Fracking waste disposal in Guernsey County, OH. (These activities are known risks of creating earthquakes.)

Environmental Essay by Lisa C. Lieb, Revelator Voices, March 27, 2023

Let’s Protect This Place: A region historically plagued by industrial pollution is overwhelmed with unconventional oil and gas development. The Allegheny Plateau is a lower-lying portion of the Appalachian Mountain Range that extends from southern and central New York to northern and western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, northern and western West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky.

Why it matters: The plateau consists of areas of gently sloping hills in the north and west of the region as well as rugged valleys in the south and east. It overlies the Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale, sedimentary rock formations. The region is rich in natural resources, including hardwoods, iron ore, silica, coal, oil and natural gas.

The abundance of these resources supported development in the region and were integral to the local steel, glass, rail and extraction industries.

Prior to widespread logging between 1890 and 1920, the area hosted old-growth forests containing red spruce, eastern white pine, eastern hemlock, sugar maple, black oak, white oak, yellow birch and American beech.

But the forest’s makeup is now different, favoring oaks, maples, hickories, American beech and yellow birch. Though fragmented and much less mature than the old-growth forests, today’s forests continue to play a vital role in ecosystems, serving as habitats for the federally endangered Indiana bat as well as locally endangered or at-risk species such as little brown bats, northern flying squirrels and blackpoll warblers.

The region hosts the Ohio River watershed and confluence, the Allegheny National Forest in New York and Pennsylvania, and the Wayne National Forest in Ohio.

The threat: Unconventional oil and gas development has boomed in the region over the past decade. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Marcellus and Utica shale plays contain approximately 214 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, making the Allegheny Plateau a lucrative location for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

Already more than 13,000 unconventional wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania. Fracking itself is a resource intense process, requiring between 2 and 20 million gallons of water per well. A 2014 study estimated that in Pennsylvania, 80% of the water used for fracking comes from streams, rivers, and lakes, thus potentially altering water temperature and levels of dissolved oxygen. This water is combined with sand and a mixture of hazardous chemicals, which may include methanol, ethylene glycol and propargyl alcohol.

Between 20-25% of the water that is injected into the well returns to the surface. This flowback water often has higher salinity and has been known to contain barium, arsenic, benzene and radium. While recycling of flowback is becoming more common, other methods of disposal include underground injection, application to road surfaces, treatment at public waste facilities, and discharging it onto rivers, streams and lakes.

Near fracking sites in West Virginia, elevated levels of barium and strontium were found in feathers of Louisiana waterthrushes, native songbirds who make their home in brooks and wooded swamps. In northwestern Pennsylvania, crayfish and brook trout living in fracked streams were found to have increased levels of mercury. Fish diversity is also reduced in streams that have been fracked.

Fracking consumes land, too. Each fracking well requires 3-7 acres. In Pennsylvania over 700,000 acres of state forest land are leased or available for gas production. Well pads, pipelines and other fracking infrastructure fragment forests, alter their ecology, and reduce biodiversity. Appalachian azure butterflies and federally threatened northern wild monkshood — purple-flowering herbaceous perennials found in New York and Ohio — are both sensitive to forest fragmentation.

In addition to the direct impacts of fracking, the availability of natural gas in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays attracts petrochemical development to the region. Shell Polymers Monaca initiated operations in November 2022 at a newly constructed 386-acre petrochemical complex in southwestern Pennsylvania, along the Ohio River.

The plant manufactures virgin polyethylene pellets, which will be largely be used for production of single-use plastic products. In addition to releasing hazardous air pollutants, volatile organic compounds and particulate matter, this ethane “cracker” plant will emit 2.2 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.

The plant’s existence will also fuel fracking in the region; it is anticipated that it will require between 100 and 200 new wells each year in order to supply natural gas for its productions. Other petrochemical companies, including Exxon, PTT Global and Odebrecht, have reportedly been considering building similar complexes in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

My place in this place: I was born and raised in the area, and my family’s roots in southwestern Pennsylvania go back several generations. Some of my most cherished memories involve Pennsylvania’s forests, rivers and streams. As a child I loved my family’s summer pilgrimages to our cabin, a rustic building that had been converted from a one-room schoolhouse in the Pennsylvania Wilds. At “camp” we fished for yellow perch, smallmouth bass and walleye in the Sinnemahoning Creek and caught crayfish by hand. We sunned ourselves on the rocks along the river bank when the water was warm. In the evenings we walked on quiet, narrow roads in hopes of spotting an eastern elk in a grassy field.

I now live in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, one mile from the Shell cracker plant. I can observe the plant’s flaring from my kitchen window, which often creates an ominous orange glow in the night sky. To me the plant doesn’t symbolize job creation or a rebounding local economy, despite the assertions of local and state politicians. I see the plant as the perpetuation of a hopeless dependence on fossil fuels and corporate profit at the expense of ecological integrity. I worry that fracking and an associated petrochemical buildout will destroy already fragile ecosystems throughout my home in the Allegheny Plateau.

Who’s protecting it now: There are a variety of environmental groups located in the region. No Petro PA is an organization that resists fracking and pipeline development in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. More locally the Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community in western Pennsylvania opposes fracking and seeks to protect local community members from its harmful effects.

With the rise of the Shell cracker plant, the group also formed Eyes on Shell, a community organization that aims to hold Shell accountable for its activity and advocates for the surrounding communities’ health and safety. These are just three of the many grassroots organizations working to protect the air, soil, water, wildlife and communities in the region.

The national organization, FracTracker, also provides extensive data on oil and natural gas wells, pipelines, legislation and environmental health.

What this place needs: Ideally Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia will follow in the footsteps of New York and institute a ban on fracking in light of the environmental and health risks associated with unconventional gas and oil development. However, given their strong ties to the fossil fuel industry, it is unlikely that this will occur. Banning fracking on public land in the region, such as in state forests and county parks, in a practical first step in combatting forest fragmentation and pollution.

At a regional level, regulations should be put in place to protect the water quality of the Ohio River. The Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, a multistate organization working with the federal government, could ban fracking in the Ohio River Basin in order to protect the river and its watershed. The Delaware River Basin Commission has successfully prohibited fracking within the Delaware River Basin; the rules developed by the commission could be adapted for use by the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission.

Additional government oversight would help to protect water quality in the region. Presently fracking is exempt from the Safe Water Drinking Act and therefore isn’t regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Ending this exemption could increase water quality and safety within the Allegheny Plateau.

Increased transparency from oil and gas companies is also required to protect the region’s water. As of July 2022, California is the only state in the country that requires full public disclosure of all chemicals used in fracking. Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio must implement policies that require full public disclosure of chemicals used in all phases of the fracking process.

OHIO Department of Natural Resources ignores the public health

From an Article by Julie Grant, The Allegheny Front, February 22, 2021

Judy Burger of Belmont County, Ohio stands next to her home, where across the road two frack waste injection wells are being constructed. She fears noise and pollution from constant truck traffic.

Each well drilled using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas production creates tens of millions of gallons of wastewater, called produced water or brine. In Ohio, much of that wastewater is disposed of in underground injection wells, including waste from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. As the number of injection wells grows in Ohio, local communities want some control over where these wells are located.

In Belmont County, Ohio, Judy Burger’s husband is getting ready to retire. After 25 years, their peaceful home near the highway is quickly changing, “I’m a nervous wreck, I’m on blood pressure medicine,” she said. “I have my Venetian blinds closed in my house so I don’t have to look across the street to see the mayhem and the destruction and the coming reality.”

Across the street, OMNI Energy Group of New Jersey has been drilling two frack waste injection wells. Heavy construction equipment has torn up the ground, and some days loud drilling noises remind her of what’s coming.

When the work is done, wastewater from oil and gas operations in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania will be trucked here. According to a state transportation study, 48 trucks will enter and exit the site during peak hours in the morning and afternoon to inject waste into the wells, a salty brine that the US EPA says can be toxic and radioactive.

Burger doesn’t want to live here anymore, and she doubts anyone else would either. “It’s beyond description, how horrible it is to feel like you’re stuck. We were told we have no property value,” she said. “Nobody would buy our property.

“We’ve got the township trustees don’t want it. We’ve got the county commissioners don’t want it. We’ve got the state rep don’t want it. We’ve got the locals that don’t want it,” said Republican State Senator Frank Hoagland, who represents the area. “And I myself put in a letter saying we don’t need it there.”

Hoagland has also gone directly to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the ODNR, which has regulatory authority over the oil and gas industry. “I asked the director of ODNR, I said, ‘So you’ve got everybody saying ‘no’, but you guys are going to authorize it anyways?’ And the director flat out said, ‘if it fits within the ORC [Ohio Revised Code], we have to allow it to happen. We have to give them the permit,’” he recalled.

In an email, the ODNR spokesperson Stephanie O’Grady said basically the same thing. If an applicant can meet the terms and conditions to prevent risks to public health, safety and the environment, she said, “The Chief shall issue the permit.”

In the case of OMNI Energy, local residents wrote letters to the ODNR, according to the agency, with concerns about truck traffic, and idling, the noise, and the proximity to homes and schools.

When the pandemic hit, the ODNR attempted to delay a decision until it could hold a public hearing in person. But OMNI sued to force permit decisions for both wells; a public hearing is not required by law. The Ohio Supreme Court sided with OMNI, requiring the agency to deny or approve the permits. The ODNR approved two permits late last year.

Company and industry supporters say wells are safe, necessary

The drilling sound will subside after construction is completed, according to Chris Gagin, attorney for OMNI Energy. This site is near the Interstate 70 and other major roadways, and the ONDR inspectors found that “the initial drilling activities did not materially increase the surrounding ambient noise levels from the surrounding traffic noise,” Gagin said in an email. “It is literally that loud on a normal basis in that area.”

He said OMNI is setting up the site to reduce the impact of trucks on the community, and the design of the wells will be what he calls “industry leading,” to prevent groundwater contamination and surface leaks.

Ed Mowrer, manager of the Energy Institute at nearby Belmont College, has seen the county benefit from the oil and gas industry. “The eleven new hotels, the fourteen hundred new hotel rooms,” he pointed out. “All the employment, whether it’s an HVAC dealer, and installing those air conditioning units in the hotels, or to the people that receive money through leasing.”

Mowrer understands why nearby residents are concerned about truck traffic, but he said that injection wells are a necessary part of energy development, since the waste it produces has to go someplace. “Disposal wells are a fact of the oil and gas industry,” he said.

Ohio injection wells dispose of more than Ohio gas wells produce

But nearly half of the more than 38 million barrels (1.6 billion gallons) of waste injected in Ohio disposal wells in 2017 came from West Virginia and Pennsylvania, according to the ODNR.

“So somewhere there was a decoupling of what’s generated in Ohio and what Ohio is disposing of, which means that we are more and more taking in a higher percentage of other people’s stuff,” said Ted Auch of the nonprofit Fractracker Alliance.

One reason Ohio takes waste from Pennsylvania: It has many more disposal wells. According to the ODNR, Ohio has 226 wells authorized to inject frack waste. Pennsylvania has 16, according to US EPA, which regulates injection wells in Pennsylvania.

Ohio meanwhile has primacy to regulate injection wells. In 1983, decades before the modern shale industry, the federal government granted the state regulatory authority.

Auch and others concerned about injection wells think it might be time to reconsider Ohio’s primacy. “Primacy is a special thing. You should have to demonstrate all the time that you’re worthy of that as a state, and the state of Ohio has not done that,” Auch said. “The levels of money and labor that they’ve had in that program over time have not kept pace with the amount of activity they’ve been charged with overseeing.”

Still, in 2015, the US EPA found that Ohio was running a “good quality program,” praising the agency for dealing with the potential for earthquakes caused by injection wells, while still recommending stronger enforcement for operators with repeat violations.

In recent years, as more injection wells are permitted, there have been problems. In 2019, brine injected into one well in Washington County migrated into producing oil and gas wells five miles a way. And just this month, an old gas well started spewing brine for days into the environment, killing fish. Brine is suspected to have come from nearby injection wells. According the state, there have been 65 spills of oil and gas related brine in the past three years. Eleven of those happened in Belmont County, where OMNI Energy is building its injection wells.

Senator Hoagland said he does not want Ohio to give up its authority over injection wells to the federal government. “I’d much rather say, ‘Hey, look, if we’ve got the state legislators, the local leadership to include the township leadership saying hell, no, we don’t want this,’ well to me that should be good enough,” he said.

The ODNR could do more to work with local communities on siting decisions, Hoagland said. He and other local leaders are looking at ways to change state law to encourage that.

New York State should not be contaminating the environment

Press Release Contacts: Liz Moran, emoran@nypirg.org; Melissa Troutman, mtroutman@earthworks.org; Eric Weltman, eweltman@fwwatch.org

(Albany, N.Y.) Today, a coalition of environmental organizations released an analysis revealing that, despite New York’s ban on fracking, oil and gas liquid waste is permitted for deicing of roads for 33 different cities, towns, and private entities. This practice is ongoing despite New York’s recently adopted law that closes a loophole that once exempted oil and gas waste from being classified as hazardous waste. Oil and gas waste is known to contain constituents that can make the waste toxic and radioactive.

The analysis also revealed that since 1988, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has issued 119 permits for road spreading of oil and gas waste, and the practice has primarily been permitted in central and western New York.

In 2017, DEC revised regulations regarding oil and gas waste and prohibited road spreading of waste from the Marcellus shale; however, the regulations still allow for road spreading of liquids from other oil and gas drilling operations for the purposes of deicing, dust control, and road stabilization.1 Any waste generated through the extraction of oil or gas can contain a number of pollutants, such as toxic chemicals, metals, excess salts, and carcinogens like benzene and radioactive materials.2

In light of these hazards, 15 New York counties and New York City (see page 3 for map) have banned this practice; however, spreading is still approved in Erie County despite their ban (see page 4 for map of road spreading locations). Environmental advocates are calling for Governor Cuomo and the DEC to follow the lead of these counties and ban this practice statewide.

“The data is clear that all oil and gas waste can contain radioactive materials,” said Melissa Troutman, Research and Policy Analyst at Earthworks. “Until testing of ‘brine’ wastewater includes analysis for radioactive materials, all spreading of oil and gas wastewater on roads in New York State must cease.”

Senator Rachel May said, “This year, we were finally able to end the loophole for fracking waste in New York state and demand that it be subject to the same hazardous waste treatment as everything else. Central New York and Upstate are home to some of the world’s most important fresh water resources. It is unconscionable to use harmful and potentially radioactive waste to treat icy roads, where it will then flow directly into our waterways. I urge the Governor and the DEC to protect our water by banning this practice across the state.”

“New York has proven itself a champion of environmental protection and fighting climate change. However, the waste that comes from oil and gas extraction still being used to treat our roads during the winter months can contain hundreds of carcinogenic and radioactive chemicals that can seep into fragile ecosystems and could even contaminate our drinking water. That’s why Albany County banned the practice years ago, with a vote that crossed party lines,” said Albany County Executive Daniel P. McCoy. “It’s time for the State to follow the science and follow suit to protect public health and our natural resources for future generations.”

Liz Moran, Environmental Policy Director for NYPIRG, said, “Road spreading of oil and gas waste has gone on in New York for far too long. It is well established that oil and gas waste contains contaminants that will leave, and likely already have, lasting damages on New York’s environment. New York made the right move to ban fracking – now those efforts must be matched with a ban on the dangerous practice of oil and gas waste road spreading.”

“New Yorkers shouldn’t be driving on toxic, radioactive oil and gas industry waste,” said Eric Weltman of Food & Water Watch. “Oil and gas waste threatens clean water and public health. Governor Cuomo should stop these permits and end this dangerous practice one and for all.”

“The scientific and medical community have documented and warned that waste from oil and gas drilling and storage sites contains toxic and radioactive pollutants that can bioaccumulate in the environment and in humans,” said Ellen Weininger, Director of Educational Outreach at Grassroots Environmental Education. “Road spreading of this waste for de-icing and dust suppression is a dangerous practice that should no longer be permitted by the NYS DEC. We strongly urge an immediate ban on road spreading oil and gas waste to protect our vulnerable water sources, agricultural lands and residents from certain contamination.”

“Toxic chemicals, metals, and known carcinogens have been found in waste produced through the extraction of oil and natural gas,” said Liz Ahearn, Conservation Analyst, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter. “The spreading of this waste on roads poses major threats to water quality, public health, ecosystems, and the environment. The NYS DEC should immediately stop issuing permits allowing the spreading of oil and gas waste on our roads.”

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1 NYS DEC, “DEC Strengthens State’s Solid Waste Regulations,” September 20, 2017, https://www.dec.ny.gov/press/111459.html

2 Robert B. Jackson et al., The Environmental Costs and Benefits of Fracking, 39 ENVIRONMENT AND RESOURCES 327 (2014); U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, RADIUM CONTENT OF OIL AND GAS FIELD PRODUCED WATERS IN THE NORTHERN APPALACHIAN BASIN (USA): SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION OF DATA (2011), available at http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2011/5135/.

Flares burn excess natural gas & pollute the air

From an Article by Justin Nobel, Rolling Stone Magazine, March 13, 2018

Photo: Flares burning at fracking industry site on federal land near Counselor, New Mexico, where environmental groups and indigenous people are fighting back against the expansion of the fracking industry.

The most authoritative study of its kind reveals how fracking is contaminating the air and water – and imperiling the health of millions of Americans

“Our examination…uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health,” states a blistering 266-page report released today by Concerned Health Professionals of New York and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group, Physicians for Social Responsibility. Drawing on news investigations, government assessments and more than 1,200 peer-reviewed research articles, the study finds that fracking – shooting chemical-laden fluid into deep rock layers to release oil and gas – is poisoning the air, contaminating the water and imperiling the health of Americans across the country. “Fracking is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, one of the report’s eight co-authors, a biologist who has worked as a public health advocate on issues like breast cancer and toxic incinerators. “Those of us in the public health sector started to realize years ago that there were potential risks, then the industry rolled out faster than we could do our science.” In recent years, the practice has expanded from rural lands to backyards, farms, and within sight of schools and sources of drinking water. “Now we see those risks have turned into human harms and people are getting sick,” says Steingraber. “And we in this field have a moral imperative to raise the alarm.”

The researchers behind the report, titled “Compendium of Scientific, Medical and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking,” are quick to point out that fracking, or “unconventional oil and gas extraction,” extends far beyond the idea of a single well obediently gurgling up natural gas or oil. Fracking is part of a complicated extraction process with a spider web of infrastructure that extends many miles from the well pad. At virtually every turn, the process contains public health hazards. Residents living near an active site breathe air laced with carcinogens, including benzene and formaldehyde, and research has shown an increased risk of asthma, a decrease in infant health and worrisome effects on the development of a fetus, such as preterm births and birth defects. “Pregnant women have a major risk, not only themselves but they’re carrying a fetus whose cells are multiplying continuously,” says Dr. Lynn Ringenberg, a retired Army colonel and the president-elect of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “If those cells get hit by some toxic chemical from fracking, it may not manifest itself for years.”

Fracking sites have caught fire – others have exploded, as happened last month in Belmont County, Ohio – torching chemicals whose dangerous components local fire chiefs may be surprised to learn are an industry secret. Communities have long feared the fracking process can contaminate underground aquifers with hazardous chemicals and research in Texas and Pennsylvania has now confirmed this to be the case. Fracked gas flows via pipelines, whose leaks and explosions are now well-documented. Piped gas must continuously be re-pressurized at compressor stations which have been documented to emit methane, fine particulate matter, as well as benzene, formaldehyde and other known human carcinogens. Report co-author Dr. Kathleen Nolan, a pediatrician and bioethicist who has examined numerous people sickened by fracking-related contamination, describes the harrowing case of one western Pennsylvania family. “They would see a yellow fog, kind of like a chemical mist coming from the compressor station,” says Nolan. “Their two youngest children, nine and 11, started having tics where their muscles would go into spasms, those spasms would persist even when they were asleep.”

Then there’s the issue of the waste that flows back up a fracked well. Although the industry calls it “brine” or “produced water,” this material contains carcinogenic chemicals, can be flammable and, in much of the country, also contains radioactive elements from deep below the surface. Occasionally, this toxic waste is used to frack new wells. Often, it is hauled by trucks that must weave around narrow local roads to sites called injection wells, where this hazardous slurry is injected deep into the earth, a process that has repeatedly been linked to earthquakes. In 2016, in Barnesville, Ohio a truck spilled approximately 5,000 gallons of fracking wastewater when it crashed beside a stream that leads into one of the village’s main reservoirs.

Last November a truck carrying fracking waste overturned near Coolville, Ohio and emptied fluid into a culvert that connects to a creek. Residents were prepared; they’d been living for years with the menace of injection wells, including what resident Susie Quinn calls a “chemical factory like smell” around their homes. Like many in the region, she spends free time researching risks the industry and her own government have failed to protect her against. More than a week after the frack truck overturned, she visited the site to take samples, but forgot gloves. “About an hour and twenty minutes later all the fingers on my left hand were burning underneath my fingernails,” says Quinn. Tests later revealed the culvert was loaded with barium, as well as strontium, whose isotopes can be radioactive.

In West Virginia and Pennsylvania, radioactive fracking waste is being processed at facilities like Antero Clearwater in Doddridge County, West Virginia, which claims it can produce water clean enough to be discharged back into nearby local waterways. But Antero’s website contains scant details on how this is done, and radioactivity experts, like Dr. Marvin Resnikoff, a nuclear physicist and international consultant on radioactive waste, remain concerned. “The radioactive levels at the Marcellus shale formation are off the charts,” he says, referring to the gas-rich layer that underlies much of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. “What is radioactive underground is still radioactive when it’s brought to the surface,” says Resnikoff. “This is not alchemy where radioactivity disappears.” A tour last February with local residents through heavily-fracked Doddridge County revealed Antero’s facility, located just six miles from Doddridge County High School, was emitting tremendous amounts of steam that drifted away in the wind. “There may be radioactive elements in the steam,” says Resnikoff.

The “Harms of Fracking” report also highlights astonishing risks for an often overlooked group in the public health discussion on fracking: The workers. Fracking has created 1.7 million jobs, says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the industry has potentially exposed workers on the ground to extremely dangerous conditions. “These are killing jobs,” says report co-author Dr. Sandra Steingraber. “We have actually detected benzene in the urine of workers at levels known to raise the risks of leukemia.” Dr. Pouné Saberi, a Philadelphia-based occupational and environmental medicine physician says workers face a wealth of risks, but their injuries rarely show up in the data, for a variety of reasons. They often work as non-unionized sub-contractors, allowing parent oil and gas companies to avoid reporting injuries, and the oil and gas industry is exempt from certain worker safety rules. Also, doctors and major Pennsylvania health care providers that service the industry, potentially a valuable source of worker data, says Saberi, rarely mention anything negative about fracking. “There is a code of silence that exists,” she says. Plus, workers themselves rarely report injuries or hazards, for fear of losing their jobs.

“If you asked too many questions, you were labeled a tree-hugger and you were gone,” says former fracking waste truck driver Randy Moyer, who describes his stomach-turning experience on a website called Shalefield Stories. “Every day was different,” he writes. “Some days I’d carry mud, but most days I’d haul wastewater from fracked wells…It was an endless parade of trucks on those back roads.” Moyer was never told the contents of the waste he was hauling. At the well-site, waste was kept in a makeshift pit, and when loading his truck Moyer often had to climb in and squeegee out material. To avoid getting their boots wet, “some guys would go in there in their bare feet.” Moyer was given no safety gear, aside from a flame-resistant coat, because, he explains, “If the public sees guys in hazmat suits they’re going to start to ask questions.” As one would anticipate from a human being with direct exposure to radioactive waste, Moyer became quite sick.

“My tongue, lips, and limbs all swelled up,” he writes. “I’ve had three teeth snap off. The first two broke while I was eating garlic bread and spaghetti. I have burning rashes all over my body that jump from place to place.” Moyer has seen over 40 specialists across West Virginia and Pennsylvania. “One told me that I had bed bugs. Another said it must be a food allergy.”

The report, which is in its fifth edition, flips the narrative on an energy rush that is quite literally powering the nation. Fracking has “bolstered our economy and energy security” says Seth Whitehead, a consultant with Energy in Depth, a website affiliated with the Independent Petroleum Association of America. The numbers bear out: Fossil fuels supply the U.S. with a majority of its electricity, and gas has overtaken coal as America’s number one power source. Meanwhile, about 60 percent of the gas produced in America and 48 percent of the oil now comes from unconventional oil and gas deposits. Fracking has helped ease America off foreign fossil fuels. And the boom extends far beyond the well pads.

Ethane, one of many components in fracked gas, serves as the base ingredient for the production of numerous plastics and petrochemicals. On the Gulf Coast, these industries are making big investments in infrastructure to take advantage of America’s newly abundant cheap gas. “With more than $35 billion in planned chemical plant expansions in our area over the next five years, these are the ‘good old days,’” Chad Burke, President of the Economic Alliance Houston Ship Channel Region, posted on the organization’s website. The American Chemistry Council bullishly estimates that over the next decade the plastics industry will generate over 300,000 jobs. “The surge of natural gas production from shale has reversed the fortunes of the U.S. plastics industry,” states a 2015 Council report.

But these glowing numbers rarely take into account the fracking boom’s epic toll on public health, the American landscape and the world’s climate. In fact, against a mounting pile of personal testimony and scientific data, the industry continues to claim it is doing nothing wrong. “The science clearly indicates that, with an emphasis on prevention…energy production can and is being done right, and that hydraulic fracturing is not leading to widespread, systemic effects to drinking water resources,” Stephanie Wissman, an Executive Director with the American Petroleum Institute, stated at a recent meeting of the Delaware River Basin Commission. “It’s sad,” Marcellus Shale Coalition spokesperson Erica Clayton Wright wrote in an email, “that some shoddy so-called ‘studies’ focused on attacking American energy and the tens of thousands of hardworking Pennsylvanians that work across the industry are the subject of fake news stories like these.”

But the science on fracking is getting more difficult to dismiss. “With fracking,” says Steingraber, “we had six peer reviewed articles in 2009 pointing to possible public health risks. By 2011 we had 42. Now there are more than 1200.” Some states are indeed listening to the scientists. New York, Maryland and Vermont have banned fracking, and even Florida’s state legislature is seriously considering a ban. “The chickens are going to come home to roost,” says Ted Auch, an environmental scientist with FracTracker Alliance. He believes that as negative impacts on health and water supplies continue to stack up, the fracking industry will have an increasingly difficult time gaining investors, an issue highlighted in a December article in the Wall Street Journal. “Shale has been a lousy bet for most investors,” the article states, referring to the deposits where fracking typically occurs. Within the past decade, says the Journal article, “energy companies…have spent $280 billion more than they generated from operations on shale investments.”

As a result, many companies have taken extreme measures to politically protect their investments. Last month, Wyoming became the third state, after Iowa and Ohio, to introduce a bill criminalizing protest activities like the ones undertaken at Standing Rock. “It is a war,” says Tina Smusz, a retired emergency medicine and palliative care physician and Virginia-based member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “And in this war one of your most valuable weapons is science.”

Real Issues Confronting Industry & EPA

NOTICE – See “Gaswork” in Buckhannon on November 5th

From April Keating, Mountain Lakes Preservation Association, October 27, 2015

In case you haven’t seen it on social media yet, “Gaswork: The Fight for CJ’s Law” will be shown on Thursday, November 5 at 7 p.m. at Lascaux Micro-Theater in Buckhannon, WV. Thanks to Bryson Van Nostrand for making his theatre space available. Members of the Bevins family will be speaking, and there will be a Q & A afterward. Come out and learn what you can do to support safer drilling practices!

See also this video: https://vimeo.com/141045811

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Buckhannon, WV – Press Release: For Immediate Release, October 27, 2015

On Thursday, November 5, at 7 p.m., there will be a free showing of “Gaswork” at Lascaux MicroTheatre in Buckhannon, WV, located in Traders’ Alley behind Fat Tire Cycle on Main St. The film describes dangerous worker conditions in the oil and gas field. Numerous injuries and deaths result from poor safety practices on rigs all over the country. The oil and gas field has a higher death rate than all other industries.

“Gaswork” opens with the story of CJ Bevins, a Buckhannon native who died on an unsafe rig in New York, then goes on to investigate worker safety and chemical risk in the industry. Many workers who were interviewed have been asked to engage in unsafe practices, such as cleaning drill sites, transporting radioactive and carcinogenic chemicals, and steam cleaning the inside of condensate tanks which contain harmful chemicals, often without safety equipment.

A member of the Bevins family will be present to speak about that family’s experience and answer questions after the showing.

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Impacted Landowners Demand EPA Revise Flawed Fracking Study

From an Article by Winonah Hauter, EcoWatch.com, October 30, 2015
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Scientific Advisory Board met this week to review the agency’s draft assessment of the impact of fracking on drinking water resources, but the largely academic exercise got a dose of reality from residents of Dimock, Pennsylvania; Pavillion, Wyoming; and Parker County, Texas who have fought for years to get U.S. EPA to act.

Inexplicably, their cases of contamination were excluded in the thousands of pages that make up the EPA’s assessment. Given only five minutes each, the residents demanded that the EPA stop ignoring their cases.

Fracking-affected residents came to Washington, DC this week to confront the U.S. EPA over its failed fracking report. From left to right: Ray Kemble, an affected landowner and former gas industry worker from Dimock, Pennsylvania; Steve Lipsky, an affected homeowner from Weatherford, Texas; and John Fenton, a rancher and affected landowner from Pavillion, Wyoming. Photo credit: Craig Stevens

Ray Kemble, an affected landowner and former gas industry worker, testified, “In 2008, gas drilling caused my water to become poisoned. The Pennsylvania DEP and the EPA confirmed this contamination, but abandoned us in 2012 and did not even include us in their long-term study. I am here today to demand that EPA recognize us, include our case in this study, and reopen the investigation.”

John Fenton, a rancher and affected landowner in Pavillion also spoke out. “When EPA launched its national study of fracking’s drinking water impacts, we thought they’d look first here in Pavillion where they’d already found pollution. But instead they ignored us without explanation. Science means taking the facts as they are. But EPA seems to be intent on finding the facts to support the conclusion they’ve already reached—‘fracking is safe.’”

Steve Lipsky, an affected homeowner in Weatherford, Texas added that “EPA omitted my case from their national drinking water study,” and then asked, “Is that science? Whose side is EPA on?”

“We have tried for years now to get the EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to meet with impacted residents across the country to hear their stories and to come up with ways that the agency can help those being harmed,” said Craig Stevens, 6th generation landowner and member of Pennsylvania Patriots from the Marcellus Shale. “This has still not happened and we deserve better.”

“While the EPA spent years conducting this study only to claim in their press releases that water contamination from fracking ‘is not widespread or systemic,’ I have been receiving calls on a regular basis from people across the state of Pennsylvania whose water and air has been polluted by this industry and who are paying the price with their health,” said Ron Gulla, an impacted resident from Hickory, Pennsylvania. “I have been trying to help people who are being poisoned by this industry for years, while our federal agencies who are tasked with protecting these people has failed them.”

It was vital that the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board hear these voices from the front lines, from people who have to deal with their water being poisoned. Not only has the agency been unresponsive, and failed to uphold its own basic mission to protect human health and the environment, the EPA—or perhaps more accurately the Obama Administration—misrepresented its own study when it claimed that “hydraulic fracturing activities have not led to widespread, systemic impacts to drinking water resources and identifies important vulnerabilities to drinking water resources.”

Some of the Scientific Advisory Board members are listening, with one member describing the EPA’s topline finding as “out of left field” and a “non sequitur relative to the body of the report.” But at the same time, the oil and gas industry is well represented on the board—several repeatedly used “we” and “industry” interchangeably as they chimed in in defense of fracking.

The EPA has been unresponsive and is failing to uphold its own basic mission to protect human health and the environment. It’s time for the agency to finally step up and serve the people, not the oil and gas industry. They could start by having a face-to-face with Administrator Gina McCarthy and affected individuals, rather than pretending they don’t exist. And the Obama administration must stop greenwashing fracking and acknowledge that it’s a dirty, polluting source of energy that harms our water, our climate, and our communities.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

AMA group calls for public disclosure, expanded water monitoring

From an Article by Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, June12, 2015

The American Medical Association, citing growing concerns about monitoring and tracking long-term human health impacts caused by shale gas development, is calling for the public disclosure of all chemicals used in the extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

The new policy, adopted Tuesday by the nation’s largest physicians organization at its annual meeting in Chicago, states that in addition to requiring the chemical disclosures, monitoring “should focus on human exposure in well water and surface water and government agencies should share this information with physicians and the public.”

Most of the 25 states in the U.S. where shale gas drilling and development is occurring — including Pennsylvania, where drilling in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations is booming — either don’t know or don’t publicly disclose all the chemicals used in fracking.

“Keeping the names of the chemicals secret is preposterous,” said Todd Sack, a physician in Jacksonville, Fla., and author of the AMA’s policy. “It places an unreasonable burden on physicians. The AMA feels that if companies are going to be responsible petroleum and gas explorers and extractors, they need to disclose the chemicals they use and do better water testing. That’s not a radical position.”

The industry says it meets all state laws. It has opposed calls to make public all of the chemicals used in the fracking process, citing commercial proprietary interests for keeping secret the chemicals used in fracking as biocides, friction inhibitors, anti-corrosives and acids to dissolve minerals.

Dr. Sack said last week’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study on water resource impacts from shale gas development couldn’t make a health impact finding after five years of gathering information, in part because the industry didn’t provide requested chemical data. He noted that 8.4 million people in the U.S. now live within one mile of a shale gas drilling and fracking site, and that the EPA found that at least one chemical used in fracking was concealed from regulators because of proprietary claims at 70 percent of the thousands of shale gas wells drilled in the U.S.

“If we don’t know what chemicals are being used at specific well sites,” Dr. Sack said, “physicians and public health officials can’t do their jobs.”

The fracking process pumps millions of gallons of water, chemicals and sand thousands of feet below the surface to crack a shale formation and release its gas. Some of the chemically contaminated water is pushed back to the surface with the released gas and must be collected, stored and disposed of by the drilling companies.

Some of the chemicals used for fracking are toxic to humans and have contaminated groundwater near drilling sites.

Scott Perry, deputy secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Oil and Gas Management, said Pennsylvania’s fracking chemical disclosure law requires companies to disclose the chemicals they use to the DEP, but not the public, within 30 days after the fracking operation is finished. The company-designated proprietary chemical information is released to physicians only if they file a Right-to-Know request, although in a medical emergency a physician may verbally request the information.

Mr. Perry said the DEP is digitizing its well completion reports so the chemical information disclosed by the companies is downloadable, but the Wolf administration has no plans to seek an amendment to the confidentiality provisions in Act 13, the 2011 amendment to the state’s oil and gas law.

Travis Windle, a spokesman for the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a North Fayette-based drilling industry trade organization, issued a statement saying, “Across the board operational transparency is a core commitment of our organization.” It stated that Marcellus Shale Coalition members register drilling and fracking information with FracFocus, a voluntary reporting site, and support the state’s fracking disclosure regulations, “which are considered among the nation’s most progressive.”

The AMA action comes just a week after a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public health study showed a “concerning association” between babies born with lower birth weights and proximity to high-density shale gas well development.

“It’s a total hoax to say the public knows what’s going on if there isn’t full disclosure of all the chemicals used in fracking,” Dr. Sack said.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Large Spills, Leaks, Casing Failures Happen

“In praise of the science” — Too much politics in our federal agencies

From the Editorial on the Opinion Page, Morgantown Dominion Post, June 7, 2015

Another EPA study, another EPA overreaching finding. No, on Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a study that acknowledged what everyone knew. Everyone as in the gas and oil industry and its supporters, in politics and elsewhere.

One U.S. senator, who once compared the EPA to the Gestapo, described the report as “the latest in a series of failed attempts” by the Obama administration to link fracking to polluted drinking water. Never mind, that the EPA was formerly the devil’s spawn of the Obama administration, according to that senator and many in that industry.

Interestingly, that industry and its supporters are not championing another study. Also this week, a new study from University of Pittsburgh’s researchers found women living close to areas of high-density natural gas operations are more likely to have babies with lower birth weights than women living farther from such operations.

Let’s be clear. We, for one, have suspected for years that fracking posed a threat to drinking water and our water resources. However, we are willing to accept science: Fracking has not caused widespread harm to drinking water.

That study did cite instances where drinking water was affected by fracking, yet that number was small. The EPA insists that the question this study answered was not whether fracking was safe or unsafe.

Its purpose was to study “how do we best reduce vulnerabilities so we can best protect our drinking water and water resources.”

No one needs a study to know that in the past decade that the EPA has become an easy mark for criticism from across the board. But especially by some industry lobbyists, uh, rather, members of Congress and the Legislature. (We get them confused.)

Has the EPA made mistakes, implemented some misguided policies and overreached at times? Absolutely. However, since its creation, in 1972, the EPA is the primary reason for ending a range of industries’ best-worst practices.

Few who were not young adults and older then can understand how much has changed. Just think of our environment then and today in these terms: Night and day.

Still, it’s odd, how this agency is everyone’s scapegoat for everything, except when it agrees with them. Though some assert that the EPA is a tool of the Obama administration we don’t buy that.

Men and women grounded in science don’t take direction from politicians, or should not. It’s counter-intuitive to act according to politics and agendas, rather than research and data.

Science is no game where we can afford to accept or deny its results. Nor should clean water ever become a political football.

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Fracking Waste Study Says States Aren’t Doing Enough to Protect Public

From an Article by Glynis Board, WV Public Broadcasting, April 12, 2015

A new report was published this month that looks at how states are dealing with dangerous waste produced during shale gas development. Not well, according to the report.

Defining Hazardous

The Environmental Protection Agency regulates the disposal of toxic or hazardous materials. Such waste includes things that may contain heavy metals, chemicals, dangerous pathogens, radiation, or other toxins. Horizontal drilling produces both liquid and solid waste streams which can contain heavy metals, dangerous chemicals, salts and radiation. But you will never hear it referred to as toxic or hazardous by anyone, officially.

Amy Mall, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based nonprofit, explains that thirty years ago the EPA exempted oil and gas waste from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). “So right now, oil and gas waste, regardless of how toxic it is, can be treated like normal household waste in many parts of the country,” Mall said.

“Wasting Away”

There’s a new report: (Wasting Away – Four states’ failure to manage oil and gas waste in the Marcellus and Utica Shale) that examines this subject published by Earthworks – a nonprofit concerned with the adverse impacts of mineral and energy development. Lead author Nadia Steinzor explains that the EPA didn’t exempt the industry because the waste wasn’t considered a threat, but because state regulation of this waste was considered adequate. Of course, this was a couple decades before the horizontal gas drilling boom.

Steinzor and her colleagues decided to see what they could learn about waste practices in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, where Marcellus and Utica shale gas are being developed.

The report indicates that states are well behind the curve in adapting to the natural gas boom: good characterizations of the waste is incomplete according to a 2014 study that’s cited; and not much information is available about where the waste is coming from, going to, or how it gets there.

West Virginia’s Oil and Gas Waste Management

West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection officials say most information that does exist about oil and gas production and waste disposal procedures is available online. What information isn’t public can be accessed with a fee and a Freedom of Information Act request.

DEP spokesperson Kelley Gillenwater says her agency is going above and beyond what’s required by law to make information more accessible and is currently working on a project to digitize and make public the information they collect. She says, however, that project is in the early stages and a timeframe for completion doesn’t exist yet.

Steinzor’s report argues that states don’t require enough information and often rely on operators to self-report in good faith.

The Earthworks report cites a 2013 study that says nearly half of all liquid oil and gas waste is shipped out of state, the remainder is injected underground. But Amy Mall from NRDC says rules for injection wells everywhere are also in need of attention.
“We think the rules for those disposal wells need to be much stronger than they are now because those disposal wells are not designed to handle toxic waste.”

Steinzor does credit West Virginia for taking some steps to address solid waste problems in the state. The sheer volume of drill cuttings, which at one point was simply being buried onsite, may have helped force the issue. Municipal landfills do accept the waste even though it’s largely uncharacterized.

Requirements are now in place for the waste to be held in separate storage cells within landfills and DEP is working with Marshall University to study the leachate from those facilities. Results from that study are scheduled to be presented to state lawmakers this July.

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RE: “Lochgelly Waste Injection Well Permit Renewal” — Operator: Danny Webb Construction.  A Public Hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, April 21st at the Oak Hill High School Auditorium, 350 Oyler Avenue, Oak Hill, WV.   Time: 6 pm to 8 pm.  [Written comment period extends to May 1st, per comment below.] Find more information here.

Residual Waste (Marcellus Brine) Tankers

Decisions about ‘brine’ toxicity: who makes them, when and how

By S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

The need for this article was brought out by an article forwarded by Debbie Borowiec. The kicker in that one was the statement that the Pennsylvania Department responsible for regulating the use of fracking “brine” on roads didn’t keep records or understand the potential effects of it until Newsweek got in touch with them.

I have reasonably good “credentials” for discussing this. I have a Ph. D. in Inorganic Chemistry, and was a teacher rather than a researcher. At one point I was preparing for work in Industrial Hygiene, so I took the American Chemical Society course in Toxicology, received a lot of literature on it, and took several courses relating to Industrial Hygiene at the University of Pittsburgh. With this background, I believe that almost all decisions involving toxicity are made by people who are just about as knowledgeable as someone picked off the street at random.

The way toxicity is handled is a kind of fundamentalism, with a set of written rules that are supposed to be capable of interpretation by someone with no training. These are put into law in such a way they are easily used in court proceedings by reasonably able people (lawyers) who don’t know (in principle) BaCl₂ from KCl unless it is spelled out in writing. These compounds are barium chloride, a deadly poison, and potassium chloride, a substitute for table salt.

What the rules do is specify is a tolerable limit of exposure for a 40 hour work week for an average person. They are intended to protect a person who comes in contact with them while working in a typical job. I will not try to explain how these quantities, defined as safe, are arrived at. It would take a book or two, and the procedure is very, very expensive.

Now I will describe some details about sensitivity in the real world. The research almost always deals with a single, pure compound. People are frequently exposed to mixtures, and, as with medicines, effects are known to be enhanced by mixing in many cases. Fracking exposures are always mixtures, with many components. Second, the published values are for 40 hours a week. People working on rigs are exposed 84 hours while people living in the vicinity 168 hours a week. Water exposure limits work the same way. The more you ingest or the more it comes in contact with your skin the more effects there can be.

Third, some poisons, like carbon monoxide, activate a process in the body to remove them, so that if you survive the dose for a few hours, the effects go away. Others, like the dread heavy metals, are not removed from the body, they are cumulative. You may receive a small dose continuously for most even a number of years before they show effects. Mercury put in the air by coal burning is often given as an example of this type of poison.

Fourth, the limits are set for working people. They do not apply to old or sick people or to fast growing children, babies in utero or the early years of life, or to asthma victims or many other categories not in the prime of life but who comprise part of a normal population. Fifth, no one knows (except the toxicologist who runs the experiment to determine the toxicity) how much more the effects are increased by some incrementally higher dose, say a quarter more than the specified quantity. More to the point, how great are the effects from two or three times the legal exposure limit, as often occurs in the real world?

The rules often don’t resolve real world situations. Many severe exposure situations end up in court where experts for victim(s) try to convince the jury against the company army of “in house” experts.

Sixth, there is a “chain of command” for the samples taken of materials to be analyzed for chemical content. That is, everyone from the various persons who take and analyze the samples to the person(s) who makes the decisions are ethically constrained. If only one in the chain is inclined to cheat (for the sake of the organization, of course), the result is not dependable. Integrity is a big deal when you are teaching chemical analysis as there are many ways to get it incorrect results. Was the sample taken in such a way it is representative, or off in some corner where the concentration is more dilute than that to which the victim was exposed? Was the container properly handled – left open for a time, for example; or was it spilled and a substitute put in its place, heaven forbid?

That is why dependable third parties are so important. That is why the bureaucracy of government, and time consuming nature of enforcement, forced on the system by drilling interests works against citizens.

In fact the “brine” that is hauled around in big trucks that comes from Marcellus shale wells is composed of many salts and many other compounds as well. You don’t want most of these compounds in your water supply or the streams you fish in! And it is obvious the people who made the decision to use such “brine” aren’t adequately educated to make such decisions.

As I said to Debbie, “The investors don’t know toxicity, the executives don’t know about it, the bosses on the job don’t know it, the workers and truck drivers don’t, and a horrifyingly large portion of the REGULATORS don’t know anything about it.”

The weight of big money is a great motivator for quick decisions that may not be in the public interest. Ethics, the other guy’s rights, the necessity of consideration of all the effects of such decisions, are not priority considerations. “First do no harm” is for physicians.

See also the following interesting reports:

(1). Marcellus-Shale.us: “Photos of Brine and Water Tankers”

(2). US-EPA: “Drinking Water Contaminants”

(3).  US-NIEHS: “Radionuclides in Fracking Wastewater: Managing a Toxic Blend“

health effects of toxics

Environmental hazards from fracking may extend well beyond drilling sites

From an Article by Jessica Cohen, The Utne Reader, Fall 2014

Pramilla Malick was reading in bed last summer when suddenly she had to struggle to breathe. Gasping, she went outside and then back inside, getting no relief from the country air around her home in Minisink, New York. Her symptoms began at a time when her children and some of their Minisink neighbors were also experiencing new ailments, such as nausea, nosebleeds, rashes, sore throats, asthma and dizziness. Their symptoms would erupt during or after an “odor event,” a period of malodorous emissions at the new Millennium Pipeline gas compressor station nearby that began functioning in June of 2013. Malick’s asthmatic symptoms, which she never had before, surface only on weekends in Minisink, she says; they live in New York City, 95 miles away, on weekdays.

The community’s ailments mirror those of the Parr family, living near Aruba Petroleum’s hydraulic fracturing (gas fracking) sites in Wise County, Texas. In April the family was awarded $2.95 million in a lawsuit alleging that environmental contamination from drilling sickened them and killed their pets and livestock, compelling them to leave their home. The maladies of Minisink residents suggest that environmental hazards from fracking may extend well beyond drilling sites.

Malick is a member of Minisink Residents for Environmental Preservation and Safety (MREPS), a group of 10 Minisink residents legally representing the community who fought construction of the compressor and our now pressing for monitoring. They presented their case against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and Millennium Pipeline Company, LLC, at a District of Columbia Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals hearing in May.

In addition to explosivity issues, the group cites concern that emission levels acceptable in Millennium’s compressor station application to FERC bump up against the findings of Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant, whom Malick engaged in their efforts. Subra provides communities in the United States and beyond with technical evaluations of environmental issues and strategies for addressing them. She does contractual consulting for the Environmental Protection Agency and was a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient. She helped the Parrs in Texas identify the toxins that were sickening them and found similar toxins in compressor emissions.

Malick and some of her Minisink neighbors attended Subra’s presentation in December, where Subra explained the compressor’s environmental effects. She found that not only do compressor stations produce several tons of carcinogenic volatile organic compounds annually, they also emit chemicals from “fracked gas,” drawn from deep in the earth with hydraulic fracturing. Fracked gas chemicals differ from those of gas from conventional drilling.

So you think environmentalism has gone mainstream, what with Al Gore spreading the climate change gospel ….

“The Marcellus shale has large quantities of radioactive components such as Radium 226 and 228,” Subra explained in her PowerPoint presentation. “The radioactive components contaminate the natural gas stream and build up in the units of compressor facilities. Radium 226 is a bone seeker and causes bone and lung cancer.”

“This is not your grandfather’s gas,” says Malick. “We’re extremely concerned with radioactive particles. There is no explanation by industry or regulators as to how radon gas would or could be removed from the methane. In the absence of an explanation we must conclude that it will be emitted along with methane. The decay particles of radium include dangerous particles such as polonium, which decays into radioactive lead, and then permanently into just lead. So the concern is short-term exposure to highly radioactive particles, and then long-term exposure to and accumulation of lead particles.”

However, uncertainty about the contents of emissions persists. “The industry is largely self-regulated, and their air emissions are entirely self-reported,” says Malick. “No one monitors what is emitted.”

Also, she notes that air quality standards established by the EPA address annual average emissions rather than “episodic emissions,” brief concentrated bursts of emissions known to damage tissue. She points to a study in the March issue of Reviews of Environmental Health, by David Brown and his colleagues at the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project.

“Case study descriptions of acute onset of respiratory, neurologic, dermal, vascular, abdominal, and gastrointestinal sequelae near natural gas facilities contrast with a subset of emissions research, which suggests that there is limited risk posed by unconventional natural gas development,” the authors wrote.

Meanwhile, Subra finds that symptoms troubling Minisink residents are typical of what 90 percent of people living within two to three miles of gas compressor and also metering stations experience. But the 24-hour monitoring MREPS seeks costs $1 million annually. “New York State has done 24-hour monitoring after a cancer cluster develops,” says Malick. “That would be too late for us.”

Because gas facility regulation is federal, MREPS pursued support from Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. They expressed concern but did nothing, says Malick.

“I think there’s a consensus to facilitate natural gas extraction for the international market,” she concluded. “We’re being sacrificed by them.”

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See also the book by Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald, The Real Cost of Fracking: How America’s Shale Gas Boom is Threatening our Families, Pets, and Food, Beacon Press, Boston, 2014