Why DEP Cut Chesapeake's Fine In Half

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.

February 10, 2012 | 2:16 PM

The Post-Gazette takes a look at why the Department of Environmental Protection scaled back the fine it issued against Chesapeake Energy this week:

The fine for the most high-profile incident of the three — last April’s well blowout in Bradford County — was $190,000. Of that amount, $67,000 was to reimburse DEP for its costs. That’s less than half of the $400,000 fine DEP’s staff first proposed for the incident last year.
The reason for cutting the fine by more than half, according to DEP spokesman Kevin Sunday, is that initial testing indicated that three homeowners’ wells may have been impacted by the blowout. Documents show that they had elevated levels of chloride, barium, strontium, iron and manganese, and there were spikes in surface samples near where the flowback fluid spilled during the blowout.
“But our original estimates were higher before the independent site characterization study was filed,” Mr. Sunday said.
That study, paid for by Chesapeake and filed last fall, determined the homeowner with the worst contaminated water had elevated levels of chloride, barium and strontium, but had a problem specific to his well and unrelated to the spill — even though Chesapeake had already agreed to help treat the water.