Pa. Dept. of Agriculture Says Frack Water Didn't Kill Calves

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

October 6, 2011 | 2:00 PM

Last week we wrote about a farmer in Tioga County who lost 8 out of 11 calves this spring, after the herd came in contact with frack water. The farmer, Carol Johnson, told us that in 56 years of farming, she’s never lost more than 2 calves a year. Johnson believes there’s a connection between the dead calves and the contaminated wastewater.
She sent two bodies to Penn State for a necropsy. We haven’t heard back from the veterinarian who examined the cows, but Johnson says E. coli bacteria are listed as the cause of death on both reports.
We did hear back from the Department of Agriculture, which had instituted a quarantine of the cows last year. Johnson’s herd wandered into a spill of contaminated water after the fluid leaked from a holding pond. Department spokesperson Samantha Krepps says the necropsies concluded that the deaths were not related to the frack water. The Department did not do the actual necropsies, but did examine the results. Krepps says the Department does monitor quarantines.

“Animal Health visits the various premises we have under quarantine as our schedules allow and also based on our perception that there may be a compliance issue. We do a risk analysis and perform compliance checks when we are in the area of a quarantined premise preforming other investigations or inspections or as the risk analysis indicates.”