safewatermovement.org 

The New York Times may be in the midst of publishing another Pulitzer Prize contender, in the form of its series on the environmental effects of hydrofracking for gas (“Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers”). Hydrofracking, or fracking, is the practice of sending pressurized bursts of water, sand and chemicals down into shale formations containing gas.  The pressurized injections break up the shale releasing the gas. In gas-rich areas like Pennsylvania, with its gargantuan Marcellus Shale formation that covers four-fifths of the state, business is booming.

oilshalegas.com 

            The Times has found that gas well operators and the regulatory agencies charged with overseeing them share some strange notions of what constitutes safe handling of waste products such as benzene and toluene, and even more importantly, radioactive waste water.  How are these waste products being disposed of?  They’re being dumped into Pennsylvania’s primary rivers close to drinking water intake units for cities like Pittsburgh.

            Sweetheart deals with the regulatory agencies have created standard practices such that no one even tests for contamination—and even if they did, current capacities of wastewater treatment plants don’t come close to being able to handle the toxicity of the waste. Pennsylvania, I see some major cancer clusters in your future.

            Where much of the past reporting of the effects of fracking on the environment have focused on polluted wells in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wyoming, those admittedly horrible consequences of drilling were more localized.  The New York Times article, by Ian Urbina, printed in its Sunday edition on February 27, reports on pollution that could affect millions of people.

            Fracking-based drilling is experiencing explosive growth.  Last year, some 3,000 permits were issued in Pennsylvania, “up from just 117 in 2007,” according to the Times. Standard operating procedure for disposing of the waste sludge in other states involves injecting it into supposedly impermeable dry wells.  Not in Pennsylvania.  Its Marcellus Shall formations don’t remain impermeable.  So, into the rivers it goes. By 2008, problems were detected with a concentration of salts so high that downriver utilities complained that their submerged pipes, outlets and pumping units were being corroded by fully treated byproducts. 

            Jamie Legenos, spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, claims that the wastewater treatment facilities can handle whatever they get.  “The wastewater treatment plants are effective at what they’re designed to do—remove material from wastewater,” said Legenos.  But the plants have received roughly 1 billion gallons of wastewater compounds they were never designed to handle.  And at the heart of the problem we find radium and uranium.

Careful, the Water's Hot

            Radioactive materials exist naturally in the soils of many areas of the country.  They are found in high concentrations deep underground in the shale below Pennsylvania. One hundred sixteen gas wells in the state reported levels of radium and uranium more than 100 times higher the maximum levels set by federal clean water standards.  Fifteen of those wells generate radioactive water 1,000 times more radioactive than federal guidelines allow in drinking water.  And guess what?  Wastewater treatment facilities have no way of treating such contamination.  What do they do?  They dilute it—to a point.  And when river levels are low, that point is dangerously low.

syracuse.com 

            Gas industry officials don’t care. They’ve said as much.  They have said these levels of contamination on all counts, chemicals and radioactivity, pose “no threat” to humans.  How do they know?  They don’t.  Federal and state regulators require that Pennsylvania test its drinking water for radioactivity “only once every six to nine years.”  That means there has been almost no testing since the boom began—and little is scheduled.  Oh, and did I mention?  Some 50,000 new gas wells are planned.

            In the sporadic spot testing that did occur at waste treatment plants in the last three years radioactivity levels 2,122 times higher than allowed in drinking water were measured at intake.  Yes, you read correctly.

            How does it get there?  Trucks.  Thousands of trucks.  Right about now it might be useful to pause and consider that these wastewater plants and the roads to them were all built with taxpayer money to serve the common needs of people, municipalities and industry.  But not this.  Not by a long shot.  But because the gas is there, demand is strong and greed is omnipresent, elected officials and environmental regulators have looked the other way as if nothing was happening—all this in the midst of a boom that could be compared to the oils sands of Alberta.

            This continues despite the fact that problems were found with the radioactivity dilution strategy as early as 2009.  The EPA—and this is inexcusable because they know what is going on—told water treatment engineers in New York that sewage treatment plants should not accept radium levels higher than 12 times the “drinking water standard.”  And get this:  they said “plants should never discharge radioactive contaminants at levels higher than the drinking water standard.”  Clearly, this is nothing but a regulatory farce on a mind-boggling scale. 

            So these trucks pull up to the treatment facilities and dump their loads.  There must be paperwork, right? Several plant operators told the Times “they were not sure of the waste’s contents because the limited information drillers provide usually goes to state officials.”  One of those plants in Elk County is taking in 20,000 gallons a day.  And I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky with that.  Some operators are just dumping out in the open, in little creeks that flow, well, who knows where?

            But Pennsylvania’s DEP doesn’t want to be too hard on those doing the dumping for fear the companies “might just stop reporting their mistakes.”  What we have here is the paradigm of regulatory capture in full bloom—and perhaps another national sacrifice zone in the making.  The legacy of this boom may well be a lifetime—maybe a shortened lifetime—of disease and compromised health outcomes for the people, and especially the children, of Pennsylvania. A culture of “cutting corners” is already firmly entrenched in the boom.  It will soon be bolstered by a slate of laws coming from Washington, D.C. that will continue to roll back already poor EPA enforcement and oversight.  This, then, is our most robust alternative energy strategy since the meltdown. This, then, is what we mean when we say green energy?