Environmental Group Says EPA's Dimock Results Show Fracking Polluted Water

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.

April 9, 2012 | 11:59 AM

Susan Phillips / StateImpactPA

Protesters urge EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to intervene in Dimock's water woes last December.

Water Defense, the anti-fracking environmental group formed by actor Mark Ruffalo, disputes the EPA’s conclusions about Dimock’s water tests. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency released water test results from 20 households in the Susquehanna County township. The EPA says analysis of those tests reveal the water is safe to drink.
But Claire Sandberg, of Water Defense, disagrees with the EPA’s conclusion. She says those very same tests show contamination.

“The preliminary results EPA Region 3 has released so far show that 20 percent of wells tested contain dangerous concentrations of methane. When the water that flows into your pipes has levels of methane that high, you are essentially living inside a bomb that could explode at any moment. And that is not safe.”

Sandberg says the evidence shows fracking by Cabot Oil and Gas, contaminated Dimock’s water supply. The EPA decided in January to test 60 private water wells in Dimock after the state Department of Environmental Protection cleared Cabot from providing free water to residents. They released the first 11 test results in March, which showed higher than normal levels of arsenic in two wells. The EPA continues to provide water to three households in Dimock, but they say nothing in the tests so far indicates the water would be unsafe to drink. The agency says their role is not to determine how contaminants entered the water, only to test whether or not the water is safe to drink.