Erin Brockovich was a hero to many people in the town of Hinkley, CA where she played an instrumental role in helping a lawyer win a lawsuit for the residents. The residents of Hinkley had suffered numerous medical ailments, some resulting in death, due to the negligent practices of Pacific Gas & Electric (P G & E), which they purposely covered up.
If people protested too much, P G & E would simply offer to buy the family’s house at fair market value. Fortunately, it was during one of these home sales transactions that Erin Brockovich became suspicious, since the residents’ medical records happened to be mixed in with the house documents.
The residents of Hinkley, CA were very fortunate Erin Brockovich worked on that file and started digging very deeply into their lives. It by no means gave them their health back, which has no price tag. But at least the financial settlement they received from P G & E will help them with their medical expenses and the care of their children upon their possible premature deaths due to the consequences of the ill effects of the water contamination at Hinkley.
Unfortunately, Hinkley, CA has what I would call a fairy tale ending compared to what is happening right now in communities across the United States. This next issue about gas drilling dwarfs PG & E’s impact on ground water contamination. We keep hearing on television about the wonders of natural gas and how we have vast quantities right here in the United States that can be used at a much lower price than foreign fuel sources. The majority of U.S. citizens think it is a wonderful clean burning transition fuel and the way of the future. Well, this fuel source is causing havoc that makes what happened at Hinkley look like child’s play.
In the United States there are numerous deep shale gas basins of natural gas, which contain trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. In order to tap into these pockets of natural gas, oil and gas companies use a procedure called hydraulic fracturing. This procedure is very damaging to the environment. Due to the practice of hydraulic fracturing, six states have documented over 1,000 incidents of ground water contamination.
In the past, our government has established laws to protect our environment. In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was formed to control air pollution and the Clean Air Act that was enacted in 1963 was significantly amended for them to enforce. In 1972 Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act into law and in 1974 the Safe Drinking Water Act was enacted by Congress. It is very disconcerting that these environmental regulations are not applicable to natural gas drilling. You might ask, “Why is hydraulic fracturing virtually unregulated”? It starts with our prior vice-president, Dick Cheney. Before Mr. Cheney became vice-president of the United States, he was CEO of Haliburton, a major provider of products and services to the oil and gas industry. One of the first things Mr. Cheney did as vice-president of the United States was to form the “Energy Task Force.” This group met numerous times with oil and gas industry leaders such as, the regional president of British Petroleum (BP), the president of American Petroleum Institute (API), the head of ENRON (Kenneth Lay) and many others. But they only met once with members of environmental groups.
In 2004 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was investigating water contamination incidents due to hydraulic fracturing across the country. But a peer review panel rejected the inquiry stating that even though hazardous materials were being injected underground, it was not necessary for the EPA to investigate the matter. A 20 year veteran of the EPA, Weston Wilson, wrote a letter to Congress objecting to this decision. He also pointed out to them that five out of seven members on the peer review panel appeared to have conflicts of interest and would benefit as a result of the EPA’s decision to not conduct the investigation. Congress did nothing and the EPA stopped investigating. Weston Wilson and other officials at EPA were appalled to be told by Washington to not investigate and to facilitate oil and gas industry plans. He said, so far their orders remain the same for EPA under the present administration.
The Energy Task Force and a $100,000,000 effort on behalf of the oil and gas industry were instrumental in the passage of the Halliburton Loophole to the Safe Drinking Water Act. This authorizes oil and gas drilling companies, such as Halliburton, to inject known hazardous materials unchecked directly into or adjacent to underground drinking water supplies. The Halliburton Loophole passed as a part of the Bush Administration’s Energy Policy Act of 2005. In fact, the 2005 energy bill that vice-president Cheney pushed through Congress exempts the oil and gas companies from the: Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Cercla/Superfund (Comprehensive environmental response, compensation, and liability act), and a dozen other environmental regulations. Once the oil and gas companies had all restrictions lifted with the passage of the 2005 energy bill, companies such as Encana, Williams, Cabot Oil & Gas and Chesapeake all started using Halliburton technology commencing the most widespread drilling campaign in history encompassing 34 states.
As I mentioned earlier, the method of drilling for natural gas is called “hydraulic fracturing” or “fracking.” This method entails blasting a mixture of water and fracking fluid thousands of feet into the ground, in order to break apart the rock with the extreme pressure to free up the gas. Fracking fluid is a mix of over 596 chemicals, one of which is a well know carcinogen, Ethylbenzene.
Another problem with fracking is the unbelievable quantities of water needed. Each time they drill into a well, between one and seven million gallons of water is needed to mix with the fracking fluid. One well could possibly be fracked up to 18 times in its life.
So you are probably wondering how much water is being used for fracking? Well, they started fracking in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama. The total number of wells they have drilled is approximately 450,000, times 18 drills per well, times one to seven million gallons of water totals about forty trillion gallons of water, all of which has been infused with the 596 chemicals in the fracking fluid.
Natural gas drilling is headed east. Plans are in the works for drilling 50,000 gas wells along a 75 mile stretch of the Delaware River to be followed by hundreds of thousands of wells covering the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
Cabot Oil & Gas has been drilling natural gas wells in a very small town in Pennsylvania called Dimock. Residents in Dimock have been complaining that the water in their wells bubbles and fizzes when it comes out. They have also been getting sick. When personnel from Cabot came to their homes in response to the resident’s complaints regarding their drinking water, they said there was nothing wrong with the water. Yet, they refused to drink the water when they were offered a drink. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection also said that everything was just fine with their water.
Finally one resident’s well exploded. Another resident had livestock that were losing weight and hair, and the pet cat was not only losing its hair but suffering from projectile vomiting. Cabot Oil & Gas sent out someone to test the water and told this resident not to use the water for any purpose whatsoever, not even to do laundry.
When a natural gas well is blasted with water and fracking fluid, the water that is sent down eventually comes back up. This waste water that comes back out of the ground contaminated by fracking fluid is called produced water. This goes into a flowback pit until it is picked up by a tanker truck for disposal, normally into the Gulf of Mexico from Henry Hub in Louisiana. Some of the produced water seeps back into the ground. They also use evaporation sprayers in the pits where they spray the water into the air in sunlight so that it will evaporate faster and this way there will be less produced water to have to haul away. The problem with this is the fluid evaporating is that it contains fracking chemicals, which are toxic and create ozone and hazardous air pollutants that fall down in the form of acid rain. Ozone is good for the upper atmosphere and keeps the UV radiation of the sun down, but on the ground ozone can burn holes in your lungs. There are also many incidents of illegal dumping of produced water onto fields and streams.
One such incident took place in Meshoppen Creek in Dimock, PA. Among the many chemicals found in the creek was Methylene Blue Active Substances. This contains synthetic or organic surface-active agents called surfactants. A surfactant will allow oil or other substances to pass through a surface by dissolving it. When a surfactant gets into a lake or a stream it will have several negative impacts: it may form a thin surface film that will reduce the oxygen levels in the water, it will start to dissolve the fish’s gills and eventually kill the fish, and it has carcinogenic by-products. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection was informed but they did not fine anyone because they said there was no proof as to who had dumped the produced water.
The Jonah Gas Fields are some of the largest and most productive gas fields in the United States. They are located in Sublette County, Wyoming at the foothills of the Grand Tetons just south of Yellowstone. Sublette County is only about 4,900 square miles in size and has a population of about 6,000 people. This means there is roughly about one person per square mile. Eighty percent of the land is Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. This means it is public land and anyone can camp on it wherever they like. In fact the BLM’s mission is to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of the public land for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations. Well, do not plan a camping trip to the BLM lands in Sublette County, WY, because the BLM has not been doing a very good job for the public; Dick Cheney got to them too.
In 2001 the Energy Task Force, headed by Vice-president Dick Cheney asked the BLM to find ways to open up new federal lands to become available for leasing to the oil and gas companies. Incredibly in what is now called the biggest transfer of public lands into private hands in history, Dick Cheney persuaded the BLM to lease millions of acres in the United States to gas companies for exploration and drilling. In Sublette County, the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality posted numerous air pollution advisories. They said that ozone in the air had reached unsafe levels.
The University of Colorado sent seven medical researchers to Garfield City, CO to conduct the first preliminary study on the health effects from natural gas development in the area. They found that many people had benzene in their bloodstream. Benzene is known to cause leukemia. Many of the people in Garfield City have received settlements from the oil and gas companies due to this study, but money cannot buy your health back and leukemia can be fatal.
Thanks to Dr. Theo Colburn, a former EPA advisor, there is knowledge of some of the chemicals in the fracking fluid. Due to the exemptions received in the 2005 energy bill, fracking chemicals are considered proprietary. This means the formula is owned by the company and they are not required to divulge any specifications regarding the ingredients going into the fracking fluid. By chasing trucks loaded with fracking fluid, searching through safety data sheets, and collecting samples, Dr. Colburn has identified 596 different chemicals in the fracking fluid. She also investigated the effects of people affected by the contamination of natural gas well drilling. Dr. Colburn described that the neurological effects are very insidious. It starts of with headaches, ringing in the ears, disorientation, dizziness and may eventually lead to peripheral neuropathy. At this point they have irreversible brain damage and they will suffer sever pain in their extremities and swelling. All the people affected by gas drilling had also lost their sense of taste and smell.
Some of the known effects of these chemicals on humans are: testicular toxicity, malformation of embryo, bone marrow depression, and hemolysis (destruction of red blood cells).
It is important to note that the workers who work at these wells are also being exposed to these toxic conditions and are inhaling vapors the entire time they are present at work. They too suffer from these ailments. They are not given any information on what they are handling, and many do not realize they are jeopardizing their health.
As I mentioned earlier, natural gas drilling is heading east. They have leased hundreds of thousands of acres within the largest unfiltered water supply in the world, the New York City Watershed and the Delaware River Water Basin. This combined watershed provides water for 15.6 million people in four states. This could mean as many as 50,000 gas wells in the combined watershed area. As of spring 2010 there has been no drilling in the combined watershed area. There are people in New York expressing the dangers of natural gas drilling, such as James Gennaro a member of New York’s City Council and the Environmental Board Chair. He has been instrumental in slowing the process, but more people need to realize the dangers this presents and get laws to change before this crucial watershed area is damaged and vast numbers of people’s health are put at risk.
In June 2009 Representative Diana DeGette from Colorado and Congressman Maurice Hinchey from New York introduced a bill in both the House and the Senate called the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act – dubbed the Frac Act. It was a piece of legislation one paragraph long taking out the exemption for hydraulic fracturing to the Safe Drinking Water Act. Unbelievably it did not pass. I imagine the House and the Senate is purchasing bottled water from a part of the United States far from any natural gas drilling.
We pay tax dollars to support agencies, such as the EPA and BLM who are suppose to be working for the citizens of the United States and looking out for our welfare and our rights. Instead all I see is that these agencies are working as independent contractors for special interest groups that are willingly endangering people’s lives with the chemicals they are using by contaminating the drinking water in the surrounding areas. They do not bother to warn the residents nor do they take responsibility when it is brought to their attention. When the agencies that should be policing these entities are serving them rather than policing them, there is a complete break down in the system of justice.
Most of these natural gas wells are being drilled in remote locations where large numbers of people are not being affected. Once drilling starts in the New York City Watershed and the Delaware River Water Basin this may no longer be the case. These water contamination problems may not be happening here in Florida, where I live, but I feel that as citizens of the United States, a tax payer, and most importantly a human being with a conscious, it is our obligation to correct this injustice. I became aware of this problem by watching a documentary by Josh Fox on HBO called “Gasland.” We must all try and do what we can to influence our elected representatives to change this loophole in the law. I urge everyone to publicize this problem, and for more information on who to contact go to www.gaslandthemovie.com. Perhaps if these drilling companies had to pay the full share of the costs of their business (environmental externalities), they would not drill anymore, because this harmful activity would be cost-prohibitive.
If people protested too much, P G & E would simply offer to buy the family’s house at fair market value. Fortunately, it was during one of these home sales transactions that Erin Brockovich became suspicious, since the residents’ medical records happened to be mixed in with the house documents.
The residents of Hinkley, CA were very fortunate Erin Brockovich worked on that file and started digging very deeply into their lives. It by no means gave them their health back, which has no price tag. But at least the financial settlement they received from P G & E will help them with their medical expenses and the care of their children upon their possible premature deaths due to the consequences of the ill effects of the water contamination at Hinkley.
Unfortunately, Hinkley, CA has what I would call a fairy tale ending compared to what is happening right now in communities across the United States. This next issue about gas drilling dwarfs PG & E’s impact on ground water contamination. We keep hearing on television about the wonders of natural gas and how we have vast quantities right here in the United States that can be used at a much lower price than foreign fuel sources. The majority of U.S. citizens think it is a wonderful clean burning transition fuel and the way of the future. Well, this fuel source is causing havoc that makes what happened at Hinkley look like child’s play.
In the United States there are numerous deep shale gas basins of natural gas, which contain trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. In order to tap into these pockets of natural gas, oil and gas companies use a procedure called hydraulic fracturing. This procedure is very damaging to the environment. Due to the practice of hydraulic fracturing, six states have documented over 1,000 incidents of ground water contamination.
In the past, our government has established laws to protect our environment. In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was formed to control air pollution and the Clean Air Act that was enacted in 1963 was significantly amended for them to enforce. In 1972 Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act into law and in 1974 the Safe Drinking Water Act was enacted by Congress. It is very disconcerting that these environmental regulations are not applicable to natural gas drilling. You might ask, “Why is hydraulic fracturing virtually unregulated”? It starts with our prior vice-president, Dick Cheney. Before Mr. Cheney became vice-president of the United States, he was CEO of Haliburton, a major provider of products and services to the oil and gas industry. One of the first things Mr. Cheney did as vice-president of the United States was to form the “Energy Task Force.” This group met numerous times with oil and gas industry leaders such as, the regional president of British Petroleum (BP), the president of American Petroleum Institute (API), the head of ENRON (Kenneth Lay) and many others. But they only met once with members of environmental groups.
In 2004 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was investigating water contamination incidents due to hydraulic fracturing across the country. But a peer review panel rejected the inquiry stating that even though hazardous materials were being injected underground, it was not necessary for the EPA to investigate the matter. A 20 year veteran of the EPA, Weston Wilson, wrote a letter to Congress objecting to this decision. He also pointed out to them that five out of seven members on the peer review panel appeared to have conflicts of interest and would benefit as a result of the EPA’s decision to not conduct the investigation. Congress did nothing and the EPA stopped investigating. Weston Wilson and other officials at EPA were appalled to be told by Washington to not investigate and to facilitate oil and gas industry plans. He said, so far their orders remain the same for EPA under the present administration.
The Energy Task Force and a $100,000,000 effort on behalf of the oil and gas industry were instrumental in the passage of the Halliburton Loophole to the Safe Drinking Water Act. This authorizes oil and gas drilling companies, such as Halliburton, to inject known hazardous materials unchecked directly into or adjacent to underground drinking water supplies. The Halliburton Loophole passed as a part of the Bush Administration’s Energy Policy Act of 2005. In fact, the 2005 energy bill that vice-president Cheney pushed through Congress exempts the oil and gas companies from the: Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Cercla/Superfund (Comprehensive environmental response, compensation, and liability act), and a dozen other environmental regulations. Once the oil and gas companies had all restrictions lifted with the passage of the 2005 energy bill, companies such as Encana, Williams, Cabot Oil & Gas and Chesapeake all started using Halliburton technology commencing the most widespread drilling campaign in history encompassing 34 states.
As I mentioned earlier, the method of drilling for natural gas is called “hydraulic fracturing” or “fracking.” This method entails blasting a mixture of water and fracking fluid thousands of feet into the ground, in order to break apart the rock with the extreme pressure to free up the gas. Fracking fluid is a mix of over 596 chemicals, one of which is a well know carcinogen, Ethylbenzene.
Another problem with fracking is the unbelievable quantities of water needed. Each time they drill into a well, between one and seven million gallons of water is needed to mix with the fracking fluid. One well could possibly be fracked up to 18 times in its life.
So you are probably wondering how much water is being used for fracking? Well, they started fracking in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama. The total number of wells they have drilled is approximately 450,000, times 18 drills per well, times one to seven million gallons of water totals about forty trillion gallons of water, all of which has been infused with the 596 chemicals in the fracking fluid.
Natural gas drilling is headed east. Plans are in the works for drilling 50,000 gas wells along a 75 mile stretch of the Delaware River to be followed by hundreds of thousands of wells covering the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
Cabot Oil & Gas has been drilling natural gas wells in a very small town in Pennsylvania called Dimock. Residents in Dimock have been complaining that the water in their wells bubbles and fizzes when it comes out. They have also been getting sick. When personnel from Cabot came to their homes in response to the resident’s complaints regarding their drinking water, they said there was nothing wrong with the water. Yet, they refused to drink the water when they were offered a drink. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection also said that everything was just fine with their water.
Finally one resident’s well exploded. Another resident had livestock that were losing weight and hair, and the pet cat was not only losing its hair but suffering from projectile vomiting. Cabot Oil & Gas sent out someone to test the water and told this resident not to use the water for any purpose whatsoever, not even to do laundry.
When a natural gas well is blasted with water and fracking fluid, the water that is sent down eventually comes back up. This waste water that comes back out of the ground contaminated by fracking fluid is called produced water. This goes into a flowback pit until it is picked up by a tanker truck for disposal, normally into the Gulf of Mexico from Henry Hub in Louisiana. Some of the produced water seeps back into the ground. They also use evaporation sprayers in the pits where they spray the water into the air in sunlight so that it will evaporate faster and this way there will be less produced water to have to haul away. The problem with this is the fluid evaporating is that it contains fracking chemicals, which are toxic and create ozone and hazardous air pollutants that fall down in the form of acid rain. Ozone is good for the upper atmosphere and keeps the UV radiation of the sun down, but on the ground ozone can burn holes in your lungs. There are also many incidents of illegal dumping of produced water onto fields and streams.
One such incident took place in Meshoppen Creek in Dimock, PA. Among the many chemicals found in the creek was Methylene Blue Active Substances. This contains synthetic or organic surface-active agents called surfactants. A surfactant will allow oil or other substances to pass through a surface by dissolving it. When a surfactant gets into a lake or a stream it will have several negative impacts: it may form a thin surface film that will reduce the oxygen levels in the water, it will start to dissolve the fish’s gills and eventually kill the fish, and it has carcinogenic by-products. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection was informed but they did not fine anyone because they said there was no proof as to who had dumped the produced water.
The Jonah Gas Fields are some of the largest and most productive gas fields in the United States. They are located in Sublette County, Wyoming at the foothills of the Grand Tetons just south of Yellowstone. Sublette County is only about 4,900 square miles in size and has a population of about 6,000 people. This means there is roughly about one person per square mile. Eighty percent of the land is Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. This means it is public land and anyone can camp on it wherever they like. In fact the BLM’s mission is to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of the public land for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations. Well, do not plan a camping trip to the BLM lands in Sublette County, WY, because the BLM has not been doing a very good job for the public; Dick Cheney got to them too.
In 2001 the Energy Task Force, headed by Vice-president Dick Cheney asked the BLM to find ways to open up new federal lands to become available for leasing to the oil and gas companies. Incredibly in what is now called the biggest transfer of public lands into private hands in history, Dick Cheney persuaded the BLM to lease millions of acres in the United States to gas companies for exploration and drilling. In Sublette County, the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality posted numerous air pollution advisories. They said that ozone in the air had reached unsafe levels.
The University of Colorado sent seven medical researchers to Garfield City, CO to conduct the first preliminary study on the health effects from natural gas development in the area. They found that many people had benzene in their bloodstream. Benzene is known to cause leukemia. Many of the people in Garfield City have received settlements from the oil and gas companies due to this study, but money cannot buy your health back and leukemia can be fatal.
Thanks to Dr. Theo Colburn, a former EPA advisor, there is knowledge of some of the chemicals in the fracking fluid. Due to the exemptions received in the 2005 energy bill, fracking chemicals are considered proprietary. This means the formula is owned by the company and they are not required to divulge any specifications regarding the ingredients going into the fracking fluid. By chasing trucks loaded with fracking fluid, searching through safety data sheets, and collecting samples, Dr. Colburn has identified 596 different chemicals in the fracking fluid. She also investigated the effects of people affected by the contamination of natural gas well drilling. Dr. Colburn described that the neurological effects are very insidious. It starts of with headaches, ringing in the ears, disorientation, dizziness and may eventually lead to peripheral neuropathy. At this point they have irreversible brain damage and they will suffer sever pain in their extremities and swelling. All the people affected by gas drilling had also lost their sense of taste and smell.
Some of the known effects of these chemicals on humans are: testicular toxicity, malformation of embryo, bone marrow depression, and hemolysis (destruction of red blood cells).
It is important to note that the workers who work at these wells are also being exposed to these toxic conditions and are inhaling vapors the entire time they are present at work. They too suffer from these ailments. They are not given any information on what they are handling, and many do not realize they are jeopardizing their health.
As I mentioned earlier, natural gas drilling is heading east. They have leased hundreds of thousands of acres within the largest unfiltered water supply in the world, the New York City Watershed and the Delaware River Water Basin. This combined watershed provides water for 15.6 million people in four states. This could mean as many as 50,000 gas wells in the combined watershed area. As of spring 2010 there has been no drilling in the combined watershed area. There are people in New York expressing the dangers of natural gas drilling, such as James Gennaro a member of New York’s City Council and the Environmental Board Chair. He has been instrumental in slowing the process, but more people need to realize the dangers this presents and get laws to change before this crucial watershed area is damaged and vast numbers of people’s health are put at risk.
In June 2009 Representative Diana DeGette from Colorado and Congressman Maurice Hinchey from New York introduced a bill in both the House and the Senate called the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act – dubbed the Frac Act. It was a piece of legislation one paragraph long taking out the exemption for hydraulic fracturing to the Safe Drinking Water Act. Unbelievably it did not pass. I imagine the House and the Senate is purchasing bottled water from a part of the United States far from any natural gas drilling.
We pay tax dollars to support agencies, such as the EPA and BLM who are suppose to be working for the citizens of the United States and looking out for our welfare and our rights. Instead all I see is that these agencies are working as independent contractors for special interest groups that are willingly endangering people’s lives with the chemicals they are using by contaminating the drinking water in the surrounding areas. They do not bother to warn the residents nor do they take responsibility when it is brought to their attention. When the agencies that should be policing these entities are serving them rather than policing them, there is a complete break down in the system of justice.
Most of these natural gas wells are being drilled in remote locations where large numbers of people are not being affected. Once drilling starts in the New York City Watershed and the Delaware River Water Basin this may no longer be the case. These water contamination problems may not be happening here in Florida, where I live, but I feel that as citizens of the United States, a tax payer, and most importantly a human being with a conscious, it is our obligation to correct this injustice. I became aware of this problem by watching a documentary by Josh Fox on HBO called “Gasland.” We must all try and do what we can to influence our elected representatives to change this loophole in the law. I urge everyone to publicize this problem, and for more information on who to contact go to www.gaslandthemovie.com. Perhaps if these drilling companies had to pay the full share of the costs of their business (environmental externalities), they would not drill anymore, because this harmful activity would be cost-prohibitive.
