EPA Knew It

[John Mayo]

Hello All,
Here is an interview of Walter Hang by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
about what the EPA know about the adverse effects of natural gas
production.
John Mayo.
LORA


Leaked EPA Documents Expose Decades-Old Effort to Hide Dangers of
Natural Gas Extraction
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Efforts by lawmakers and regulators to force the federal government to
better police the natural gas drilling process known as hydraulic
fracturing, or "fracking," have been thwarted for the past 25 years,
according to an exposé in the New York Times. Studies by scientists at
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on fracking have been
repeatedly narrowed in scope by superiors, and important findings have
been removed under pressure from the industry. The news comes as the
EPA is conducting a broad study of the risks of natural gas drilling
with preliminary results scheduled to be delivered next year. Joining
us is Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, a firm that tracks
environmental spills and releases across the country, based in Ithaca,
New York, where fracking is currently taking place. [includes rush
transcript]
Filed under Natural Gas & Oil Drilling, Climate Change


Guest:
Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, based in Ithaca, NY.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Efforts by lawmakers and regulators to force the
federal government to better police [the] natural gas drilling process
known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," have been thwarted for
the past 25 years, according to an exposé in the past week in the New
York Times. Studies by scientists at the Environmental Protection
Agency on fracking have been repeatedly narrowed in scope by
superiors, and important findings have been removed under pressure
from the industry, according to the Times. For example, last year, the
EPA planned to call for a moratorium on fracking in the New York City
watershed, but the advice was removed from the publicly released
letter sent to officials in New York. The news comes as the EPA is
conducting a broad study of the risks of natural gas drilling, with
preliminary results scheduled to be delivered next year.
AMY GOODMAN: Walter Hang is the president of Toxics Targeting, a firm
that tracks environmental spills and releases across the country. He’s
joining us from Ithaca. And joining us via Democracy Now! video stream
is Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary
Gasland. In it, Josh travels the United States to meet people whose
lives have been impacted by natural gas drilling. The film was awarded
the Special Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival
last year.
But let’s start with Walter Hang. Walter, talk about the significance
of this exposé and the information about the industry thwarting EPA’s
efforts to regulate fracking for over a quarter of a century.
WALTER HANG: Well, the most important thing is that the natural gas
industry has said all along that there’s never been a confirmed
problem with horizontal hydrofracking in Marcellus Shale. They’ve said
this practice has been used for decades, it’s safe, it’s not
problematic. The first installment of the New York Times series
basically brought to light that in the autumn of 2008, there was so
much natural gas drilling wastewater being dumped into municipal
treatment plants along the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, and
these plants were not designed, constructed or maintained in any way
to take out the very high salt content, the toxic chemicals associated
with petroleum, or the radioactive nucleotides. And so, this
contamination was going into the river in such incredible volumes that
essentially it impacted a 70-mile stretch of the river, and 850,000
people didn’t have any drinking water. Subsequent studies show that
actually the water became brackish. They started to find salt-loving
diatoms flourishing in the water.
And so, this is when basically the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency tried to recommend to the state of New York, don’t go forward
with horizontal hydrofracking in New York, where there’s been a de
facto moratorium against that practice for two-and-a-half years, until
you deal with the wastewater hazards, until you safeguard New York
City’s drinking water. And that’s when the recommendation came: no
drilling in the watershed. And amazingly, they actually proposed to
allow the drilling in the rest of upstate New York, so that the
Department of Environmental Conservation could essentially get
experience regulating this practice. But then none of those
recommendations made it into the final document submitted to the
Department of Environmental Conservation. So this is an incredible
revelation about how the EPA knew about these problems, didn’t tell
New York, and that’s why we’re calling for these regulations to be
withdrawn, the scope revised, so that, for the first time, this kind
of practice can be adequately safeguarded.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Walter, what kind of public attention was there
when the drinking water of 800,000 people in Pennsylvania was
endangered? Did the EPA or any of the other environmental agencies in
the state of Pennsylvania sound a warning to the public about it?
WALTER HANG: Well, basically, it was just a catastrophic crisis that
had never happened before. There had been a drought during that time.
And so, they tried desperately to release water from big reservoirs,
and basically none of that worked. But the key thing is, they never
really spelled out that this problem with high total dissolved solids
in the river was associated with wastewater treatment plants taking up
to 40 percent of their influent as natural gas drilling wastewater. So
it was never really made clear. For example, in New York, when this
700-page document came out about how the state was proposing to
regulate natural gas drilling wastewater, there’s not a single mention
about this crisis. So it’s really never come to light, until the New
York Times got these incredible internal EPA documents.
And that’s how come we’re now saying to Andrew Cuomo, the governor of
New York, expand the scope of this proceeding, go back to the drawing
board. You know, there’s so much that’s been hidden from public review
that it’s just really a shocking situation. It’s really an outrage.
And I’m sure that the Mayor of New York is going to be extremely
unhappy to find out that EPA was so concerned about this practice that
they proposed to keep it off-limits from the watershed and then didn’t
finally make that proposal known.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the industry that is putting pressure,
that has thwarted the EPA from regulating fracking for a quarter-
century. Who are they?
WALTER HANG: Well, it’s basically the biggest corporations on the
planet. It’s the oil and gas industry. It’s basically that they want
to tap into this giant underground reserve of natural gas, the
Marcellus Shale formation. It’s the biggest reserve, arguably, on the
entire planet. They think that they’re just going to wallow in money.
It’s "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil." And they’re spending
incredible amounts of money trying to influence decision makers to
allow this practice to go forward. And in New York, for example,
yesterday in the legislature, the halls were reportedly overrun with
lobbyists from the natural gas industry. They’re watching the bread
being taken from their mouths, potentially, and so they’re going to be
trying to do everything that they can to essentially allow this
practice to go forward.
But let me note that the drilling in shale with horizontal
hydrofracking is essentially regulated by the states. The
Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t issue the drilling permits.
For example, in New York, the State Department of Environmental
Conservation issues the permits. So it’s really the call of Governor
Cuomo. It’s the call of the other governors. If they want to make this
practice safe, if they want to require financial surety, if they want
to require that this wastewater is dealt with properly, all they have
to do is read those internal EPA documents, which say you can’t accept
this wastewater unless the treatment plants are specifically equipped
to take out the radionucleotides, the toxics, the high salt. In New
York, for example, there isn’t a single publicly owned treatment plant
that accept that. And in little Ithaca, New York, where I live, the
Cayuga Heights wastewater treatment plant accepted three million
gallons of this drilling wastewater and discharged it into the
southern end of Cayuga Lake, about a mile upgradient from the drinking
water intake for 30,000 people.
So when all of these facts begin to come to light, when the influence
of industry begins to come to light, people are just, you know,
jumping up and down and saying, "What can we do?" And the answer is,
they have to lean on the officials. They have to call Andrew Cuomo. At
toxicstargeting.com, there’s a coalition letter. More than 3,500
people have signed this letter. And it’s basically saying to Andrew
Cuomo, start over again with these draft regulations. There’s an
executive order that Governor Paterson signed just before checking out
of office, and he basically said we’ve just got to open up the
proceeding, we’ve got to address all the issues that the state
authorities tried to exclude at the behest of the industry.
And if we want to make this an honest process, if we want to make sure
that this extraction mining is properly regulated, there’s no better
time than right now. We’ve never seen these documents before. I’ve
been doing this work for 34 years. All of those internal
communications, as you know, are excluded from Freedom of Information,
so this is really a cornucopia of documents revealing how the EPA
thinks. And that’s how come, for the first time, we know what they
wanted to do, to their credit, to protect the environment. And in
fact, there’s even one document that said that the authorities didn’t
want EPA to write down what their best hopes were, because if it ever
came to light, the public could hold their feet to the fire to
implement it. So this is a tremendous opportunity to regulate an
industry that’s really never been regulated before.
And the epicenter of that fight is in New York, because there’s not
one horizontal hydrofrack Marcellus Shale well in New York, and it
isn’t going to be allowed until these final regulations are adopted.
So, I urge every one of your listeners, go to toxicstargeting.com,
sign the coalition letter to Andrew Cuomo, look at the alerts, and
then call him. Call Lisa Jackson. Call EPA Region 2 Administrator
Judith Enck, and just express your outrage, express your anger, and
say, "We want this process to be open and honest. We don’t want this
practice, basically, in New York to turn out to the way it turned out
in Pennsylvania."
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Walter, specifically about all of these—this
trove of internal documents that the Times obtained, there clearly has
been a raging battle within the EPA between the scientists and the
various political appointees from different administrations over the
years on this issue. In terms of—one of the things you mentioned was
the whole issue of radioactivity in some of the wastewater. Could you
specifically talk about that and the battle that’s gone on within the
agency on that issue?
WALTER HANG: I think that the thing that most impressed me was how you
could read these technical recommendations from the scientists within
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and they recognize—they said
it right there in the documents—these are elevated concentrations of
toxic radionucleotides. And there has to be a program, essentially not
only to protect the environment, protect the public health, but
actually to protect the workers. And so, they made their
recommendations. They were totally blunt: you have to regulate what’s
called the flowback wastewater, which is what they use to fracture the
rock, and then it comes back up out of the well. But they also said
you have to regulate what’s called the brine. And this is the
wastewater that comes out of the well for the entire lifetime of the
well. And a Marcellus Shale horizontally fracked well can produce for
30 years. So they were very clear. They really recognize that the
levels were high. They recognize that there was a lot more data. But
again, as was noted in the Times piece, they came right up against the
issue of the politics, of the money.
So again, for the first time, you can see a PowerPoint that was made
to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency headquarters on August 9th,
2009. You can see exactly what this EPA scientist, Amy Bergdale,
presented to the powers that be at the top. You can see how she talked
about the radionucleotide hazard. You can see how she identified a
mine void dumping. So not only were they spreading this on the roads,
they were actually dumping it into abandoned mines that weren’t
equipped to, again, break down or remove the radionucleotides, the
toxics, the high salt. And most importantly, she revealed this problem
in 2008 along the Monongahela River. So I invite all of your
listeners, go to the New York Times website, look at these documents,
or look at some of the selected documents that Toxics Targeting has
posted. You can read them, and we’ve highlighted the sections that are
the most telling. And it’s just unbelievable. I mean, people are going
to be shocked. They’re going to just be so angry that the government
tried to do the right thing and then basically ran up against the
barriers of internal politics.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Walter Hang. He’s the head of Toxics
Targeting. He’s speaking to us from Ithaca College.