Poison Spring (33 page)

“As children grow and mature, their bodies may be especially vulnerable to certain chemical exposures during critical windows of development,” the academy wrote. “Neurologic and endocrine systems have demonstrated particular sensitivity to environmental toxicants at certain stages of growth. These differences in biological susceptibility and exposures in children versus adults support the need for strong consideration of children in chemicals policies. This principle must underpin all chemical-management legislation and regulation.”
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It’s not just the young who are most vulnerable to our toxic legacy. Minorities and the poor have more poisons in their bodies not merely because of the food they eat, but also because of where they live. Their communities have long been the dumping grounds for America’s industrial pollution. For example, West Anniston, Alabama, had the misfortune of being a center for the manufacture of PCBs. West Anniston was also an Army depot for chemical weapons. In 2003, the military began burning its chemical weapons. The people of West Anniston, who are mostly black, pay the price for being surrounded by pollution, many of them dying young from cancer and other diseases.

Bob Herbert, an African American columnist for
The New York Times
, visited West Anniston and other black communities burdened by dumping. He rightly concluded that placing garbage dumps, oil refineries, and other hazardous manufacturing operations in the midst of black communities was a continuation of the Jim Crow policies that “have existed in one form or another, legally or illegally, since slavery.

“The evidence has been before us for decades that black people, other minorities and some poor whites have been getting sick and enduring horrible deaths from the filth that they breathe, eat, drink and otherwise ingest from the garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators, toxic waste sites, oil refineries, petrochemical plants and other world-class generators of pollution that have been deliberately and relentlessly installed in the neighborhoods where they live, work, worship and go to school,” Herbert wrote. “Government and industry alike have used black and poor neighborhoods as dumping grounds for the vilest and most dangerous of pollutants.”
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The latest crisis at the EPA—and one with disproportionate impact on the country’s young, its poor, and its minorities—concerns the current fever over a procedure for gas drilling known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Once again, giant industries are disregarding or sneaking around the law and ignoring science and the public health. Once again, government regulators are looking the other way. And once again, the public health—and particularly its drinking water—hang in the balance.

As hot as this issue is today, the struggle over fracking goes back decades. And one of its sorriest chapters began at the EPA, with a morally compromised study of drinking water contamination.

The EPA has known since the 1980s that wastes created by drilling for oil and gas are toxic and should not be allowed to flow into rivers or groundwater. Yet to this day, the oil and gas industries have pressured their puppets in Congress to exempt drilling from most environmental laws.

In 1994, the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation sued the EPA for its refusal to regulate the gas drilling industry. Several years later, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals recommended that EPA bring the gas drillers under its control. EPA ignored the court but agreed to look into the potential effects of drilling chemicals on drinking water.
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“Fracking a well” means pointing a cannon at the source of the suspected gas, usually found in stone formations thousands of feet under the ground, often in or near aquifers of drinking water. Huge amounts of water mixed with tons of chemicals and sand blast their way through a downward shaft under tremendous pressure and demolish the stone that encloses the gas. Some of the three hundred compounds used in hydraulic fracturing include diesel fuel, a dangerous mixture of benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene. Other materials in fracking fluids include acids, formaldehyde, polyacrylamides, chromates, and other potentially toxic or carcinogenic substances.

Rather than reveal these chemical cocktails to a public that will inevitably see the stuff in their rivers (and in their tap water), companies routinely put their fracking chemicals on a list of “trade secrets” and refuse to divulge their names or compositions. And while the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory used to inform us about what chemicals companies release in our environment, even that basic source of information is dead: the oil and gas industries long ago maneuvered their way out of being subject to this fundamental environmental law.
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Here’s how that travesty came about. The EPA started a fracking study in 2001 and completed it in 2004, during the administration of George W. Bush, a former oilman, and Dick Cheney, whose former company, Halliburton, had pioneered the fracking process. Predictably, the administration’s 2004 study found that injecting toxic fluids into gas wells “poses little or no threat” to drinking water and “does not justify additional study at this time.”
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This finding dismayed Weston Wilson, a scientist who had been with the EPA for thirty years. Wilson, an environmental engineer in the Denver office with long experience with oil and gas drilling, had observed carefully how EPA did its study. He knew the politics of the gas drilling industry, and how tightly those politics were linked to the execution of the EPA study.

Since Wilson’s home state of Colorado had grand fracking ambitions—and since the state’s coal beds producing natural gas are located within drinking water aquifers—Wilson had good reason to worry. He wrote to three Colorado politicians, Senator Wayne Allard, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, and Representative Diana DeGette, and attached a report entitled “EPA Allows Hazardous Fluids to be Injected into Ground Water.”
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The Bush administration’s EPA report, Wilson wrote, was “scientifically unsound” and ran afoul of the Safe Water Drinking Act that prohibits the contamination or poisoning of our drinking water. The EPA had not only failed to adequately assess the risks of the toxic fracking fluids, it had used a panel of outside experts who openly favored the drilling industry. Five of the seven members of the study panel “appear to have conflicts of interest and may benefit from EPA’s decision not to conduct further investigation or impose regulatory conditions,” he wrote.

EPA’s failure to regulate the injection of fluids into gas wells “may result in danger to public health and safety,” Wilson continued, noting that fracking “can also create new pathways for methane migration into aquifers containing good quality ground water.”

Beyond the dangers to Colorado residents, Wilson predicted that EPA’s “flawed analysis” would open the floodgates for the gas drilling industry, who no longer had to concern themselves with drinking water contamination. Sure enough, Congress (and Dick Cheney) used the EPA’s 2004 report to shape the Energy Policy Act, which exempted gas drillers from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. This public health abomination became known as the Halliburton loophole.
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It didn’t take long for the scientific community to raise the alarm about the dangers of all these chemicals in drinking water supplies. Theo Colborn, a Colorado resident and a nationally recognized expert on the effects of poisons on the human endocrine system, has identified 171 products composed of 245 chemicals used in fracking fluids. Close to 90 percent of the volatile chemicals cause irritation to the skin, eye, sinuses, nose, throat, lungs, and stomach and cause effects on the brain and nervous system ranging from headaches, blackouts, memory loss, confusion, fatigue or exhaustion, and permanent neuropathies, she told a congressional panel in 2007. More than half can cause disorders to the cardiovascular, kidney, reproductive and immune systems.
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Do we really want this toxic cocktail pouring into our drinking water? Congress doesn’t seem to mind; it ignored Colborn’s warnings. And in the years since, politicians from both parties have pushed the gas companies’ fracking mission with an evangelical fervor, using their full voice to convince the world that America is the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. Most congressional members of panels reviewing studies are associated with the industry. Oklahoma, a major gas drilling state, illustrates this sordid policy. The state’s Republican senators, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, have spent their political careers defending gas drilling, always pressuring EPA to stay clear of their pet industries. In return, the drilling industries have rewarded them handsomely. As a result, in Oklahoma and other states, the “mystery liquids” of toxic gas and oil drilling wastes continue to contaminate the nation’s waters.
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Nationwide, the mania for gas well drilling has simply overwhelmed state officials. New Mexico, for instance, has 99,000 gas wells but only eighteen inspectors. How can they possibly safeguard the state’s drinking water?
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While some elected officials pay lip service to protecting the public health, it’s hard to be convinced by such expressions of good faith. “We have a supply of gas that can last America one hundred years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy,” President Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union speech. “I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk. We don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.”

Given the Washington establishment’s history—and his own—Obama’s promises for health and safety did not sound sincere. He made no effort to get rid of the Halliburton loophole, so fracking fluids are
still
(unbelievably) exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. And as his EPA prepares another study of fracking and drinking water, gas industry lobbyists and their congressional clients are adding more pressure to simply confirm the results of the morally bankrupt 2004 study.

In this gold-rush climate, it’s hard to imagine drinking water advocates getting anything like a fair hearing. Senator Inhofe, long a fiery booster of the petrochemical industry, has cautioned the EPA not to use outside experts “who have been longtime critics of hydraulic fracturing.” When the EPA announced in December 2011 that they had linked fracking to water contamination near Pavilion, Wyoming, Inhofe described the findings as “offensive.”
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So here we are: once again giant corporations are acting with impunity, muscling local officials and members of Congress to nullify environmental regulations. Just as banks considered “too big to fail” wrecked the lives of millions of Americans, the hucksters in the gas industry are moving fast into the country’s farm fields. They dig for gas and petroleum and poison the drinking water and air. People living near gas wells—many of them poor, many of them bought off by companies waving fistfuls of cash for drilling rights—now find themselves living in sacrifice zones. They are the first victims of gas drilling: if they detect bad smells or their drinking water catches fire, they complain to state and EPA officials, but these officials have already made their allegiance clear, and their allegiance is not to the victims of poisoned water wells.

The upshot of all this is that today there are more than a thousand cases of fracking-related water contamination in thirty-four states, and documented cases of both human harm and severe health effects on wildlife and farm animals. In Colorado alone, where drilling increased by 50 percent between 2003 and 2008, there were more than fifteen hundred fracking spills.
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In Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, fracking wastes contain dozens of compounds of unknown toxicity, including arsenic, barium, and strontium. Yet gas drillers in Pennsylvania still dump these radioactive wastes into rivers that provide drinking water for more than 16 million people.
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These crimes take place in part because gas drillers are literally beyond the reach of both state and federal governments.

In Wyoming, a small farmer named John Fenton has twenty-four gas wells on his farm, and his drinking water is full of poisons, including drilling fluids, drilling muds, and high levels of the cancer-causing benzene. Since the contamination, Fenton’s property has lost half of its value; he has to buy drinking water, though he still bathes in the contaminated water. Around his community, he has seen people with “a lot of neurological problems, neuropathy, seizures, people losing their sense of smell, sense of taste. People with their arms and legs going numb.”

Local officials, meanwhile, continue to tell Fenton his water is potable. When Fenton persuaded the EPA to test his water and investigate the fracking of gas wells under his land, the agency agreed with him: fracking had poisoned his water.

The political response to this evidence was predictable. House Republicans held a public meeting on the Fenton water testing case, but when the “public” actually showed up—in the form of Josh Fox, the producer of
Gasland
, a documentary on the devastation caused by natural gas drilling—the elected officials had Fox arrested.
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In May 2012, the Obama administration proposed regulations requiring drillers to reveal the composition of their fracking chemicals thirty days before they blasted the underground deposits of oil and gas with those chemicals. Once again, industry pressure diluted the effort, and lobbyists for ExxonMobil and other drillers convinced the White House to reverse the regulation. The drillers would name their fracking chemicals only
after
they completed their work.
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