“White Lung” like Black Lung is a debilitating (permanent) condition

From the Message by Patricia Popple, Frac Sand Sentinel # 428, January 30, 2023

Doug Wood, who lives with his wife, Dawn, in Michigan, just south and west of Detroit, is besiged with a continually developing silica mine right next door to his home. Silica dust is carcinogenic and has known to be so for many years. It settles in the deep lung and in other body parts, unable to be released in anyway due to the small glasslike particulates that are a part of the geological formation.

While Michigan may have a standard set for respirable crystalline silica dust, it seems there is no enforcement by state protection agencies in residential areas. Who is responsible? Doug and his wife have worked endlessly it seems to get someone in the regulatory agencies and mining industry, to install air quality monitoring, and yet nothing has been achieved. Neighbors seem to be unconcerned about the presence of a mining operation that continues to spew dangerous dust into the air without concern for the residential areas that exist around the silica mine. There are other problems also associated with this operation including truck traffic and noise, but the dust produced is horrific and dangerous.

While it could take 20 years for silicosis to develop in the deep lung, it could take less. The glass like particulates don’t seem to be much different than asbestos which is also a known carcinogen.

Take a look at the video at the site and see for yourself the problems that the Wood family members are dealing with. They need help and support from the state and neighbors and Michigan’s protective agencies and organizations to spread this information and their concerns and more than that, take action.

Fractracker has played a role in the production of this video, and there are other videos in this series about the problems faced when regulatory agencies aren’t much concerned about the health, safety, and welfare of people and their offspring living near silica or other mines that bring the potential for grave health conditions to a neighborhood. Also, look for them on YouTube.

Please click on the video link here:
https://youtu.be/T6PSl9Cdhvw

I know that Wisconsinites are aware what the Wood Family is facing, but there are others of you in other locations who may be in similar situations. The industry must tighten its regulations, states and local governmental officials and groups much enforce. Residents and others must get involved by speaking out and by attending meetings of local and state agencies who can make a difference through rules, comprehensive plans, ordinances, zoning, and action.

>>> And by the way, register to VOTE in your communities at upcoming primary and general elections. It is critical that everyone get to the polls or participate in voting via absentee ballot. You can make a difference by researching candidates who are responsive to people facing environmental and health issues in your communties across the nation. Make a difference by exercising your right at your nearest voting location. VOTE!

>>> Welcome to the Frac Sand Sentinel, a newsletter highlighting resource links, news media accounts, blog posts, correspondence, observations and opinions gathered regarding local actions on, and impacts of, the developing frac sand mining and processing industries.

Regions of heavy oil & gas activity in the USA

From the Announcement by Matt Kelso, FracTracker Alliance, May 24, 2022

FracTracker is proud to join Earthworks and a coalition of concerned health, environmental, and social justice organizations in launching the Oil & Gas Threat Map — a mapping tool to help you visualize the pollution the oil and gas industry is trying to hide.

This new mapping tool shows who is living in the threat radius – and gives the EPA 17.3 million reasons why it must use its full authority to cut methane from oil and gas wells.

Infrared footage included in the map makes invisible pollution from oil & gas facilities visible — and you might be shocked by what you see.

The Threat Map shows 17.3 million people in the US living within 1/2 mile of oil and gas facilities that cause severe health impacts. There are also 12,445 primary and secondary schools within this threat radius.

Frontline communities deserve a swift response to this public health crisis. Take action to curb this pollution: call on the Biden administration to release the strongest rules possible to protect our communities from oil and gas pollution.

Matt Kelso, FracTracker Manager of Data & Technology, worked with Earthworks and partners to create this tool. If you have questions about the data included in the Threat Map, feel free to reach out to Matt at kelso@fractracker.org.

GO TO THE OIL AND GAS THREAT MAP

>>> FracTracker Alliance, 216 Franklin St, Ste 400, Johnstown, PA 15901

See Also: www.fractracker.org

FracTracker U.S. Map (November 2014)

FracTracker Launches Oil and Gas Tracking App for iPhones

From the latest FracTracker Newsletter, November 30, 2014

Pittsburgh, PA – FracTracker Alliance announces the release of our free iPhone app – designed to collect and share experiences related to oil and gas drilling across the United States. As unconventional drilling or “fracking” intensifies, so too do the innovative ways in which citizens can track, monitor, and report potential issues from their smart phones.

The app allows users to submit oil and gas photos or reports. Users can also view a map of wells drilled near them and user-submitted reports. This map shows wells that have been drilled both unconventionally and conventionally.

“FracTracker’s app contributes to the collective understanding of oil and gas impacts and provides a new opportunity for public engagement,” explains Brook Lenker, Executive Director of the FracTracker Alliance. “We hope that our mobile app will revolutionize how people share oil and gas information.”

Updated Shale Drilling Map for West Virginia

New maps have been developed for Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Updated maps are available for CA, PA and WV.  See the November Newsletter for more details. The latest “WV Shale Viewer” updated map can be seen here.

Development Partners

Several organizations and community groups helped to test and improve the app during its development. To address questions about the impacts of oil and gas development across landscapes, FracTracker joined with the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) to create a crowd-sourced digital map with photos detailing the scale of oil and gas development near North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park using the app. The photo map is part of a NPCA’s campaign designed to educate citizens about the cross-landscape impacts of oil and gas development near America’s national parks. NPCA is hosting two events this week in support of this campaign work – in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

“FracTracker’s new app allows us to tell a visual story about fracking’s impacts to national parks and their local communities,” said Nick Lund, who manages the NPCA’s Landscape Conservation program. “With this week’s public events in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, we will show the dramatic impact that fracking continues to have, in just a few years, near Theodore Roosevelt National Park. These images can help inform the public and our elected officials as they finalize drilling regulations in Pennsylvania. We hope this information will lead to strong protections for our national parks, our forests, and our drinking water.”

Beta testing and reviews of the app were also conducted by Mountain Watershed Association, Responsible Drilling Alliance, Audubon PA, PA Forest Coalition, Southwest PA Environmental Health Project, and Save Our Streams PA. The app was developed in collaboration with Viable Industries, L.L.C.

Like NPCA, groups can use the FracTracker app to collect visual data and develop customized maps for their own projects. Contact FracTracker to learn more: info@fractracker.org.

Download the App

Download the free app from the iTunes store or visit FracTracker.org to learn more: www.fractracker.org/apps. Currently the app is only available for iPhone users, but an Android platform is under development.

Contact: Samantha Malone, smalone@FracTracker.org, 412-802-0273

FracTracker Alliance is a non-profit organization with offices in PA, OH, NY, WV, and CA that shares maps, data, and analyses to communicate impacts of the global oil and gas industry and inform actions that positively shape our energy future. Learn more about FracTracker at www.fractracker.org.

National Parks Conservation Association: Since 1919, the nonpartisan National Parks Conservation Association has been the leading voice of the American people in protecting and enhancing our National Park System. NPCA, its one million members and supporters, and many partners work together to protect the park system and preserve our nation’s natural, historical, and cultural heritage for our children and grandchildren. For more information, please visit www.npca.org.

Home web-site; www.FracTracker.org — Exploring data, sharing perspectives, and mapping impacts of the oil & gas industry.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

SkyTruth Monitoring, Shepherdstown, WV

Transparency about  fracking chemicals remains elusive

From an Article of  ”The Pulse” on WHYY, NewsWorks, Philadelphia, August 7, 2014

The website FracFocus.org was built to give the public answers to a burning question about the shale boom: what exactly were companies pumping down tens of thousands of wells to release oil and gas?

Today, FracFocus has records for more than 77,000 wells. Pennsylvania is one of 14 states requiring operators to use the website as part of their chemical disclosure laws, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

However, transparency about those chemicals remains elusive. FracFocus is run by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission and the Groundwater Protection Council, both based in Oklahoma City. The IOGCC is a multi-state government agency and the GWPC is a nonprofit group of state regulators who oversee water quality and oil and gas development. Pennsylvania is a member of both organizations.

“We were just trying to do some good,” says GWPC Associate Director Dan Yates, “Get some data out there on something we felt the public was hungry for.”

With funding from industry trade groups, FracFocus launched in April 2011 as an optional disclosure tool. More than 200 operators voluntarily uploaded their fracking fluid recipes for each well – with the exception of those ingredients companies deemed “trade secrets.” One year later, the voluntary disclosure site started to become a required regulatory tool in several states, including Pennsylvania.

Yates says the goal was to provide a well-by-well service. “We really wanted to focus in on individual people who lived and worked near a well, what they needed to know about that well,” he says.

That’s a problem, according to David Manthos with the group SkyTruth. He says information about tens of thousands of wells is technically available to the public on FracFocus, “but in such an obscure, obtuse way that it’s impossible to look at it in aggregate.”

SkyTruth is a nonprofit that uses publicly available data and satellite images to monitor the impacts of industry on the environment – all from a tiny office in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. When the SkyTruth team learned about FracFocus, Manthos says they were excited to find a new data set on shale development. The reports included information about the volume of water, sand and chemicals companies used to frack, as well as the location, height and depth of each well.

However, the data wasn’t so easy to get. Drillers post their lists of chemicals as individual PDF documents for each well they frack. PDFs are not “machine-readable.” In other words, computers can’t understand the documents, so it’s harder to tell machines to pull the data out and organize the information as a table or a spreadsheet. (An Excel spreadsheet is one example of a “machine-readable” document.)

Click here to see what a FracFocus report looks like.

At the time, FracFocus had records for more than 30,000 wells. To mine all that data, SkyTruth would have to open one PDF at a time and then copy and paste all the information about each ingredient into a spreadsheet.

Manthos says it was a daunting task. “We calculated about 6 years’ worth of labor and just at minimum wage, would have been something on the order of $90,000 just to manually do this whole thing,” he says.

Paul Woods, SkyTruth’s self-described “big data wrangler,” spent about three months coming up with a better solution. He designed a bot – a software program that could do all the work for them. Every night, the bot scraped the site for all the available PDF documents and compiled the information into a searchable database. SkyTruth published that database online for the public in 2012. “We were overwhelmed by the response of people contacting us, asking questions about the data set, downloading it and then the subsequent reports and publications that used that data set to say very interesting things,” Woods says.

For instance, researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago used the data to look at how much water goes into producing natural gas and using it as a transportation fuel.

The Smithsonian used it to make an interactive map of shale gas wells across the country. Even a consulting firm that does data analysis for the industry tapped into SkyTruth’s database.

But one night last June, the bot hit a roadblock. The first thing Woods noticed was that there was no new data coming in from FracFocus. He ran some tests and was discouraged by what he found. “There was a little error message that was coming out saying, ‘Hey, you’re sending too many requests. You’re being blocked for 24 hours,’” he says. “Then, they block you for 48 hours and then they block you forever.”

The GWPC had set up a system to block automated programs like SkyTruth’s bot. Yates says it was “out of concern about overloading our system resources.”

The new blocking program was part of an overhaul of FracFocus launched on June 1, 2013. “FracFocus 2.0″ included new search tools and more flexibility on the back end of the site so companies could tailor their reports to meet different states’ disclosure requirements. “We didn’t want automated searches overloading the system and blocking or slowing down individual public access,” Yates says, noting that the site was meant for residents and landowners, not groups like SkyTruth looking for big data on drilling.

To get companies to voluntarily disclose what’s in their fracking fluid, the GWPC and IOGCC had to agree it would only serve up the information one well at a time. The industry didn’t want FracFocus to be a wholesale repository of data. “That agreement is still in place,” Yates says. “We think that’s more than likely going to change, but we’re not actively seeking that out.”

FracFocus has come under new scrutiny as the U.S. Bureau of Land Management considers whether to use it as a disclosure tool for fracking on federal and Indian lands. The BLM recently finished combing through more than one million public comments on the draft rule. Spokeswoman Bev Winston says the agency is in the process of writing the final regulation and it is not clear whether the website will play a role.

“Like it or not, FracFocus is now one of the most comprehensive, if not the most comprehensive source of information about the chemicals being used in unconventional oil and gas development,” says Kate Konschnik, director of the Environmental Policy Initiative at Harvard Law School.

In a 2013 report, Konschnik gave FracFocus a failing grade as a disclosure tool. She found that the data were often inaccurate or incomplete, and that companies were making “trade secret” claims for chemicals at one well site while fully disclosing the same chemicals at another. “Not maybe as robust a tool as one would hope if something is regulated or required by state law,” she says.

In March, a task force convened by the U.S. Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board recommended that the site’s administrators beef up quality control and allow the public better access to the data in aggregate or wholesale form. The task force also recommended federal funding for these improvements.

Morgan Wagner, a spokeswoman for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection says the agency “is in support of the Advisory Board’s recommendations.”

Konschnik says the groups running the site are under more pressure to make changes, but are juggling multiple interests – the industry, the states and now, the federal government.

Yates admits FracFocus could be improved and says the administrators are already working to fix some of the site’s limitations, but it will be up to the industry and the states to decide whether to release the full data set to the public. “We certainly have capability to make that happen,” he says. “The technical know-how exists.”"If we didn’t build it, there wouldn’t be a FracFocus. Though it has some limitations, it’s better than not existing at all.” “They haven’t really accomplished public disclosure”

What became of SkyTruth’s efforts to get the data? It’s been just over a year since the bot was blocked from the site. Woods says the group is stalled. In the spring, SkyTruth teamed up with another environmental nonprofit called FracTracker, based in Pittsburgh, to try to work things out with the site’s administrators. So far, they have not reached an agreement.

Yates says the blocking system is no longer needed and will eventually be removed. However, he could not say when that will happen. FracFocus is still a unique source of information about a technology that is changing communities and the global energy economy.

But data miners are frustrated that the big information inside FracFocus has been purposefully made so small. Samantha Malone with FracTracker puts it this way: “Imagine trying to understand your financial spending throughout the year by taking photos of all of your receipts of anything you ever purchased the entire year,” she says. “You would need to look at each one, one at a time and even then you still couldn’t see the big picture.”

Without big data, Woods says, even individual homeowners can’t see the big picture of how the shale boom is impacting them or their communities. “The kind of people who can answer those questions for you are people like us,” he says. “And if we can’t get the data because they only want to give it to individual homeowners about their individual wells, then they haven’t really accomplished public disclosure.”