Future oil and gas regulations to focus on public health issues

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.

August 14, 2015 | 5:26 PM

$Skylar McEvoy holds up a sign at a rally in Butler, Pa. She and her family moved after they say fracking polluted their water. Her mother Kim says the DOH was no help.$

Susan Phillips / StateImpact Pennsylvania

Skylar Sowatskey holds up a sign at a rally in Butler, Pa. She and her family moved after they say fracking polluted their water. Her mother Kim says the DOH was no help.

The Department of Environmental Protection says the agency is developing a new set of oil and gas regulations to address public health concerns. DEP Secretary John Quigley told reporters on Wednesday of the planned regulatory package during a press call outlining the Department’s latest round of updates to Chapter 78, the section of the Pennsylvania Code that governs construction and operation of oil and gas sites.

“We’re looking in part at public health protections because that’s certainly one of the areas of biggest concern,” said Quigley. “We want to make sure we are doing everything we can to protect health and the environment and given the time frame it takes to get regulations enacted, it’s clear to us that we need to begin immediately on the next set of regulatory proposals.”

Quigley said those rules will likely be proposed by the end of the year.

Public health advocates have long been pushing to be heard in Harrisburg regarding shale gas drilling issues, but had felt rebuked by the Corbett Administration.

StateImpact Pennsylvania reported last year that Department of Health workers were silenced on drilling-related health inquiries. One veteran employee told StateImpact she was instructed not to return phone calls from residents who expressed health concerns about natural gas development.

StateImpact also reported on a list of fracking “buzzwords” that if mentioned by a caller, the DOH employees were not allowed to speak to them. Health department employees also reported getting reprimanded for discussing anything related to shale gas at public meetings.

Documents released earlier this year from the Pennsylvania Department of Health on fracking-related health complaints revealed a lack of follow-through and inaccurate record-keeping. The telephone logs, which span four years from 2011 to 2015, were gained through a Right-to-Know request.

Those documents include about 87 separate complaints from residents and workers who feared exposure to fracking chemicals and were looking for advice from the Department of Health. But notes taken by agency workers show little information was collected from patients. The documents also revealed a lack of coordination between the DEP and the Department of Health regarding the complaints.

Both environmentalists and public health workers have met recently with Wolf Administration officials and staff from both the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Health. DEP Secretary John Quigley said the agencies are working together on the new regulatory proposals.

“We are in regular contact with the Department of Health,” he said. “As recently as [Tuesday] the staff of the two agencies met. Governor Wolf has expressed his strong support for a health registry, and it requires our agencies to work together in a collaborative way.”

Efforts to speak to Department of Health officials for this story were not successful.