Bottled water transported regularly

From an Article by Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 2, 2020

The Woodlands community in Butler County PA has dealt with water woes for a decade.

On a steamy Monday evening in July, just as they have done every other Monday for too long, Janet and Fred McIntyre unlock the double side doors of the White Oak Springs Presbyterian Church and wait for the first SUV or pickup truck to back into the short driveway.

Soon a line of vehicles forms along Shannon Road. They come for the water. They are residents of the Woodlands, an unincorporated, isolated rural community in Connoquenessing Township, Butler County, 35 miles north of Pittsburgh where 50 or 60 of the 200 homes have been without potable water for nearly a decade.

Their well water turned orange or brown or cloudy or contaminated in 2011, shortly after State College-based Rex Energy began drilling and fracking multiple gas wells into the Marcellus Shale.

Danielle Griffin has lived in the Woodlands for all of her 36 years and stopped by the church to pick up water for her family of six. As the gallon plastic water jugs, six to a box, were loaded into her vehicle, she said her family’s well water still has “particles” suspended in it.

“I just don’t trust it, and it gets old,” Ms. Griffin said. “We’re stuck in a hard place. We’ve had our animals get sick drinking the water and our pet hamsters developed tumors. It’s not a good situation. A lot of people are tired of it.”

Ms. McIntyre said the church’s “Water for the Woodlands” program, which for the last eight years has bought and distributed 400-500 gallons of water each week with few exceptions, has been a godsend for her community. But she and many others wonder why a permanent fix for the Woodlands’ water problems can’t seem to find traction.

“The county has received millions of dollars in impact fees from gas drilling over the years,” Ms. McIntyre said. “Why couldn’t some of that go to put public water in our homes? But it never happens. We just keep getting put off to the side, put on a back burner.”

The McIntyres were one of nine Woodlands families to file a lawsuit alleging Rex ruined their water wells, and the company settled their claims in April 2018 for $159,000. Each family received between $16,250-$27,125, according to spending disclosures Rex was required to make when it filed for bankruptcy in May 2018.

The money is nice, but it doesn’t solve the bigger problem. “We just want to turn on our faucet and have good water come out,” she said. “We’ve lived through enough.”

Since 2011, when the state first began collecting impact fees for each shale gas well drilled, the Public Utility Commission has collected almost $1.5 billion. It has distributed $16.8 million of that to Butler County, including $2.1 million last month. Connoquenessing Township has received about $1.8 million over the past nine years, including $209,511 in July.

But none of that money has found its way to solving the water problems of the Woodlands, a 100-acre swath of forests, fields and mostly unpaved roads originally established more than 50 years ago by Pittsburghers as a hunting and fishing retreat.

When that venture went belly up, the land was divided into smaller parcels and sold at a sheriff’s sale. The new property owners, mostly working poor, built houses or moved in double-wide trailers and dug water wells of varying depths.

Residents say the well water was good until the shale gas drilling started. Beginning in 2009, Rex Energy drilled 32 wells on 12 pads within 2 miles of the Woodlands and had permits from the state Department of Environmental Protection to drill 32 more.

Woodlands residents complained that the well drilling and fracking caused severe nosebleeds, skin rashes and respiratory problems, and that the water was unusable for drinking, cooking and bathing. But water quality tests by Rex Energy and the PA-DEP were inconclusive in establishing a connection between the drilling and the bad water.

That assessment didn’t change after two of the nearby shale gas wells were later discovered to have bad “casings” — the concrete sleeves that are supposed to prevent drilling and fracking fluids and gas from escaping the wells and contaminating underground aquifers.

Jenna Alexander, daughter of Janet McIntyre and a volunteer at the water distribution site, lived in the Woodlands but moved out of the area because of the water problems. She first became aware of the problems 10 years ago when she noticed an oily sheen on well water she was using to wash the baby bottles for her then 9-month-old daughter, Peyton.

“Our water went from great water to not being able to drink it,” Ms. Alexander said. “I knew that it wasn’t safe or healthy for a baby to even bathe in it, let alone drink it.”

John Stolz, a professor of biological sciences and director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University, who has studied the Woodlands’ water issues, said the casing failures may have allowed escaped fluids and gas to pressurize underground formations and push around other contaminants including iron, manganese, oil and gas from shallow old and abandoned wells in the area.

“My 2015 study shows it’s not so much the fracking fluids that have contaminated the water wells, but it’s still the shale gas wells that have damaged the Woodlands’ water supply,” Mr. Stolz said.

Rex Energy went bankrupt in 2018, but its assets were purchased for $600 million by PennEnergy Resources, and Mr. Stolz said additional shale gas drilling in the area could exacerbate the Woodlands water problem.

Mr. Stolz said the county and township impact fee money should be used to extend public waterlines and connections into the Woodlands, a project that would cost approximately $1 million.

“What is the purpose of an impact fee,” he said, “if the money isn’t spent on people in the shale gas drilling fields who are impacted?”

Kevin Boozel, one of three county commissioners and the only Democrat, said there is impact fee money available to support a bond for the public waterlines in the county’s infrastructure bank fund. But the township would need to apply for it and there doesn’t seem to be a consensus for that, he said.

“There are different perspectives. Some residents living there don’t want township water,” Mr. Boozel said. “We can’t run water to some and not all. But should the municipality have interest, I guarantee we would look at it.” Although the water bank at the church has been operating for eight years now, he recognizes it isn’t a viable long-term solution. “I know this will come to a head eventually,” he said.

Every Thursday or Friday, a truck from Crystal Pure Bottled Water of Altoona, Blair County, delivers approximately 70 cardboard cases, each containing six, one-gallon plastic water jugs, to the church.

Every Monday in the morning or evening on alternating weeks, volunteers distribute between 400 to 500 gallons to Woodlands residents in amounts that vary depending on the size of their households.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the water bank pickups at the church had to shut down in March, but the McIntyres continued to deliver water jugs to Woodlands residents’ porches. The distribution at the church reopened in late July to increased demand, likely due to more people working at home or becoming unemployed.

The Rev. Lee Dreyer, who established the water bank at the church and still heads up the Monday morning distribution, said it’s a “Band-Aid,” but a necessary one.

“What is needed is to have water piped into the Woodlands neighborhood, but that’s not happened because those folks are, by and large, the forgotten poor,” said Mr. Dreyer, who retired in June 2019. “They live without a lot of services that most people take for granted. They are in the situation they are in because they don’t carry a lot of political weight locally or with the county. They are kind of powerless.”

Rev. Dreyer said he doesn’t see the situation changing anytime soon, and so will continue to focus on collecting donations to pay for the water. That task was made a bit easier when the Water for the Woodlands program received a $13,484 grant in June through Marcellus Outreach Butler, a local environmental organization, from the Ohio River Valley COVID-19 Response Fund.

According to a news release from Marcellus Outreach Butler (MOB), the grant will allow the program to provide water for up to 60 families for 32 weeks. MOB, which opposes shale gas development, also has called on the Butler County commissioners, the Connoquenessing Township supervisors and state and federal elected officials to provide funding for a Woodlands waterline.

Michael Badges-Canning, a MOB spokesman, said the county has used impact fees for repairs to the Alameda County Park swimming pool but never finds money for the Woodlands. “So people can swim at the county park but people in the Woodlands can’t take a bath,” Mr. Badges-Canning said. “We’d like to see the drilling impact fees spent on real impacts.”

>>> Donations to the Woodlands water bank can be made by a check made out to “Water for The Woodlands,” c/​o White Oak Springs Presbyterian Church, 102 Shannon Road, Renfrew, PA 16053.

Four (4) states confirm water pollution from drilling

From an Article by Kevin Begos, Associated Press,  January 5, 2014

Associated Press review of complaints casts doubt on industry view that it rarely happens

Story Highlights

• AP requested data on drilling-related complaints in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Texas
• Extracting fuel from shale formations requires salt, chemicals, heavy metals and radiation
• Most common type of pollution involves methane gas, not other chemicals

PITTSBURGH (AP) — In at least four states that have nurtured the nation’s energy boom, hundreds of complaints have been made about well-water contamination from oil or gas drilling, and pollution was confirmed in a number of them, according to a review that casts doubt on industry suggestions that such problems rarely happen.

The Associated Press requested data on drilling-related complaints in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Texas and found major differences in how the states report such problems. Texas provided the most detail, while the other states provided only general outlines. And while the confirmed problems represent only a tiny portion of the thousands of oil and gas wells drilled each year in the U.S., the lack of detail in some state reports could help fuel public confusion and mistrust.

The AP found that Pennsylvania received 398 complaints in 2013 alleging that oil or natural gas drilling polluted or otherwise affected private water wells, compared with 499 in 2012. The Pennsylvania complaints can include allegations of short-term diminished water flow, as well as pollution from stray gas or other substances.

More than 100 cases of pollution were confirmed over the past five years.

The McMickens were one of three families that eventually reached a $1.6 million settlement with a drilling company. Heather McMicken said the state should be forthcoming with details.

Among the findings in the AP’s review:

— Pennsylvania has confirmed at least 106 water-well contamination cases since 2005, out of more than 5,000 new wells. There were five confirmed cases of water-well contamination in the first nine months of 2012, 18 in all of 2011 and 29 in 2010. The Environmental Department said more complete data may be available in several months.

— Ohio had 37 complaints in 2010 and no confirmed contamination of water supplies; 54 complaints in 2011 and two confirmed cases of contamination; 59 complaints in 2012 and two confirmed contaminations; and 40 complaints for the first 11 months of 2013, with two confirmed contaminations and 14 still under investigation, Department of Natural Resources spokesman Mark Bruce said in an email. None of the six confirmed cases of contamination was related to fracking, Bruce said.

— West Virginia has had about 122 complaints that drilling contaminated water wells over the past four years, and in four cases the evidence was strong enough that the driller agreed to take corrective action, officials said.

— A Texas spreadsheet contains more than 2,000 complaints, and 62 of those allege possible well-water contamination from oil and gas activity, said Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for the Railroad Commission of Texas, which oversees drilling. Texas regulators haven’t confirmed a single case of drilling-related water-well contamination in the past 10 years, she said.

In Pennsylvania, the number of confirmed instances of water pollution in the eastern part of the state “dropped quite substantially” in 2013, compared with previous years, Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman Lisa Kasianowitz wrote in an email. Two instances of drilling affecting water wells were confirmed there last year, she said, and a final decision hasn’t been made in three other cases. But she couldn’t say how many of the other statewide complaints have been resolved or were found to be from natural causes.

In Pennsylvania, the raw number of complaints “doesn’t tell you anything,” said Rob Jackson, a Duke University scientist who has studied gas drilling and water contamination issues. Jackson said he doesn’t think providing more details is asking for too much.

“Right or wrong, many people in the public feel like PA-DEP is stonewalling some of these investigations,” Jackson said of the situation in Pennsylvania.

In contrast with the limited information provided by Pennsylvania, Texas officials supplied a detailed 94-page spreadsheet almost immediately, listing all types of oil and gas related complaints over much of the past two years. The Texas data include the date of the complaint, the landowner, the drilling company and a brief summary of the alleged problems. Many complaints involve other issues, such as odors or abandoned equipment.

Scott Anderson, an expert on oil and gas drilling with the Environmental Defense Fund, a national nonprofit based in Austin, notes that Texas regulators started keeping more data on complaints in the 1980s. New legislation in 2011 and 2013 led to more detailed reports and provided funds for a new information technology system, he said.

Anderson agreed that a lack of transparency fuels mistrust. “If the industry has nothing to hide, then they should be willing to let the facts speaks for themselves,” he said. “The same goes for regulatory agencies.”

Tom Wilber

Gas Industry “Buries” Fracking’s True Dangers Says Tom Wilber

By EcoWatch, April 30, 2013

Author and journalist Tom Wilber doesn’t take sides on whether the risks of fracking outweigh its rewards. But as a reporter, he does have strong feelings about the issue of transparency. “And often, this puts me on the same side of the fence as the anti-fracking activists,” Wilber said in an April 23 speech at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Wilber, author of the 2012 book Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale, said the natural gas industry is different than almost every other type of industry in terms of the exemptions and the nondisclosure agreements under which it operates. All of this secrecy, “doesn’t give people a true idea of what all of the risks are,” he explained. “And part of my job is to show what the industry is rather than just the glossy public relations image of itself.”

Methane migration is a particularly hot-button issue in the overall discussion on fracking. Wilber has written extensively on the topic and understands that methane does occur naturally in water wells. But as for Dimock, PA, one of the battleground towns where the industry and local residents have fought over the issue of methane migration, Wilber reminds his readers that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP)—often perceived by anti-fracking activists as a friend of industry–concluded that the methane polluting the aquifer under the town was thermogenic, from deeper producing formations, rather than biogenic or naturally occurring gas that collects in shallow seeps.

Residents in Dimock and in towns across the country have found thermogenic gas in their water where drilling is taking place. The gas industry typically blames methane migration on naturally occurring circumstances and often ignores findings to the contrary. “It is an insidious thing about the approach the gas industry is taking to this, which is to try to muddle things, rather than to try to be accountable for things,” Wilber said at the event, sponsored by Green GW, a student environmental group. “There is this defensive, ‘We didn’t do it, it’s always been there,’ type of approach.”

For example, according to DEP records, Dimock resident Norma Fiorentino’s water well exploded in early 2009 as a result of production gas, not naturally occurring methane, leaking into an aquifer and moving into her well, Wilber told the audience. “So when the industry said, ‘This is just a problem that’s always been around,’ it’s really confusing the issue,” he said.

The hardback edition of Under the Surface was released about a year ago; the paperback edition is scheduled to be published soon. With an absorbing narrative and solid reporting, the book has been well-received by industry officials, residents and anti-fracking activists alike.

 “There are people who live directly over this resource who never knew they lived over a major natural gas resource or oil resource,” he said.

While Pennsylvania and West Virginia rushed into fracking, New York has taken a cautious approach due in large part to the organizing efforts of anti-fracking activists. “New York is unique in that it is the only state with this type of resource underneath that has not gone ahead to allow it to be exploited,” Wilber said. “New York has become something of a showcase of the anti-fracking movement.”

The fact that part of the Marcellus Shale is located in the New York City watershed helped to invigorate the movement. “At the beginning, the awareness wasn’t there of the magnitude of all of this,” he said. “But once people started getting their mind around the fact that the New York City watershed was under a prime drilling zone, it raised a lot of opposition that we have to put the brakes on.”

 “If you’re Gov. Cuomo and you have this critical mass of local and city elected officials saying, ‘We don’t want it,’ that’s going to send a message,” Wilber said.

NOTE: The book entitled The End of Country by Seamus McGraw describes the impacts of drilling and fracking generally on the region including Sesquehanna County in Pennsylvania. The WV Surface Owners Rights Organization carries an article on The Industrialization of Rural West Virginia on their web-site WVsoro.org.

Visit EcoWatch’s FRACKING page for more related news on this topic.

Marcellus Frack Water

Water Analysis Results Withheld From Public

At least two articles appeared Friday reporting the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection failed to protect rural residents by shortchanging them on its analytical results, denying them critical information for their health. (References below.)

A civil case was brought in Washington county Common Pleas Court (Haney et al. v. Range Resources et al., Case No. 2012-3534) which lead to the new information. The company had placed a 13 million gallon impoundment and a drill cuttings pit a short distance away and above the three wells owned by the litigants. During the case two depositions were given which contain the substance of the charge against the DEP.

The deposed employees of the DEP say the government agency used a special code on water analysis from Marcellus well locations to indicate it came from the politically sensitive sites.

Although the DEP did an extensive set of measurements, only certain information was released to water well owners. The charge is that the PA DEP failed to include heavy metals and volatile organic compounds. These substances, called “markers,” indicate waters from the Marcellus Shale! Simultaneously, they have serious adverse health consequences for someone drinking them.

Rep. Jesse White, a member of the Pennsylvania Legislature, called on state and federal agencies to investigate the PA DEP for “alleged misconduct and fraud” revealed by the sworn depositions in the civil case currently in Washington County Common Pleas Court.

See the following sources:

Lawmaker challenges Pennsylvania DEP’s reporting of gas well water safety

http://pipeline.post-gazette.com/news/archives/24893-lawmaker-challenges-pa-dep-s-reporting-of-gas-well-water-safety

Pennsylvania State Representative Calls on Federal Authorities to Investigate Deceptive Marcellus Shale Water Quality Testing Practices

http://ecowatch.org/2012/marcellus-shale-water-quality/

>>> NOTE: S. Thomas Bond lives on a 500 acre cattle farm near Jane Lew in Lewis County, WV. He is a retired teacher of high school and college chemistry. And, he is active in the Guardians of the West Fork and the Monongahela Area Watersheds Compact. <<<

EPA releases last Dimock water tests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A government scientist, Dr. Christopher Portier recently said, that much more research is needed to determine the possible impacts of shale gas drilling on human health and the environment, research that should include all the ways people can be exposed, such as through air, water, soil, plants and animals. Portier is director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

He said that research should also include “livestock on farmed lands consuming potentially impacted surface waters; and recreational fish from potentially impacted surface waters.”  Other federal and state agencies are studying the impacts of gas drilling on air and water. Portier indicated that the science on the issue isn’t settled yet.

“We do not have enough information to say with certainty whether shale gas drilling poses a threat to public health,” he wrote. “More research is needed for us to understand public health impacts from natural gas drilling and new gas drilling technologies.”

He also suggested pre- and post-testing of private drinking water wells near drilling sites. So he recognizes that drilling and fracking are placing existing and future water wells at risk of contamination.

Another prominent scientist said the answers won’t come quickly. Duke University researcher Rob Jackson is reported as follows: “I think it will take three to five years to sort through this.”   But, that doesn’t mean there isn’t evidence of water contamination by drilling in some communities – Wyoming, for example, or Dimock in northeast Pennsylvania. “On the other hand, a handful of cases of contamination is not enough to shut down an industry,” he said. “What’s safe in Oklahoma might not be an acceptable risk somewhere else, where the population density is higher.  And you have different geology.”