The Fracking Industry Buys Congress - But for how much?

Environmental News Service
Blue Ridge Press
By Sharon Guynup

WASHINGTON, DC, February 16, 2012 (ENS) - A natural gas drilling rush is on in rural North Dakota. And with it, residents are reporting growing numbers of respiratory ailments, skin lesions, blood oozing from eyes, and the deaths of livestock and pets.

Elsewhere, residents of Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wyoming and other states who thought they'd hit the lottery by signing natural gas drilling leases have watched their drinking water turn noxious: slick, brown, foamy, flammable.

In December, for the first time, federal regulators scientifically linked hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to the contamination of an aquifer, refuting repeated industry claims that the practice does not pollute drinking water.

It happened in the rural ranching community of Pavillion, Wyoming, an area riddled with 162 natural gas wells dug between 1990 and 2006. Despite a decade of complaints from residents that their reeking water was undrinkable - and that many suffered from nerve damage, asthma, heart trouble and other health problems - state officials did nothing.

Finally the EPA stepped in, launching a three-year study running from 2008 to 2011.

In its report, the EPA identified numerous fracking chemicals in Pavillion's water. Cancer-causing benzene was found at 50 times safe levels, along with other hazardous chemicals, methane, diesel fuel, and toxic metals - in both groundwater and deep wells.


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CDC scientist: tests needed on gas drilling impact

The Patriot-News
AP
PennLive.com
Jan. 4, 2012

PITTSBURGH (AP) — One of the government's top scientists says much more research is needed to determine the possible impacts of shale gas drilling on human health and the environment.
"Studies should include all the ways people can be exposed, such as through air, water, soil, plants and animals," Dr. Christopher Portier wrote to The Associated Press in an email.
Portier is director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

While other federal and state regulators are already studying the impacts of gas drilling on air and water, Portier said research should also include "livestock on farmed lands consuming potentially impacted surface waters; and recreational fish from potentially impacted surface waters."
Portier made clear 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.
Another prominent scientist said the answers won't come quickly.

"I think it will take three to five years to sort through this," Duke University researcher Rob Jackson told AP in an email.

Jackson said that doesn't mean there isn't evidence of water contamination by drilling in some communities— Wyoming, for example, or Dimock, Pa.

"On the other hand a handful of cases of contamination is not enough to shut down an industry," he said.

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