Pennsylvania

Energy. Environment. Economy.

Department of Energy Pushes for Baseline Water Testing

August 11, 2011 | 2:40 PM
By Susan Phillips

Susan Phillips / WHYY

Brad­ford County res­i­dent Crys­tal Stroud says nearby gas drilling con­t­a­m­i­nated her drink­ing water well. Stroud, like many rural Penn­syl­va­ni­ans, did not have a base­line water test before any gas pro­duc­tion occurred near her property.

Penn­syl­va­nia may be the only state that has no reg­u­la­tions regard­ing pri­vate drink­ing water wells. That means well loca­tion, con­struc­tion, test­ing and treat­ment are all up to the indi­vid­ual landowner. So the Depart­ment of Energy’s Shale Gas Pro­duc­tion Subcommittee’s rec­om­men­da­tions on water qual­ity test­ing could change things for the more than 3 mil­lion Penn­syl­va­nia res­i­dents who rely on pri­vate wells.

Pres­i­dent Obama cre­ated the sub­com­mit­tee to advise D.O.E Sec­re­tary Steven Chu on how to improve the envi­ron­men­tal and pub­lic health impacts of shale gas drilling. The draft report released today rec­om­mends state and local gov­ern­ments adopt manda­tory test­ing and report­ing of water qual­ity before any shale gas pro­duc­tion activ­ity takes place. It also advises mak­ing those tests public.

But those tests can run between $500 and $1000 dol­lars. So, who pays for them?

The for­mer head of Pennsylvania’s Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Kath­leen McGinty says the subcommittee’s assump­tion is that indus­try will pay for those tests. McGinty is a mem­ber of the 6-person sub­com­mit­tee. She served as the DEP sec­re­tary under for­mer Gov­er­nor Ed Rendell.

The sub­com­mit­tee report says few if any doc­u­mented cases of frack­ing have caused water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. But the report does not rule out the drilling process itself as a poten­tial haz­ard. The dif­fi­culty of prov­ing a con­nec­tion lies in the lack of base­line test­ing, espe­cially in Penn­syl­va­nia. I reported on a case of bar­ium poi­son­ing in Brad­ford County for WHYY, where res­i­dent Crys­tal Stroud says drilling is to blame. But the lack of a base­line test before any pro­duc­tion activ­ity occurred means the source of Stroud’s drink­ing water well con­t­a­m­i­na­tion may remain a mystery.

 

Comments

  • http://eatthebabies.com/ Brady­Dale

    This is, mostly, great news, but… I don’t fully trust the tests if the drillers hire the labs. An inde­pen­dent body should be set up to take money for tests from drillers and do the hir­ing, so the drillers can’t hire labs that (wink, wink, nudge, nude) hap­pen to find traces of petro­chem­i­cals and other tox­ics in the base­line samples.

  • Bran­don Some­thing in Clyde, PA

    Here’s the thing about frack­ing. We have a con­t­a­m­i­nated well, we’re not any­where near a land­fill, or any other excuse you can fly to try and exalt the mar­cel­lus ini­ta­tive. We have an obscene amount of Bar­ium and Stron­tium in our water, that wasn’t there prior to Atlas Energy set­ting up shop a few hun­dred yards away (Clyde, PA). Well, it’s Atlas Energy now, it was some other com­pany a few months ago, when faced with doubt, change your name I sup­pose. And while the ini­tia­tive likes to claim that they con­tain the chem­i­cal amal­gam that spews forth from these frack­ing oper­a­tions, Atlas Energy was spray­ing it on the ground to keep the dust down from their trucks, yes, the exact same liq­uid that was col­lected. Our well is 40 years old, used to be flaw­less, and now it’s dan­ger­ous, as is the ground, the air, and the fruit in our orchard.

    Another delight­ful thing that Atlas Energy did was spew the chem­i­cal con­tacts of their rig, into the air. My father was down near our prop­erty line when this hap­pened, and he was caught in the mist that came from the rig, and since then, has to keep return­ing to a der­ma­tol­o­gist to get pre­can­cer­ous growths removed from his face.

    Atlas refuses to rec­tify the sit­u­a­tion by replac­ing the well, they want to pay my par­ents off and hope that they shut up and go away. We live in a town­ship that’s fairly cor­rupt (prob­a­bly why Atlas set up shop here), and the city water sup­ply, is far from clean, and now we have no choice but to use the less of two evils. Before frac­ing, we had the option of clean water. Atlas doesn’t return calls, doesn’t pay my par­ents per their con­tract, and is killing them.

    And atlas loves to run their equip­ment in the dead of the night. I can only imag­ine what takes place that they don’t want peo­ple to see, when they have no reser­va­tions about destroy­ing liveli­hoods in the daylight.

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