Here's The NY Times Article

[John Mayo]

Hello,
Here is the Times article referred to by Walter Hang in the Democracy
Now! interview which I erroneously stated was done by Amy Goodman. It
was Juan Gonzales.
There are many problems described in the article which are familiar to
us as well as some new ones, namely for me, the radioactivity found in
the drilling waste water. I do not know how often waste water is
treated in this area, but wherever this water goes it poses a risk to
people. I have witnessed it being sprayed by commercial sprinklers on
the property behind my home directly out of a sludge tank (without
being processed). I have witnessed it being "farmed" onto two separate
ranch properties used for grazing within two miles of my home. I have
pictures as well. (The dozer operator joked to me that they were
dumping toxic waste, then took back the joke. It's not a joke, and you
can't take it back.) At the time I was clueless that it may contain
radioactivity. If it does, it will be there for thousands of years.
Thank you for reading these articles and passing them along to as many
others as you can,
John Mayo
LORA
Ps An otherwise healthy dog of ours died from a rare cancer a few
years after she took a swim in the sludge pond I referenced above.


Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers
By IAN URBINA

The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new
wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this
century’s gold rush — for natural gas.

The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in
countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between
thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent
years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to
be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings,
generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred
years.

So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare
support from their usual sparring partners. Environmentalists say
using natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more
cleanly than coal and oil. Lawmakers hail the gas as a source of jobs.
They also see it as a way to wean the United States from its
dependency on other countries for oil.

But the relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume
horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries
significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of
water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up
rock formations and release the gas.

With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of
wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts,
carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of
which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other
carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals
used in the hydrofracking itself.

While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands
of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the
Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show
that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than
previously understood.

The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to
sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers
that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher
than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal
regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.

Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are
alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water
in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never
made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some
sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling
waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.

The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a
confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that
radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and
other waterways.

But the E.P.A. has not intervened. In fact, federal and state
regulators are allowing most sewage treatment plants that accept
drilling waste not to test for radioactivity. And most drinking-water
intake plants downstream from those sewage treatment plants in
Pennsylvania, with the blessing of regulators, have not tested for
radioactivity since before 2006, even though the drilling boom began
in 2008.

In other words, there is no way of guaranteeing that the drinking
water taken in by all these plants is safe.

That has experts worried.

“We’re burning the furniture to heat the house,” said John H. Quigley,
who left last month as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of
Conservation and Natural Resources. “In shifting away from coal and
toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing
massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring
radioactive materials, and it’s not clear we have a plan for properly
handling this waste.”

The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a
sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up
from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the
wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the
maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water. While
people clearly do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the
drinking-water standard for comparison is that there is no
comprehensive federal standard for what constitutes safe levels of
radioactivity in drilling wastewater.

Drillers trucked at least half of this waste to public sewage
treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2009, according to state
officials. Some of it has been sent to other states, including New
York and West Virginia.

Yet sewage treatment plant operators say they are far less capable of
removing radioactive contaminants than most other toxic substances.
Indeed, most of these facilities cannot remove enough of the
radioactive material to meet federal drinking-water standards before
discharging the wastewater into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream
from drinking-water intake plants.

In Pennsylvania, these treatment plants discharged waste into some of
the state’s major river basins. Greater amounts of the wastewater went
to the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to more than
800,000 people in the western part of the state, including Pittsburgh,
and to the Susquehanna River, which feeds into Chesapeake Bay and
provides drinking water to more than six million people, including
some in Harrisburg and Baltimore.

Lower amounts have been discharged into the Delaware River, which
provides drinking water for more than 15 million people in
Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania.

In New York, the wastewater was sent to at least one plant that
discharges into Southern Cayuga Lake, near Ithaca, and another that
discharges into Owasco Outlet, near Auburn. In West Virginia, a plant
in Wheeling discharged gas-drilling wastewater into the Ohio River.

“Hydrofracking impacts associated with health problems as well as
widespread air and water contamination have been reported in at least
a dozen states,” said Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, a
business in Ithaca, N.Y., that compiles data on gas drilling.

Problems in Other Regions

While Pennsylvania is an extreme case, the risks posed by
hydrofracking extend across the country.

There were more than 493,000 active natural-gas wells in the United
States in 2009, almost double the number in 1990. Around 90 percent
have used hydrofracking to get more gas flowing, according to the
drilling industry.

Gas has seeped into underground drinking-water supplies in at least
five states, including Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West
Virginia, and residents blamed natural-gas drilling.

Air pollution caused by natural-gas drilling is a growing threat, too.
Wyoming, for example, failed in 2009 to meet federal standards for air
quality for the first time in its history partly because of the fumes
containing benzene and toluene from roughly 27,000 wells, the vast
majority drilled in the past five years.

In a sparsely populated Sublette County in Wyoming, which has some of
the highest concentrations of wells, vapors reacting to sunlight have
contributed to levels of ozone higher than those recorded in Houston
and Los Angeles.

Industry officials say any dangerous waste from the wells is handled
in compliance with state and federal laws, adding that drilling
companies are recycling more wastewater now. They also say that
hydrofracking is well regulated by the states and that it has been
used safely for decades.

But hydrofracking technology has become more powerful and more widely
used in recent years, producing far more wastewater. Some of the
problems with this drilling, including its environmental impact and
the challenge of disposing of waste, have been documented by
ProPublica, The Associated Press and other news organizations,
especially out West.

And recent incidents underscore the dangers. In late 2008, drilling
and coal-mine waste released during a drought so overwhelmed the
Monongahela that local officials advised people in the Pittsburgh area
to drink bottled water. E.P.A. officials described the incident in an
internal memorandum as “one of the largest failures in U.S. history to
supply clean drinking water to the public.”

In Texas, which now has about 93,000 natural-gas wells, up from around
58,000 a dozen years ago, a hospital system in six counties with some
of the heaviest drilling said in 2010 that it found a 25 percent
asthma rate for young children, more than three times the state rate
of about 7 percent.

“It’s ruining us,” said Kelly Gant, whose 14-year-old daughter and 11-
year-old son have experienced severe asthma attacks, dizzy spells and
headaches since a compressor station and a gas well were set up about
two years ago near her house in Bartonville, Tex. The industry and
state regulators have said it is not clear what role the gas industry
has played in causing such problems, since the area has had high air
pollution for a while.

“I’m not an activist, an alarmist, a Democrat, environmentalist or
anything like that,” Ms. Gant said. “I’m just a person who isn’t able
to manage the health of my family because of all this drilling.”

And yet, for all its problems, natural gas offers some clear
environmental advantages over coal, which is used more than any other
fuel to generate electricity in the United States. Coal-fired power
plants without updated equipment to capture pollutants are a major
source of radioactive pollution. Coal mines annually produce millions
of tons of toxic waste.

But the hazards associated with natural-gas production and drilling
are far less understood than those associated with other fossil fuels,
and the regulations have not kept pace with the natural-gas industry’s
expansion.

Pennsylvania, Ground Zero

Pennsylvania, which sits atop an enormous reserve called the Marcellus
Shale, has been called the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.

This rock formation, roughly the size of Greece, lies more than a mile
beneath the Appalachian landscape, from Virginia to the southern half
of New York. It is believed to hold enough gas to supply the country’s
energy needs for heat and electricity, at current consumption rates,
for more than 15 years.

Drilling companies were issued roughly 3,300 Marcellus gas-well
permits in Pennsylvania last year, up from just 117 in 2007.

This has brought thousands of jobs, five-figure windfalls for
residents who lease their land to the drillers and revenue for a state
that has struggled with budget deficits. It has also transformed the
landscape of southwestern Pennsylvania and brought heavy burdens.

Drilling derricks tower over barns, lining rural roads like feed
silos. Drilling sites bustle around the clock with workers, some in
yellow hazardous material suits, and 18-wheelers haul equipment, water
and waste along back roads.

The rigs announce their presence with the occasional boom and quiver
of underground explosions. Smelling like raw sewage mixed with
gasoline, drilling-waste pits, some as large as a football field, sit
close to homes.

Anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent of the water sent down the well
during hydrofracking returns to the surface, carrying drilling
chemicals, very high levels of salts and, at times, naturally
occurring radioactive material.

While most states require drillers to dispose of this water in
underground storage wells below impermeable rock layers, Pennsylvania
has few such wells. It is the only state that has allowed drillers to
discharge much of their waste through sewage treatment plants into
rivers.

Regulators have theorized that passing drilling waste through the
plants is safe because most toxic material will settle during the
treatment process into a sludge that can be trucked to a landfill, and
whatever toxic material remains in the wastewater will be diluted when
mixed into rivers. But some plants were taking such large amounts of
waste with high salt levels in 2008 that downstream utilities started
complaining that the river water was eating away at their machines.

Regulators and drilling companies have said that these cases, and
others, were isolated.

“The wastewater treatment plants are effective at what they’re
designed to do — remove material from wastewater,” said Jamie Legenos,
a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental
Protection, adding that the radioactive material and the salts were
being properly handled.

Overwhelmed, Underprepared

For proof that radioactive elements in drilling waste are not a
concern, industry spokesmen and regulators often point to the results
of wastewater tests from a 2009 draft report conducted by New York
State and a 1995 report by Pennsylvania that found that radioactivity
in drilling waste was not a threat. These two reports were based on
samples from roughly 13 gas wells in New York and 29 in Pennsylvania.

But a review by The Times of more than 30,000 pages of federal, state
and company records relating to more than 200 gas wells in
Pennsylvania, 40 in West Virginia and 20 public and private wastewater
treatment plants offers a fuller picture of the wastewater such wells
produce and the threat it poses.

Most of the information was drawn from drilling reports from the last
three years, obtained by visiting regional offices throughout
Pennsylvania, and from documents or databases provided by state and
federal regulators in response to records requests.

Among The Times’s findings:

¶More than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater was produced by
Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been
previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan
in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove
many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.

¶At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas
industry wastewater and discharged waste that was only partly treated
into rivers, lakes and streams.

¶Of more than 179 wells producing wastewater with high levels of
radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive
materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-
water standards. At least 15 wells produced wastewater carrying more
than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered
acceptable.

Results came from field surveys conducted by state and federal
regulators, year-end reports filed by drilling companies and state-
ordered tests of some public treatment plants. Most of the tests
measured drilling wastewater for radium or for “gross alpha”
radiation, which typically comes from radium, uranium and other
elements.

Industry officials say they are not concerned.

“These low levels of radioactivity pose no threat to the public or
worker safety and are more a public perception issue than a real
health threat,” said James E. Grey, chief operating officer of Triana
Energy.

In interviews, industry trade groups like the Marcellus Shale
Coalition and Energy in Depth, as well as representatives from energy
companies like Shell and Chesapeake Energy, said they were producing
far less wastewater because they were recycling much of it rather than
disposing of it after each job.

But even with recycling, the amount of wastewater produced in
Pennsylvania is expected to increase because, according to industry
projections, more than 50,000 new wells are likely to be drilled over
the next two decades.

The radioactivity in the wastewater is not necessarily dangerous to
people who are near it. It can be blocked by thin barriers, including
skin, so exposure is generally harmless.

Rather, E.P.A. and industry researchers say, the bigger danger of
radioactive wastewater is its potential to contaminate drinking water
or enter the food chain through fish or farming. Once radium enters a
person’s body, by eating, drinking or breathing, it can cause cancer
and other health problems, many federal studies show.

Little Testing for Radioactivity

Under federal law, testing for radioactivity in drinking water is
required only at drinking-water plants. But federal and state
regulators have given nearly all drinking-water intake facilities in
Pennsylvania permission to test only once every six or nine years.

The Times reviewed data from more than 65 intake plants downstream
from some of the busiest drilling regions in the state. Not one has
tested for radioactivity since 2008, and most have not tested since at
least 2005, before most of the drilling waste was being produced.

And in 2009 and 2010, public sewage treatment plants directly upstream
from some of these drinking-water intake facilities accepted
wastewater that contained radioactivity levels as high as 2,122 times
the drinking-water standard. But most sewage plants are not required
to monitor for radioactive elements in the water they discharge. So
there is virtually no data on such contaminants as water leaves these
plants. Regulators and gas producers have repeatedly said that the
waste is not a threat because it is so diluted in rivers or by
treatment plants. But industry and federal research cast doubt on
those statements.

A confidential industry study from 1990, conducted for the American
Petroleum Institute, concluded that “using conservative assumptions,”
radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed
“potentially significant risks” of cancer for people who eat fish from
those waters regularly.

The industry study focused on drilling industry wastewater being
dumped into the Gulf of Mexico, where it would be far more diluted
than in rivers. It also used estimates of radium levels far below
those found in Pennsylvania’s drilling waste, according to the study’s
lead author, Anne F. Meinhold, an environmental risk expert now at
NASA.

Other federal, state and academic studies have also found dilution
problems with radioactive drilling waste.

In December 2009, these very risks led E.P.A. scientists to advise in
a letter to New York that sewage treatment plants not accept drilling
waste with radium levels 12 or more times as high as the drinking-
water standard. The Times found wastewater containing radium levels
that were hundreds of times this standard. The scientists also said
that the plants should never discharge radioactive contaminants at
levels higher than the drinking-water standard.

In 2009, E.P.A. scientists studied the matter and also determined that
certain Pennsylvania rivers were ineffective at sufficiently diluting
the radium-laced drilling wastewater being discharged into them.

Asked about the studies, Pennsylvania regulators said they were not
aware of them.

“Concerned? I’m always concerned,” said Dave Allard, director of the
Bureau of Radiation Protection. But he added that the threat of this
waste is reduced because “the dilutions are so huge going through
those treatment plants.”

Three months after The Times began asking questions about radioactive
and other toxic material being discharged into specific rivers, state
regulators placed monitors for radioactivity near where drilling waste
is discharged. Data will not be available until next month, state
officials said.

But the monitor in the Monongahela is placed upstream from the two
public sewage treatment plants that the state says are still
discharging large amounts of drilling waste into the river, leaving
the discharges from these plants unchecked and Pittsburgh exposed.

Plant Operators in the Dark

In interviews, five treatment plant operators said they did not
believe that the drilling wastewater posed risks to the public.
Several also said they were not sure of the waste’s contents because
the limited information drillers provide usually goes to state
officials.

“We count on state regulators to make sure that that’s properly done,”
said Paul McCurdy, environmental specialist at Ridgway Borough’s
public sewage treatment plant, in Elk County, Pa., in the northwest
part of the state.

Mr. McCurdy, whose plant discharges into the Clarion River, which
flows into the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, said his plant was taking
about 20,000 gallons of drilling waste per day.

Like most of the sewage treatment plant operators interviewed, Mr.
McCurdy said his plant was not equipped to remove radioactive material
and was not required to test for it.

Documents filed by drillers with the state, though, show that in 2009
his facility was sent water from wells whose wastewater was laced with
radium at 275 times the drinking-water standard and with other types
of radiation at more than 780 times the standard.

Part of the problem is that industry has outpaced regulators. “We
simply can’t keep up,” said one inspector with the Pennsylvania
Department of Environmental Protection who was not authorized to speak
to reporters. “There’s just too much of the waste.”

“If we’re too hard on them,” the inspector added, “the companies might
just stop reporting their mistakes.”

Recently, Pennsylvania has tried to increase its oversight, doubling
the number of regulators, improving well-design requirements and
sharply decreasing how much drilling waste many treatment plants can
accept or release. The state is considering whether to require
treatment plants to begin monitoring for radioactivity in wastewater.

Even so, as of last November, 31 inspectors were keeping tabs on more
than 125,000 oil and gas wells. The new regulations also allowed at
least 18 plants to continue accepting the higher amounts set by their
original permits.

Furthermore, environmental researchers from the University of
Pittsburgh tested wastewater late last year that had been discharged
by two treatment plants. They say these tests will show, when the
results are publicly released in March, that salt levels were far
above the legal limit.

Lax Oversight

Drilling contamination is entering the environment in Pennsylvania
through spills, too. In the past three years, at least 16 wells whose
records showed high levels of radioactivity in their wastewater also
reported spills, leaks or failures of pits where hydrofracking fluid
or waste is stored, according to state records.

Gas producers are generally left to police themselves when it comes to
spills. In Pennsylvania, regulators do not perform unannounced
inspections to check for signs of spills. Gas producers report their
own spills, write their own spill response plans and lead their own
cleanup efforts.

A review of response plans for drilling projects at four Pennsylvania
sites where there have been accidents in the past year found that
these state-approved plans often appear to be in violation of the law.

At one well site where several spills occurred within a week,
including one that flowed into a creek, the well’s operator filed a
revised spill plan saying there was little chance that waste would
ever enter a waterway.

“There are business pressures” on companies to “cut corners,” John
Hanger, who stepped down as secretary of the Pennsylvania Department
of Environmental Protection in January, has said. “It’s cheaper to
dump wastewater than to treat it.”

Records back up that assertion.

From October 2008 through October 2010, regulators were more than
twice as likely to issue a written warning than to levy a fine for
environmental and safety violations, according to state data. During
this period, 15 companies were fined for drilling-related violations
in 2008 and 2009, and the companies paid an average of about $44,000
each year, according to state data.

This average was less than half of what some of the companies earned
in profits in a day and a tiny fraction of the more than $2 million
that some of them paid annually to haul and treat the waste.

And prospects for drillers in Pennsylvania are looking brighter.

In December, the Republican governor-elect, Tom Corbett, who during
his campaign took more gas industry contributions than all his
competitors combined, said he would reopen state land to new drilling,
reversing a decision made by his predecessor, Edward G. Rendell. The
change clears the way for as many as 10,000 wells on public land, up
from about 25 active wells today.

In arguing against a proposed gas-extraction tax on the industry, Mr.
Corbett said regulation of the industry had been too aggressive.

“I will direct the Department of Environmental Protection to serve as
a partner with Pennsylvania businesses, communities and local
governments,” Mr. Corbett says on his Web site. “It should return to
its core mission protecting the environment based on sound science.”

[James Lemon]

Hello John,
Kerry and I are meeting with the foreman and some rep of the oil company next week to express our concerns connected to the pending frack next door. We've done soil and water testing pre-frac in order to be able to compare water and soil condition post frack. We'll emphasize that we'll be driving the road to work and ask that truck drivers be mindful of safe driving . Can you think of other issues that we might bring up ? I'm  working on Air Quality monitoring and am hopeful I can rent a SUMA tank that will allow me to capture any obvious releases. Suggestions?  Jim Lemon
 
> Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2011 11:47:47 -0700
> Subject: [LORA:216] Here's The NY Times Article
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[Tiffany Sparks]

They are doing the same down by my house. I am sick of the traffic all day and night. They are driving too fast on the road.

 

[johnmayo]

Jim,
The most important thing(s) to do is document with words,
pictures, witnesses, as much as possible before, during,
after the production event. Keep a journal including dates,
names, conversations, observations. Date your photos. Most
digital photos are self time stamped, but be sure the camera
is dated and timed correctly.
Document a baseline (what are conditions now) and continue
the documentation from that point as above. The one thing I
would add is noise level before, during, after. God forbid,
if they put even a small compressor at that well, or nearby
you would be very unhappy, but would be able to prove the
difference in noise levels, something that is valuable in
negotiations and/or court, which is the crux of all I am
suggesting you do.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst,
John Mayo.

> > , far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of