"On the Education of a ‘Fracking Neophyte" by Peter Davies

Basically I am someone who favors energy independence. I would love someone to install an electricity-generating windmill on the hill behind my house, and I am impressed by the dedication of neighbors who have installed solar panels, though I doubt that we get enough sun here to make it economically viable. So when, a few years ago, I first heard about the local drilling for gas, my thought was “what a good idea, and how fortunate we are to be over a gas deposit”. I could not understand how anyone could be opposed: after all, sink a pipe and up comes clean, natural gas.

Thus the past few weeks of reading what is happening to our area has come as a shock and a rude awakening. As many who live in the areas surrounding Ithaca, I discover by looking at the gas lease maps available on the web that I am surrounded by land that has been leased for gas drilling. I’m sure that these neighbors thought like I used to: it is perfectly safe, you stand a chance of getting rich (I am told by more than one landowner that the leasing agents gave figures to land-owners of $40,000 per month), and the operation is perfectly benign, so what’s the harm?

WRONG! Unlike my naïve original assumptions, drilling involves more than a simple hole in the ground. And I find that many of my neighbors are unaware that it’s possible for this drilling to take place in their back yard, unaware of the dangers to which we are all likely to be exposed. So to that end I would like to list what this drilling involves.

• Drilling a single well involves the creation of a 3-5 acre industrial site, with 140-ft tall rigs, industrial-scale noise, floodlights and incessant truck deliveries 24/7 for several months. Land will be cleared and leveled, waste water holding ponds created as needed. One site may have many wells. Even after drilling is finished, thumping compressors burning diesel at 150 gal/hr are audible for miles, and the periodic venting of fumes containing the carcinogen benzene, pollutes the air downwind.
• The drilling goes to the Marcellus shale layer about 3000 thousand feet down in our area, and then horizontally for almost a mile. Millions of gallons of water, containing a toxic brew of chemicals, are injected into that hole under high pressure, to split the shale and release the gas. This process is called “hydrofracking”. Drilling companies do not reveal their proprietary chemical mix, but many of the known ingredients are poisonous, cancer causing, or hormone disrupters. The first “fracking” takes about 1500 truckloads of water and chemicals; a single well may be fracked many times over several years. Successive frackings usually involve successively more liquid.
• What goes down must come up: much of this fracking fluid comes back up the well-shaft and is pumped into acre-sized, plastic-lined, holding ponds on the surface. Not only does this fluid contain the toxic chemicals that were pumped into the well, but any compounds that were previously entrapped in the shale, such as salt (to six times sea water concentration) and radioactivity (to 1000 times the level considered unsafe). This fluid may be left on site for some period, and in our rainy climate can readily overflow contaminating the surface water. Out in the arid west they let the water evaporate to decrease the volume: fat chance of no rain here.
• This fluid is supposed to be removed for treatment, but there is no way to completely decontaminate this witch’s brew. Some has been trucked to sewage treatment plants, but sewage plants are designed to deal with organic waste, (and phosphorous – from detergents – in the most sophisticated plants). They cannot decontaminate salts, petroleum products, or radioactivity. Expert engineers recommend that sewage plants refuse the fracking waste, which corrodes sewage station pumps and can quickly destroy a treatment facility. A few industrial treatment plants have been built, but current capacity is thousands of times too small. In Pennsylvania, where treated fracking waste is discharged into rivers, industries downstream have found their pumps fouled by the stuff that can’t be removed. The only remedy was to increase the ratio of good water to treated waste water in the stream flow. Some remedy that is!
• As the fluid is pumped down and returns to the surface it has the possibility to escape laterally from the well shaft into the ground water that we all depend on, not only as well-water for rural homes, but as the sources of water in the watersheds that supply of Ithaca, and of course Cayuga Lake. Once an aquifer is contaminated it is impossible to clean it up: the contaminants are with us always. The drilling companies will assure us that such accidents will not happen, but it is a fact that in other areas 2-8% of the wells in any given area have leaked toxins into the ground water, leading to contaminated water supplies for homes and fish-kills in creeks. Even dishwashing machines have become corroded on contact with the diluted fluid. A landowner in PA who had baseline tests showing “perfect” water prior to drilling, now has contamination with arsenic at 2,600 times and benzene at 44 times the federal limit.
• As part of the fracking process the underground rock is split. Some of these splits may run vertically leading to the methane in natural gas leaking out of the surface. While methane from pond-mud and cows is benign because of the dilution in open air, when methane flows into houses it is toxic leading to a range of health problems; and that doesn’t even include any radioactive gas that may also escape. In Dimock PA, 73 miles from Ithaca, on New Year’s Day 2009, leaking methane caused a water well to blow up. The offending party, Cabot Gas, took 11 months to supply the poor resident with bottled water! So far, Cabot drilling and fracking has caused methane gas to migrate into 13 wells in a 9 square-mile area. The homeowners, who lost the good, sweet water from their wells, have been without water for nearly a year. On November 4th, the PA DEP finally ordered Cabot to do something about the situation.
• What is unbelievable is that the gas drilling companies are largely immune from environmental protection laws: they do not have to abide by any laws protecting the quality of our water or air, meet the same standards for handling toxic waste as other entities. They can pollute and currently there is almost nothing that you or I can do about it.
• What if you have no water, or the value of your house drops to close to nothing (as it might with no usable water)? If your water becomes contaminated by compounds that were entrapped in the rock (and therefore “natural”) you have no right to sue. The gas-drilling companies are all-powerful: you have no rights! If your well is fouled with methane, you will be advised to drink bottled water and shower with the windows open!

  It has been decided that the water supply for New York City is too crucial for gas-drilling to take place in the New York City watershed (see opinion earlier in the Ithaca Journal). But we who live Upstate can be sacrificed! It matters not if the water supply for Ithaca, or for our Finger Lakes, or for the Delaware River watershed and Chesapeake Bay become contaminated! And if our aquifers become contaminated that contamination could persist for decades, or even centuries – nobody knows. Water is our most valuable resource. But we have sold our birthright to clean water, if not for a “mess of pottage”, for a mess of fracking fluid!

  One of my neighbors said sadly, “But what can you do?” My answer is fight like hell for your right to clean water and clean air. Become informed: start with Shaleshock.org and Propublica.org (gas drilling); contact every official that you can think of, from the Governor on down in the state, the NY Department of Environmental Conservation, your federal officials, the EPA, and national environmental organizations; attend every hearing, information session or meeting; attend every protest rally; and donate to Shaleshock.org, who are leading the fight. Make yourself heard, if only by your presence. Maybe we can convince our regulators that hydrofracking is just too dangerous for our environment, as results elsewhere show it to be. We must convince them. Otherwise we either have to accept contaminated homes and seriously compromised health, physically fight, or leave our beloved Finger Lakes for good. Act now! Time is of the essence!

  Peter Davies
  Town of Dryden