Chemicals In Butler County Drinking Water

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 24, 2012 | 3:11 PM

The AP has more details on a Butler County dust-up over who’s responsible for chemicals discovered in ten families’ drinking water:

A western Pennsylvania woman says state environmental officials refused to do follow-up tests after their lab reported her drinking water contained chemicals that could be from nearby gas drilling.
Janet McIntyre’s is one of at least 10 households in the rural Woodlands community, about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, who complain that recent drilling impacted their water in different ways. She says the chemicals didn’t show up on pre-drill tests.
The Associated Press confirmed that five chemicals that can be associated with natural gas drilling showed up in tests last summer. But the chemicals are also widely used separately in other industries.
Kevin Sunday, a Department of Environmental Protection spokesman, says the low chemical concentrations were not a health risk, and that the contamination may have come from the laboratory.