Krancer Strikes A Chilly Tone In EPA Dimock Letter

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

Ever since he took office, Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Krancer has been wary of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Again and again,he’s chided the EPA and other federal organizations for getting involved in issues he thinks should be regulated by Pennsylvania.
Now, as the EPA weighs an effective override of a major DEP decision – delivering water to residents of Dimock, Susquehanna County, after the state told Cabot Oil and Gas it could stop providing potable fluids – Krancer has fired off another derisive letter.
In a missive dated January 5, Krancer keeps a polite, civil tone, but makes it clear he thinks the EPA has no idea what it’s talking about, when it comes to methane migration in Dimock. “Based on my conversations with you it was clear the EPA is really at the very early stages of its learning curve with respect to Dimock,” he writes, calling the federal agency’s grasp of the facts, and DEP’s enforcement actions, “rudimentary.”
Krancer goes on to question the EPA’s recent preliminary discovery of fracking fluid in a Wyoming aquifer. (Read the full letter after the jump.)

The EPA is currently considering whether to deliver to residents of Dimock whose water has been contaminated by methane migration. Up until December, Cabot Oil and Gas had been providing water to the dozen families, in accordance with a legal agreement it had reached with DEP, under the Rendell Administration. In November, the department allowed Cabot to stop deliveries, after the company had fulfilled all its requirements.
Here’s Krancer’s full letter:

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