Alert! Your Water May Become Irreversibly Polluted!
ALERT: YOUR WATER MAY BECOME IRREVERSIBLY POLLUTED!
BLOGGER: STEPHANIE LOW
When my good friend Debbie Heiser asked me to write this blog, my first response, as always, was…no, no, focus on saving the environment… or become ineffective…we have so little time…and on and on. Until it suddenly dawned on me what a tremendous opportunity this is to do precisely that, to tell a BIG bunch of people exactly what’s happening just under our radar, and if we’re lucky, to raise such a public stink about it that it will “drive the devils back to hell,” in the words of the Liberian women who unseated their tyrannical leader Charles Taylor by sheer resolve and their determination to survive.
And that’s where we’re at–on the survival brink–only most of us are unaware of the massive disaster bearing down on us. Most of my smart, environmentally informed NY friends haven’t a clue about the threat that natural gas drilling in New York State’s Marcellus Shale is, much less what it could mean to us. So unless you live in that area (the southeastern tier of NYS), or have a home in Pennsylvania, or speak often with people from devastated communities in Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, or Ohio, prepare to be surprised, shocked, outraged, and maybe even mobilized and activated.
If you live in New York State, you need to know that we’re at major risk of losing not just our legally unfiltered drinking water (the best in the country, along with only 3-4 other areas of similar size), but our water to bathe in, wash our vegetables in, water our cropland, splash around the open summer hydrants in, water our parks and potted plants in, and on and on.
And if you’re a Pennsylvanian and use the great Monongahela for your tap water, you’ve already been warned to drink and cook with bottled water. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette headlined last November 17th, “Mon River Solids a Threat to Machinery but Not Health.” (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08322/928571-113.stm ) I wonder how many people laughed at the transparently political claim that pollutants able to damage machinery would leave human bodies unharmed. I laughed—an outraged laugh to be sure—but then I don’t live in Pittsburgh.
The consequences of such a loss, were it irrevocable –and according to the Post-Gazette, “Water treatment facilities aren’t set up to filter out [these] contaminants” – boggles the mind. We’ve never had to contemplate this kind of disaster, so all its ramifications aren’t immediately apparent, but the potential cost of importing all our water makes our current deficit, again, laughable. Then again, NYC alone uses more than 1.1 billion gallons of water daily. New York State population is twice NYC’s—how in the world could that much water be imported? Water is life; polluted water is no water and that’s death.
So, before going on to quote how and why this natural gas drilling technology creates death, I want to provide a little background on why we’re talking about it at all in NYS. I first heard about it last summer, before the financial meltdown, when natural gas developers such as Chesapeake Energy were moving in fast to buy up mineral rights from impoverished landowners in the Marcellus Shale area. The Marcellus Shale is a northeastern multi-state underground geological formation lying partially in the southeastern tier of NYS. It contains largely untapped natural gas deposits, untapped because they were economically inaccessible until our old friends Halliburton invented a technique called hydraulic fracturing–or fracking, in the vernacular. Today fracking is used for nine out of 10 natural gas wells in the United States.
Briefly, this process shoots vast amounts of water, sand and chemicals several miles underground to fracture the rock and let the gas rise to the surface. “When the gas surfaces, so does the water—laden with natural toxins, including suspected cancer-causing compounds” such as heavy metals and radiation from deep within the earth. What’s worse, added to the shale’s toxins are those injected with the fracking fluids, now returned to the surface, where the tainted water lies in open, unlined waste pits, allowing the toxins to be carried by air as far as 200 miles away. (http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=705332 )
It’s claimed that the chemicals are so diluted as to be no threat to public health, but “six-tenths of one percent of two million gallons of drilling water still equals 10,000 gallons of toxic chemicals—and that’s just from one well.” (http://www.propublica.org/feature/new-yorks-gas-rush-poses-environmental-threat-722/ ) “The US Department of Energy lists [this] water from gas drilling as among the most toxic of any oil industry byproduct.” (http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=705332 )
If you’re wondering how these contaminants might affect our bodies, read the 2007 testimony before the House Committee on Oversight given by the expert Dr. Theo Colborn, whose credentials include a “B.S. in pharmacy from Rutgers University, an M.A. in fresh water ecology from Western State College of Colorado, and a PhD in zoology, with distributed minors in epidemiology, toxicology, and water chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.” She knows what she’s talking about. (http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/natural_gas/colburn_testimony_071025.pdf )
“We are certain of one thing,” she testified. “Even at extremely low levels one would not want to drink the majority of the chemicals on the list.” Reading her testimony on the effects of the known 265 chemicals in the drilled water—and many are unknown, claimed as “proprietary secrets” by the gas developers—you’re immediately clear that you never want to have to worry if they’re going to issue from your tap.
Or you can read a much more personal account of just one of over 800 documented reports of “sickened people and animals, clouded…drinking water…flammable wells.” http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE52C07920090313?pageNumber=3&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true Pat Farnelli talks about her children’s diarrhea and vomiting, her own stomach cramps so excruciating that “It felt like an appendicitis attack.” Others, who can barely afford bottled water for themselves, watch their animals endure projectile vomiting and lose their hair.
The fact that this is happening in Pennsylvania is important to notice because the NYS DEC claims that NYS wouldn’t be subject to all the horrible environmental and public health effects seen in western states such as NM, CO and TX because the Marcellus is geologically different from ones out West. But Pennsylvania sits on the same Marcellus Shale that NYS sits on—the effects would be the same.
An even more frightening episode involving fracking toxins happened “in the summer of 2008 when a Colorado nurse almost died from exposure while treating a gas field worker whose clothing had been doused with the chemicals.” She suffered “from heart, lung, and liver failure, plus kidney damage and blurred vision.” http://www.ombwatch.org/node/3847 )
Although human health effects include cluster illnesses and death, drilling is currently permitted within 150 feet of New Yorkers’ homes and private water wells, and within 50 feet of streams. Toxins from the drilling process leach into wells, aquifers, watersheds and rivers, contaminating the water supply along with land for local farming.
But one of the worst aspects of fracking isn’t immediately apparent—it’s the immense amounts of water required. Each well’s ten possible fracking events requires 1-5 million gallons of fresh water. That’s a possible 50 million gallons of water for one well–and Chesapeake Energy, the major player in the Marcellus Shale, “is planning to significantly increase its Marcellus Shale drilling activity during 2009-2010,” according to its website http://www.chk.com/Operations/Unconventional/Pages/MarcellusShale.aspx). This translates into thousands of wells. Multiply each by 50,000,000 gallons.
Where is all this water going to come from?? The UN recently reported the current and looming water shortages around the world. It warned that, aside from creating “climate change refugees…water shortages are having another unusual effect: they are beginning to constrain economic growth…in parts of China, India…and the western United States…The world will have “substantially more people” living in urban and coastal areas vulnerable to scarce water resources.” (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090312.WATER12/TPStory/Environment )
In other words, we are looking into a near future when water has become the new oil, and yet many of our state officials are willing to officiate over the permanent loss of billions upon billions of gallons of one of most precious natural resources, in return for the very illusory fool’s gold of immediate tax revenues–what’s been estimated to be about $1 billion a year.
This doesn’t even begin to address the immediate fiscal fact that if NYC, with just half the state’s population, loses its legally unfiltered water supply, law mandates that it must build a filtration plant. Cost: $27 billion. (If you want to know where that number comes from, multiply the $3.1 billion Croton filtration plant, which supplies 10% of NYC’s water, by the remaining 90%, which flows to us from the Delaware watershed. Voilà–$27 billion! Not a good bargain.) http://boogiedowner.blogspot.com/2008/11/croton-filtration-plant-to-cost-31.html How the rest of the state will get potable water is anybody’s guess. And the future is visible out West. (http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE52A04P20090311)
All this doesn’t include the worse news that we don’t necessarily have the filtering technology to eliminate all the fracking chemicals, some of which the industry refuses to disclose as “proprietary,” like the Coke recipe. (Coke, however, does us the favor of listing its ingredients on the side of the bottle.) Filtering tainted water would be, at best, very slow, very expensive, and very possibly ineffective. Given that scenario, I’d consider moving out of the state. But a lot of people don’t have that choice. And then there’s the question of where to move to? Over half the United States is under consideration for this kind of devastating gas drilling.
Other effects of drilling include incessant truck traffic, spills, rampant noise pollution, the destruction of forests and wildlife habitats, and the degradation of air quality. On many drilling sites, frequent accidental gas fires have burned for weeks. In short, New York’s bucolic hiking, hunting, and fishing areas—an economic resource for tourism–would become burnt-out industrial sites. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQOiJ3Ne7j0, http://www.endeavornews.com/news/2008/1004/news/011.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxNpz41wSOg&feature=related)
There’s another aspect to losing fresh water throughout the state: over the last two centuries, rural areas provided much of urban food. Very soon, as we’re beginning to experience now, food from great distances will become too expensive to import. The rural areas that would see the most extensive gas drilling would not only have lost enough water to make food production difficult-to-impossible and expensive—it would have lost uncalculated acres of land to drilling and drilling rig devastation, which leaves the land so polluted that it becomes unreclamably barren. Losing our water to gas drilling now means losing our local food when faster-than-expected global warming creates local shortages. That’s in the foreseeable future.
Have you heard enough? Are you scared? Are you scared enough to write a letter to Governor Paterson and ask him for protection against this uncalculated risk? And get all your friends to do it too? He could Just Say No to gas drilling, but he needs to hear from a HUGE number of constituents to out-shout the voice of the natural gas industry, which stands to reap billions from the rape of New York. Meanwhile New York faces a budget deficit that is drawing the attention of all legislators and the press and the public as well.
Well, here’s a letter, all written, stating much of what I’ve just described. Copy and paste it into a Word document, print it out and mail it, signed. Get all your friends to do the same. And when you’ve done that, send a little post back to this blog to let me know you’re on the case. We need to stand together and work together…or else.
Stephanie
NEXT TIME: The Ban(e)-Boone Plan
Governor David A. Paterson
State Capitol
Albany, NY 12224
Dear Governor Paterson:
I oppose natural gas drilling within or near any of New York State’s drinking water supplies and call for a ban on such a practice. This includes but is not limited to the Catskill and Delaware watersheds, which provide 90 percent of the drinking water for over nine million New Yorkers. Such a ban should apply to all local watersheds and ground water sources all over New York State.
Gas drilling in our watersheds and near our aquifers would put our most precious natural resource — clean, pure drinking water — at severe risk of contamination. It will also pollute our air and soil, have negative impacts on people’s health, and increase greenhouse gas emissions.
Governor, the long-term costs of extracting gas from shale far outweigh any short-term economic benefits. I call on you to ban it in New York State. But you can do more than that.
2008 saw a new national record for drilling permits—more than 7100. Over 44 million acres of public lands are being leased for oil and gas development. According to The Wall Street Journal, more rigs are operating in the U.S. than at any point in over two decades. The gas drilling industry is poised to expand its activities throughout the country. We cannot, as a nation, live with the devastation this will present to our air, land, public health, and especially our water. There are tremendous possibilities in the wind and solar industries that need to be addressed and promoted.
I call on you to lead a governors’ initiative to protect every state’s waters from the shortsighted pursuit of drilling money and its citizens from the critical shortages this pursuit will inevitably create. I urge you to join with governors such as Bill Ritter in Colorado, where regulations have been tightened as a result of toxic spills into streams, threatening the Colorado River and the drinking water of nearby municipa-lities. You, as the Governor of an important state, can be the leader we need to bring sanity to a looming crisis masquerading as an economic opportunity. I call on you to be that leader.
Sincerely,
Your Name
Your Organization
123 Your St.
Yousville, YO 12345
Phone: (123)456-7890
Fax: (123)456-7890×123
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