaboration called the Breathe Project, slammed his hand on a table. “This region has been down this path before and we should know better,” he said. “I grew up in Pittsburgh at the time the steel industry unravelled. It has taken 30 years to recover.”

Dangerous air is already present and more coming

Opposed residents have myriad concerns. The Shell ethane facility, or “cracker” plant, would use extreme heat to turn ethane into ethylene, which becomes the polyethylene in plastic bottles, bags and food packaging. It will be fed by thousands of fracking wells that dot local communities, including next to day-care facilities and school bus stops.

Pipelines run under neighbourhoods that have previously been affected by explosions and fires. Trucks overwhelm the roads.

Residents opposing the ever-growing expansion say they worry about illnesses and dozens of cases of rare cancers they never saw in generations past.

Pittsburgh already has some of the most dangerous air in America. The city received a double-F rating from the American Lung Association for smog and particle pollution from fossil fuels. And Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, has ranked in the top 2% for cancer risks from air pollution.

And a report by the Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania last year found that since 2007, companies profiting from fracking had spent nearly $70m lobbying the state government, in part to insist the method was safe.

“Fracking money has undermined the voice of the people in comparison to the voice of the desire for fracking in the region,” said Mark Dixon, a film-maker and activist.

The pro-business group the Allegheny Conference on Community Development has boasted the plastics boom could turn Appalachia into a petrochemical hub similar to the Gulf Coast. But there, Louisiana residents have long tried to draw attention to the stretch of communities between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley”.

The conference argues its goal is to attract business and that government regulators are responsible for keeping residents healthy. A spokesman, Philip Cynar, said: “We have to think about the holistic approach … we can do a lot more for the overall benefit of the region if we have a good economy.”

The fear of health risks is misplaced, according to Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. In consultation with US regulators, it approved Shell’s air pollution plan in 2015. Allegheny County’s health department considered the effects of the plant’s releases of benzene, toluene, hexane, formaldehyde and ammonia – which cause cancer and other serious health problems. The department found the levels would be “well below the health-based risk value” for an individual.

Shell has said it designed the facility to “obtain the lowest achievable emissions.”

Aside from air pollution, the Shell plant will be as bad for global heating as putting a further 424,000 cars on the road each year. “It’s a huge paradox,” said Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s chief resilience officer. Oil and gas jobs pay well, even for people straight out of high school, he said. But the climate crisis puts humans “at the precipice of a public health disaster.”

Job creation has been a priority

Republicans and Democrats have supported the Shell plant, saying it will bring work to an area that has been hit hard by a downturn in US-made steel and coal.

Shell says it will create 6,000 construction jobs in the short term and 600 over the longer term. It is unclear exactly how many will go to locals. State lawmakers offered the company a $1.65bn, 25-year tax cut, the biggest break in Pennsylvania history.

Republican legislators have proposed a package of bills to encourage the natural gas industry, including by speeding the process for permitting projects and providing huge financial incentives.

Pennsylvania’s governor, the Democrat Tom Wolf, inherited the project from a Republican predecessor and now supports it.

But the facility and others like it are antithetical to Wolf’s plans to shrink the climate footprint of Pennsylvania, the country’s fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide. He wants to cut carbon pollution in Pennsylvania 26% by 2025, and 80% by 2050. His Department of Environmental Protection said the state is requiring the plant to reduce its climate footprint as possible “to help ensure that economic development and environmental protection can go hand in hand.”

Pittsburgh’s mayor, the Democrat Bill Peduto, famously challenged Trump on climate change, saying Pittsburgh would abide by an international pledge to limit heat-trapping pollution, even if Trump would not. But Peduto has stayed silent about the plant.

Construction continues (temporary stop work underway)

Hailed by Barack Obama as a “bridge fuel”, natural gas has become a nightmare for climate advocates. It has spurred a transition from coal, which emits twice as much carbon dioxide. But the bridge does not seem to be ending, and the natural gas production process leaks methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The industry has continued to build wells, plants and pipelines – about 27% of natural gas in the US comes from the Marcellus and Utica shales under Appalachia. By 2040, the area will produce 37% of the country’s natural gas, according to the data firm IHS Markit.

Appalachia has wet gas, meaning it produces both the methane mixture that is used for power and stovetops and natural gas liquids, including ethane and propane. Drillers want a local market at which to sell them all.

Of the Democratic frontrunners for president, senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have pledged to ban fracking. Joe Biden, the former vice-president, has not. But the Trump administration is supporting the build-out.

Ken Humphreys, a senior adviser for regional economic development at the US Department of Energy, said: “Broadly this is about creating the conditions for private capital to flow into the region.

Between 2018 and 2040, the US’s capacity for making ethylene and intermediate petrochemical products is expected to nearly double. The energy department argues that global demand for plastic is rising, and it will either be produced in the US or in countries with more lax environmental standards.

Humphreys said there were 7,500 businesses within 300 miles of Pittsburgh, employing 900,000 people to make products that incorporated petrochemicals – most of which came from the Gulf Coast. Producing plastic locally would be more efficient, the department said.

Rare cancers in southwestern Pennsylvania

In Washington County, Pennsylvania, south-west of Pittsburgh, fracking well pads sit alongside neighbourhoods. One, called a super-frack pad because of its dozens of wellheads, sits in a valley next to the former coal community of Marianna.

A school bus stop overlooks the site and the children who wait there each morning live in brick homes that were built for coalminers and then abandoned.

Four counties in south-western Pennsylvania have been afflicted by a rash of rare cancers, including 27 cases of Ewing sarcoma over 10 years in a population of about 750,000. The bone cancer usually occurs in children and young adults.

A retired paediatrician, Ned Ketyer, said: “Ewing sarcoma is a nightmare for the families that are given that diagnosis, and certainly for the patients and also for the physicians that diagnose it. It starts very quietly but by the time the diagnosis is made it has deepened and spread.”

There are dozens of other rare cancer cases in the area too. The Pennsylvania Department of Health studied rates of the disease in two school districts and said there was no evidence of a cluster.

But people are still worried. Last week, 50 environmental advocacy and public health groups as well as hundreds of individuals signed a letter to the Pennsylvania governor asking him to attend a public meeting to hear their health concerns. The state’s epidemiologist attended instead.

The region has a toxic legacy that predates natural gas – including hundreds of years of coal-mining and agriculture pesticide use. But Ketyer said the cancers did not begin until fracking arrived.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection found the Shell plant’s hazardous air pollutants–which cause cancer and other serious sicknesses–“will not threaten public health and safety,” spokesman Neil Shader said.

Residents also worry about gas industry accidents. One September morning in 2018, Karen Gdula awoke to an explosion and flames shooting into the air from a 24-inch pipeline buried a few houses away. Her neighbours narrowly escaped with several of their dogs, but they lost their home, another dog and four cats in the fire.

Another neighbour, who was celebrating her birthday, had trouble convincing an emergency services operator that the pipeline had exploded until the operator heard the fire roar. The flames were so hot they melted a nearby transmission tower.

A second pipeline is under construction that will cross over the one that exploded. Gdula has been working with the construction company to make it safer for the neighbourhood. “My goal is safety,” she said. “We don’t believe we can stop them but we can do what we can to be safe.”

Global climate change

Natural gas from shale – the type that is extracted with fracking – is expected to double in the US in the coming decades, mostly in the east, according to the US Energy Information Administration. And the energy department expects an enormous 20-fold surge in ethane production in the eastern US by 2025.

Scientists say to avoid catastrophe from rising temperatures, people must rapidly reduce their emissions from fossil fuels to net zero by 2050.

The world is already 1C hotter than before industrialisation, and it is on track to warm an additional 2C – worsening extreme weather and poverty and leading to rapidly rising seas.

The Center for International Environmental Law, a pro-environment group, estimates that by 2050 climate-harming emissions from the production and incineration of plastics could reach 56 gigatons per year, or 10-13% of the budget allowed for keeping temperatures from rising more than 1.5C.

There is no way of knowing how much a plastics hub in Appalachia will exacerbate global warming and offset the work of states and cities trying to cut heat-trapping emissions. The ethane boom will, however, stretch beyond western Pennsylvania into Ohio and West Virginia.

In nearby Barnesville, Jill Hunkler said she was driven from her home by fracking. As gas wells were constructed around her, Hunkler said she started to experience headaches, breathing problems, burning eyes and a metallic taste in her mouth.

Hunkler counts 78 producing wells within five miles of her house, according to data from FracTracker. “There’s just no respect for the local community’s health,” she claimed.

Bev Reed, a nursing graduate and intern at the Sierra Club, a grassroots environmental organisation, said the community had no say over whether the facility was built.

“We already know it’s not sustainable and that Appalachia has been pillaged and plundered and raped for pretty much as long as its existed,” Reed said. “We’ve seen enough and we deserve better.”

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See also: The Ohio River Defines the Borders of Five States—But Its Pollution Doesn’t Stop at State Lines, Susan Cosier, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), August 21, 2019

In a move that could open the door to industrial waste and interstate squabbles, the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission is making its water quality standards voluntary.

[The Ohio River consistently is ranked as the most polluted in the country, with an estimated 30 million pounds of toxic chemicals illegally dumped into its waters each year.] dgn

Public community meeting on excess cancers in SW PA

From an Article by Don Hopey & David Templeton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 19, 2019

Environmentalists and researchers attending a panel discussion Tuesday called for studies to determine whether shale-gas drilling and fracking, or other pollution sources, could be responsible for an increasing number of childhood, teenage and young adult cancers in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Bernard Goldstein, professor emeritus of environmental and occupational health at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, moderated the discussion and talked about a handful of investigations of environmental exposures and possible “clusters” of disease.

“This situation raises important questions about public health, what’s happening to people where they live, and the lack of responsibility by the industry,” Dr. Goldstein said.

He noted that he had been involved in more than a dozen investigations of potential disease clusters and said they are invariably “frustrating and humbling.” “That’s because the science is often not good enough to give us the answers we need,” he said.

About 150 people attended the event at Bella Sera in North Strabane, Washington County. It was held in response to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s project, “Human toll: Risk and exposure in the gas lands,” that documented up to 67 childhood, teenage and young adult cancers over the past decade in Washington, Westmoreland, Fayette and Greene counties.

Those cases include 27 cases of Ewing sarcoma — a rare bone cancer with only 250 diagnoses nationwide each year.

A major concern is the Canon-McMillan School District, with a legacy of six cases of Ewing sarcoma in the past decade, along with 10 cases of other cancers, many of them rare types, among current students, including a girl who died in February from astrocytoma, a brain-spinal cord cancer.

Dee Kochirka, vice president of the Allegheny County chapter of the Izaak Walton League, said the league’s objective is to unite the state’s 80 or so environmental groups to speak with one voice on environmental health matters.

“We need to be heard. The scientific methods can take decades to prove true. It took 40 years to prove cigarettes cause cancer,” she said. “Are we going to wait until more children die to find out about shale gas drilling?”

Reports of childhood cancers continues to raise concern.

The panel raised concerns that identifying a cause of the cancers is difficult, but pollution from various sources, including shale gas development, could be responsible, said Dr. Ned Ketyer, a panelist and a retired pediatrician who now works with the Environmental Health Project. He noted that the number of Ewing sarcoma and other cancer cases is alarming.

“Only unbiased studies can lead to answers,” he said.

On Monday, more than 100 organizations and 800 individuals signed a letter to Gov. Tom Wolf and state Health Department Secretary Rachel Levine requesting an investigation of potential links between shale gas development and childhood cancers.

The group also requested that all new shale gas permitting be suspended until the health department determines whether such a link exists.

In response, the Marcellus Shale Coalition sent a letter later Monday to Mr. Wolf, terming the request “ridiculous.” It said those asking for the investigation represent “the insidious movement we are witnessing to shut down American shale gas development.”

He called the groups’ actions as “shameful” in the effort “to exploit the very real and heartbreaking issues associated with childhood cancer” that “should not be fodder to advance a political agenda.”

“The claims made by the signatories to the letter are an affront not only to the integrity of the researchers who have dedicated their lives to understanding rare cancers such as those affecting families in Southwest PA, but also to those who work in the industry, as well as the professionalism and expertise of your own environmental regulators and health professionals,” said David J. Spigelmyer, Marcellus Shale Coalition president.

Panelist Janice Blanock, whose son, Luke, died from Ewings sarcoma in 2016, said there’s no loss like the loss of a child and parents shouldn’t have to watch their children suffer, especially if it’s caused by something environmental.

“It’s time to come together as one united group of concerned citizens,” Ms. Blanock said. “It’s our right to make sure we have a healthy environment for our children. I want to ask each of you what you will do. What will you stand up for?”

CDC, state officials investigating multiple cases of rare cancer in southwestern Pa.

From an Article by David Templeton & Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 28, 2019

Many in the Canon-McMillan School District first learned about Ewing sarcoma, a rare childhood bone cancer, when Luke Blanock of the village of Cecil was diagnosed on Dec. 5, 2014.

The media did stories about the community rallying around the smart, handsome teenager and his family, then returned on Feb. 19, 2016, to cover Mr. Blanock — pale, thin and having just been told he had only two weeks to live — when he married his high school girlfriend, Natalie Britvich.

He rebounded a bit and even played a round of golf before succumbing nearly six months later on Aug. 7, from multiple tumors of the brain, spine, skull, jaw and pelvis. He was only 19.

But, as it turns out, the Ewing sarcoma scare within Canon-McMillan’s boundaries in eastern Washington County neither began nor ended with Luke Blanock.

In fact, six cases of Ewing sarcoma have been diagnosed within the school district since 2008, including two cases in the past nine months.

And only now is it being disclosed that twice that number of Ewing cases have occurred in southeastern Westmoreland County since 2011.

Only 200 to 250 cases of Ewing sarcoma — a rare cancer of the bone or nearby soft tissue — occur each year in the United States. The National Cancer Institute said the incidence for all ages is one case per million but up to 10 cases per million among those in the 10-to-19 age group.

Based on a report by a concerned resident and St. Vincent College researchers about the Ewing cases in Westmoreland County, the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a study to determine whether these cases constitute a cluster. The state now has expanded the investigation to include the Canon-McMillan School District and Washington County.

Nate Wardle, health department spokesman, said it received more than a dozen phone calls within the last month from residents of Washington and Westmoreland counties about the Ewing sarcoma cases, and several more called this week.

Ewing Sarcoma Canon Cases mount up

The string of Ewing cases in Canon-McMillan began with the mid-2008 diagnosis of Curtis Valent, a Cecil Township resident who graduated from Bishop Canevin High School. He died on Jan. 2, 2011, at age 23, according to his obituary. His parents could not be reached for comment.

Late in 2008, Alyssa Chambers, then an 18-year-old Canon-McMillan senior living in northern Cecil Township, was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma and survived. She later became an oncology nurse at UPMC Shadyside.

Kyle Deliere, who lived about a mile from Mr. Blanock in the village of Cecil, was diagnosed with Ewing next, on Oct. 30, 2011. He lost weight, had night sweats and fevers, and developed large tumors on his hip, femur and lungs. The 11-letter high school athlete who wrestled for the University of Pittsburgh died on Nov. 15, 2013, at age 27.

Then in June 2018, David Cobb, 37 at the time, and also living in Cecil Township, was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma and now is undergoing rounds of chemotherapy.

Compounding this cancer conundrum and fueling concern, Mitchell Barton, a 21-year-old Canon-McMillan graduate now working as a technician in a local box factory, posted news on Facebook of his Dec. 27, 2018, Ewing diagnosis.

He and Mr. Blanock played baseball together in high school. Mr. Barton, now undergoing chemotherapy, still lives at home in North Strabane, where fracked natural gas wells surround him. For that reason, environmental issues crossed his mind from the moment of diagnosis.

“I worked at a golf course for four years and was exposed to a lot of chemicals, weed killers and things like that,” he said. “Our house also is in a valley surrounded by four gas wells. I heard about natural gas and my mom is concerned about methane [natural gas].”

In addition to the Ewing cases, a 14-year-old girl from Cecil Township died of astrocytoma, a brain and spinal cord cancer, in February, and as many as seven current students and two preschoolers in the Canon-McMillan School District have other types of cancer.

Those nine consist of two cases of osteosarcoma (bone); one liposarcoma (joint); one rhabdomyosarcoma (also joint); a Wilms (kidney) tumor in a child whose family has moved from the district; one liver cancer; two cases of leukemia (blood); and a 2-year-old with cancer that the parent declined to identify.

In another case, a 21-year-old Canon-McMillan graduate of North Strabane was diagnosed in early January with leukemia.

Another concentration of cases: The worries about Ewing and other forms of childhood cancer go well beyond the Canon-McMillan School District. In Westmoreland County, 12 cases of Ewing sarcoma were found to be diagnosed from 2011 through early 2018.

Maureen Grace, a Westmoreland County lawyer and teacher, began compiling a list upon hearing of one case after another in areas southeast of Greensburg. “All that I can say is that I saw beautiful children and families suffering. I asked myself, ‘What if this happened to a child in my family?’ Every child, every parent and anyone who cares about children has the right to clean, healthy, safe air, water and surroundings for their babies, little ones and teenagers to grow and become adults. I don’t know if we have this environment right now,” Ms. Grace said.

“Our children are our most precious resource. If we don’t investigate this to the very best of our abilities, who are we as a culture or community?” she added. “We need to do better for our little ones who look to us for the answers. We need to protect them above all else.”

So determined, she sought help from two St. Vincent College researchers — Elaine Bennett, professor of anthropology and public health, and Cynthia Walter, a now-retired professor of ecology and toxicology — who recruited students to help verify cases, analyze results and write a report. Ms. Grace also received help through the Healthy Child/Healthy World Organization. The research team, known as the Westmoreland County Pa. Ewing Sarcoma Project, submitted its report to the state health department and CDC in December 2017.

Working quietly, Ms. Grace finally responded to longstanding inquiries from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and stepped forward with Ms. Walter, who holds a doctorate in biology, to publicize their results. Ms. Grace said she initially documented eight pediatric Ewing cases and the health department now has expanded that total to 12, when cases involving young adults were included.

Confirming a cluster requires meeting a high statistical and analytical bar, including identifying a pollution or chemical exposure linked to that cancer, according to a Pitt biostatistician. That presents a problem because Ewing sarcoma has no known cause. What could be the cause?

The Westmoreland project presented the state with a long list of possible pollution sources, including countywide shale gas drilling and fracking operations and a Penn Township landfill that has accepted thousands of tons of radioactive drill cuttings from gas well sites. The project’s report also makes a case for how pollution exposure could lead to Ewing.

But Ms. Grace said she and the team don’t yet know if fracking, water or air pollution, or pollution from old industry, among other sources of pollution and contamination, are responsible. “We don’t want our aim to stray from seeking a scientific cause and solution,” she said.

The health department said it is reviewing cancer statistics for Washington County and for the Canon-McMillan School District, where it is only aware of four cases but has yet to incorporate 2018 cancer data into its review. In the past decade, two additional Ewing sarcoma cases have occurred in Washington County — one in Charleroi and another in or near Bentleyville — with at least two cases each in Greene and Fayette counties.

The health department also said it has been working with researchers to separately evaluate and monitor Westmoreland County statistics. Even with 12 Ewing cases, the department does not see a statistically significant excessive number in Westmoreland County, Mr. Wardle said, adding that that finding has been shared with concerned residents of the county. “But we will continue to monitor the number of cases in the area.”

He said the department is doing the statistical evaluation of the Ewing cases in Washington County and now has included all childhood cancers in the study, including those identified by the Post-Gazette.

The Ewing family of sarcoma is not one of the common cancers the department reports on annually, he said. Most cases occur in teens when they experience growth spurts, and science is limited as to what causes it.

The concerned citizens who recently called the health department wanted to know if the cancer cases are related to environmental factors, including radiation, Mr. Wardle said. Washington County has historic radiation issues related to a uranium mill tailings disposal site in North Strabane, near Canonsburg, where the U.S. Department of Energy continues to report background or below background levels of radiation.

Another concern is the widespread drilling and fracking of more than 1,000 shale gas wells, which produce waste water with radioactive components, among other pollutants. The first experimental well in southwestern Pennsylvania was fracked in 2005 in Cecil Township. The township now sits downwind from a phalanx of compressor stations and a hilltop cryogenics plant, a major source of pollution.

Academic studies done in Pennsylvania and Colorado have found higher rates of childhood cancers in areas where fracking is occurring but with no links to Ewing sarcoma.

The Marcellus Shale Coalition, the trade organization representing the shale gas industry in Pennsylvania, issued a statement citing a review of medical data by the American Cancer Society that found “no known lifestyle-related or environmental causes of Ewing tumors ….”

In a statement, David Spigelmyer, coalition president, said attempts to link the incidence of Ewing sarcoma and other childhood cancers to the shale gas drilling industry were without scientific or medical support.

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See also: Study Finds Higher Risk of Brain Tumors in Appalachia, January 17, 2019