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The Lens: Suing oil and gas interests to save the coast: author John Barry weighs in

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Suing oil and gas interests to save the coast: author John Barry weighs in

OPINION By John Barry, Contributor August 22, 2013 11:36am 5 Comments

Dr. Terry McTigue / NOAA
Oil service canals in the Barataria Basin show the ravages of an industry that has given much and taken even more from Louisiana.
The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East has filed a controversial lawsuit seeking to extract a settlement from oil, gas and pipeline interests in compensation for the industry’s long-term damage to Louisiana’s fragile and rapidly collapsing coast. The administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal claims that the Flood Protection Authority lacked the authority to file the suit and wants it withdrawn on grounds that it is hostile to oil and gas interests and possibly inimical to other state efforts to secure funding for coastal restoration.

In recent days, author and Flood Protection Authority vice chairman John Barry has spoken in defense of the suit before a joint legislative committee and the Baton Rouge Press Club. His remarks have been edited and updated to include developments at a Wednesday meeting of the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, of which Barry is a member:
What we’re doing is simple: We want to save Louisiana, at least part of it.

First, the background:
We are an independent board, created by a constitutional amendment, which passed after Katrina with 81 percent of the vote. The amendment envisioned a board of experts who would try to prevent another such catastrophe – a board of experts independent of political influence.

A special nominating committee was created, including deans of engineering schools in the state, representatives of engineering and scientific societies and good-government groups.
This committee sends nominees to the governor, who must appoint someone from the nominees, and the senate confirms.

To guarantee we see the big picture, that we are not parochial, the law requires us to have four members from outside our jurisdiction.

Our board has expertise in engineering, meteorology, coastal science, oceans and the history of the levees. From North Carolina we have the co-author of the most advanced storm-surge model in the world, from California the head of that state’s flood plain management, and another board member has written textbooks used in college courses. I have the least technical training of anyone on the board, but I routinely participate in working groups at the National Academies of Science. I am the only non-scientist ever to win an honor given by the National Academies for contributions to water-related knowledge. I also serve on advisory boards at MIT’s Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals and Johns Hopkins’ School of Public Health Center for Refugees and Disaster Relief.

We all take our task very seriously and very personally. Two board members lost everything they owned in Katrina. Several of us know people killed in that storm.

Jindal can be a great governor for the coast – a great governor period – if he steps in, brings everyone together and solves this problem. It might make him the greatest governor in Louisiana’s history.

Flood protection has nothing to do with partisanship, I might add. We are a majority Republican board, including one vocal Tea Party member and at least one other member who leans that way.

With unanimous support, we filed the lawsuit seeking compensation from oil, gas and pipeline interests because we don’t want other people to die in a hurricane or have their homes and livelihoods destroyed.

Those who created the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East wanted to insulate us from political pressure – exactly the kind of pressure exerted on us by the governor and others in the past month.

We have gotten criticism from public figures but a lot of support from the public. We believe the public understands. The more people hear what we’re doing and why, the more support we have.
The first point I want to make is that no one has criticized the substance of our lawsuit. Let me repeat: No one has criticized the substance of our lawsuit.

PROBLEM UNIQUELY OUR OWN

Louisiana isn’t like any other state. Twelve thousand square miles of Louisiana – all the way north to the Arkansas border and our entire coast – was formed by sediment coming from the Mississippi River. We are not like Texas or Mississippi, and certainly not like Maine and Oregon. We have no rocky cliffs on the coast. We have mud held together by roots. And that mud is melting into the ocean.

Our board has never said oil, gas and pipeline companies are solely responsible for the loss of nearly 2,000 square miles of our state in the past 80 years or so. There are multiple causes.

It’s the industry which likes to blame one cause – the levees – as the source of all problems, but it isn’t just levees. If it was, the western part of the state wouldn’t have lost any land at all. The western part of the state is outside the river’s flood plain. Even if there were no levees, floodwater from the river would never reach that area. If levees were the only problem, out west they would have no land loss. Instead, they have plenty of it.

In fact, the multiple causes for land loss include levees, six dams in Montana and the Dakotas which retain almost a third of the sediment that used to flow down the river, benefits for the shipping industry, such as the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the lethal Mississippi River Gulf Outlet – and the oil and gas industry.

The fact that there are multiple causes does not mean, however, that an entity responsible for part of the destruction should not be accountable for what it has done.

Let me quote something: “Dredging canals for oil and gas pipelines Š took a toll on the landscape Š Canals and pipelines Š criss-crossed south Louisiana marshes Š The coastal marshes were lost when spoil banks were left randomly throughout the area, drastically altering the natural hydrology Š Saltwater intrusion increased and more land was lost Š Canal dredging has had one of the most dramatic effects on wetland growth and regeneration Š The marsh is unable to regenerate itself. [All of this amounts to] “industrial negligence.”

What I just quoted isn’t from our lawsuit. It’s from the state’s Master Plan for a sustainable coast.
The truth is the truth. Every scientist agrees that the oil and gas industry has done extraordinary damage to our coast. Even the industry concedes it. One U.S. Geological Survey study, a study that included input from industry scientists, concluded that 36 percent of the damage statewide comes from industry. Other estimates put it much higher.

It is also a truth that the industry operated under permits which required them to minimize damage and repair it when they finished. The industry has failed to obey these requirements.

Those are the two fundamental facts which drove us to consider taking legal action. There is a third truth. Everyone on the board has wondered how we can meet our responsibilities. Our job is not simply to operate and maintain a levee system handed to us by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Our job is protecting people’s lives and property.

We just conducted a study of the land bridge extending into Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans East. If that narrow spit of land disappears, the ocean will roar unchecked into the lake and threaten the lives and property of people who have never been threatened before. Reinforcing that alone would cost $1.2 billion.

We don’t have that money. As we look at the tremendous expenses necessary to maintain minimally adequate protection, we see nothing coming in.

One of our critics is quoted as saying: “We have a Master Plan. Let’s give it a chance.” I absolutely agree with that statement. Let’s give it a chance. Nothing we do is at variance with the state’s Master Plan. We want to carry out the Master Plan.

Let me repeat: Nothing we’re doing is inconsistent with the Master Plan. What we’re doing will let us carry out the Master Plan in our area.

Here’s the problem: The Master Plan has no funding.

OVERARCHING DUTY: PROTECTING THE PUBLIC

The Flood Authority board believes that for our jurisdiction we have an absolute duty to pursue this case. If we don’t do it, we see no way to get the money needed to protect the public.

Our case is based on the fact that we are forced to maintain and possibly build more elaborate flood protection defenses because of land loss. The industry’s failure to comply with permits – its failure to do what they voluntarily agreed to do and to obey the law in exchange for taking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the state – has destroyed land.

That land loss means there’s no buffer to block storm surge, and that sends more water pounding against our levees. As the saying goes, the levees protect the people, and the land protects the levees.
The land is disappearing so fast that by 2100, if nothing is done New Orleans will be basically an island. The levees will be beach-front property. Much of the rest of the Louisiana coast will simply cease to exist.

Louisiana law also embodies a concept going back to the Romans called “servitude of drain.” This prohibits one party from increasing the natural flow of water from its property onto another’s. The destruction of land is sending more storm surge pounding against our levees.

We believe the oil and gas industry violated the law, and these violations have endangered the people we are responsible to protect.

Our suit does not ask that the industry restore the entire coast. But they must restore the part of the coast they destroyed. They must fix the part of the problem which they created. That’s all we want: Fix the part they broke.

If some areas are impossible to fix, industry should compensate us so we can upgrade flood protection to take care of the increased risk they caused.

We decided unanimously to file the lawsuit, and we unanimously reaffirmed our decision last week.

We have been called a rogue board, but we first informed Garret Graves of our plans Dec. 4, 2012. Garret is head of the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. He attended the Flood Authority’s executive session Jan. 17. We informed him several more times of our intent to proceed with a lawsuit. We’re an independent, non-political board. We want to work with everyone, but ultimately each of us is responsible to his own conscience, and we did not operate in stealth.

SUIT ATTACKED FROM MANY ANGLES

We have been told we don’t have the authority to sue. We welcome a court challenge to that. You notice for all the talk – and there has been a lot of it – no one has filed for a declaratory judgment against us. They know the court will uphold our authority.

We have been criticized for trying to collect from an industry which was complying with the law at the time it conducted its operations. We believe that they were never in compliance with the law.
We have been criticized on grounds that we are interfering with efforts to get a larger share of federal revenues from offshore drilling. We absolutely support that effort but don’t believe our lawsuit interferes with it. [Louisiana’s U.S.] Sen. Mary Landrieu, the sponsor of that legislation, has said Louisiana should pursue coastal restoration everywhere, including in the courts.

We have been told our suit may interfere with the BP trial. Our attorney checked with the attorney representing the state and was told our suit would not interfere. How could it? The BP trial will be over long before our trial starts. And at Garret’s request we waited until the first phase of the trial was over before filing suit.

We have been told the state has litigation plans of its own, which our lawsuit interferes with. Those plans have been described to us, and in our board’s unanimous opinion our suit does not interfere; in fact it could complement the state’s strategy.

We have been told that we’ll cost the state jobs, but the reality is the oil and gas industry will stay as long as there’s oil and gas here. Look at BP. The state is suing BP. Every parish is suing BP. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against BP. And BP just sued the federal government to be allowed to bid on offshore tracts.

And as far as jobs go, no one talks about the jobs a major coastal restoration effort would create. These are not just construction jobs or transitory jobs. We have the potential to be the world leader in the science and engineering of this kind of work. We are the point of the spear, but every coastal area in the world will be dealing with problems like ours soon. We have the potential to produce great jobs, important jobs. We can create a silicon valley of water-related expertise.

Every one of the criticisms comes down to one thing: politics. But we are currently an independent board, specifically designed to do what politicians will not or cannot do.

They used to say, “The flag of Texaco flies over the Louisiana capitol.” People have to ask themselves, is that still true?

Legally speaking, the Flood Authority’s action involves our jurisdiction only. We are not acting for the state or for any other parish or levee board. Ironically, our jurisdiction has lost much less land than others. Much less.

EVEN INDUSTRY’S FUTURE IS AT STAKE

What’s at stake is the future of Louisiana, the very existence of Louisiana as we know it. Everything is threatened. Our ports are threatened. Our way of life is threatened.

If you hunt anywhere near the coast, where will you hunt? What will you hunt? What happens to all the migratory birds that use our marsh? If you fish, where will you fish? Nearly every species in the gulf depends on the Louisiana marsh for some part of its life cycle. And if you live on the coast, where are you going to live? What will happen to your community? Because you won’t be able to live where you live now.

The U.S. Geological Survey is remapping the coast. They’ve finished only one parish, Plaquemines. They took 31 names off the map. These places no longer exist – 31 names in one parish, gone from the map. Many more names will come off the map as more parishes are mapped.

This lawsuit presents a choice:
Protect the industry from having to live up to its word and obey the law, or protect people’s lives and property from the crawling death of a vanishing shoreline and the violence of a hurricane storm surge. Protect the industry, or protect Louisiana’s way of life.

It’s really that simple.

Nearly everyone in Baton Rouge seems afraid of the oil and gas industry. They never talk about the elephant in the room, about the damage the industry has done to the coast. Our current status as an independent board allowed us to take the action we did. Because of it, the elephant isn’t in the room anymore. Right now it’s stampeding down the street. The issue cannot be ignored any longer.
Too many people in Louisiana, too many things, are threatened.

The industry itself is threatened. Chris John, head of Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, says the industry recognizes the need to “protect critical oil and gas infrastructure from storm surge,” adding that “our viability depends on” the coastal buffer.

The industry wants it fixed, but they want taxpayers to pay for the damage they did, either in taxes or flood insurance rates. If we succeed in getting a bigger share of offshore revenue, we’re getting it from the federal treasury. From taxpayers in Rhode Island and Oregon – and in Louisiana. The industry won’t be paying a penny more. If the money comes from state or parish funds, it comes only from Louisiana taxpayers.

The wealthiest industry in the world wants taxpayers to pay to fix what the industry broke. We say to the industry: Fix what you broke.

I am not against the industry. I recognize it’s enormously important to the state and in the country. I’m proud of our ability to produce gas and oil, to let Americans heat their homes and drive their cars with what we produce. Years ago, I worked for an oil company – one of our defendants. I also applied for and got a job at the American Petroleum Institute, though in the end I didn’t take it because I would have had to give up my writing. But I appreciate the industry for treating me well when I did work for it.

We’re not charging that the industry has done nothing to help. They have done things to help. But they haven’t done enough. The industry isn’t responsible for all the land loss, but it is responsible for some of the land loss. It has to fix the part of the problem it created.

Compared to the size of the industry, the wealthiest in the world, the burden will be small. To Louisiana, the benefit will be enormous.

The Master Plan has no funding.

BP money won’t be enough. Even if we win, our lawsuit won’t be enough either, not even for our area. But if you start putting different funding together, we may get enough – enough to save what can be saved. If we don’t, most of the coast, most of the people who live there, will be gone.
Our board is not the problem. Land loss is the problem, and getting the industry to fix the part of the problem it created will go a long way toward the solution.

TASK FORCE PROPOSED

The governor wants us to withdraw the lawsuit. Last Thursday our board unanimously passed two resolutions. The first affirmed the suit. The second said we’d consider a 45-day pause in the substantive part of the suit in return for a good faith effort to create a task force to address the problem.

A pause was Garret Graves’s idea. We had hoped the CPRA would look upon our proposal as what it was, an olive branch.

We proposed a process that would result in oil being at the table to discuss a resolution to save lives and property – including industry’s own property. Our lawyers had already agreed, in the event of a resolution in this working-group process, to have their fee determined in arbitration with industry – and paid by industry, not taxpayers – in accord with long-established principles of Louisiana law.
No lawyers hijacked this board. The idea came from us. With a task force in place, our lawyers would stand down in accordance with our resolution.

The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) met Wednesday. But apart from my own comments offering this pause – again, a pause which Garret Graves had suggested – there was not a single mention of it in a three-hour meeting, not one. The meeting ended with CPRA voting to oppose the law suit. But they still did not authorize taking legal action against the law suit.
I still have hope for a resolution.

In return for a major contribution from the industry, there are many things the industry wants from the Legislature which I would personally support. This, of course, is not up to me. It’s up to the governor. He’s got tremendous abilities. Whether you agree with all his policies or not, there’s no question that when it comes to the coast he’s been a good governor.

He can be a great governor for the coast – a great governor period – if he steps in, brings everyone together and solves this problem. It might make him the greatest governor in Louisiana’s history.
That’s what I want. I want the governor to be great.

John Barry’s books include “Rising Tide” and, more recently, “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul.” A member of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, he also serves on the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, fracking, natural resource management, oil pollution

CBS News: Fishermen concerned about industry if fracking approved

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http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2013/08/15/nl-fracking-port-au-port-815.html
Posted: Aug 15, 2013 2:40 PM NT Last Updated: Aug 15, 2013 6:02 PM NT

West coast fishermen wary of possible problems

Port au Port Peninsula fishermen voiced concerns at a meeting Wednesday night about the future of their industry if fracking were to be approved near the waters where they fish. About 100 people showed up to the meeting in Lourdes to discuss the possible implications of the process.

Fracking involves injecting chemicals and water into rock at a high pressure in order to extract oil. Terry Tucker, a fisherman in the area, said he doesn’t think fracking is a fool-proof process.

Fishermen on the Port au Port Peninsula are concerned about fracking plans in the area. Fracking is a technique which injects oil, water and chemicals into wells to draw out oil.Fishermen on the Port au Port Peninsula are concerned about fracking plans in the area. “They’re pumping a bunch of chemicals down into the ground, they’re pumping it down into a mile down – no one really knows what goes on down there,” Tucker said.

“This is all just a guess and this is a big chance to take. If things go wrong and there’s no fix, and NASA engineers can’t fix it, and it’s just unfixable. So then this place here just goes – everything goes.”

Tucker said he actually used to work in the fracking industry, but he didn’t like what he saw.

“It’s actually scary when you think of what they were doing because after the job was done, I went over cause I was just there watching, and I grabbed a handful of the Š sand that we put down into the ground, and just dumped on the ground,” he said.

“And when I had Š the sand in my hand, one of the chief engineers ran over to me and said, ‘Get that out of your hand, wash your hands, do you know what’s in that?’ They just dumped it in a field, just in a cattle field, so it seems to me that they weren’t really too concerned about just dumping that stuff into a cattle field and I don’t think they’d be really concerned about dumping that stuff into Bay St. George or Port au Port Bay where I fish.”

Tucker said he would be happy to have more development in the area, but doesn’t think it would be worth the risk to the natural environment.

“I’d love to see development here. I’d love to see companies coming in and bring jobs and bring money and bring everything to the place, but I don’t think it’s worth the chance of destroying something, even if there’s a small, small chance that it could just go to crap,” he said.

“I hope that the government really, really looks into this. I hope they’re not blinded by what some of the oil companies are probably going to offer.”

Black Spruce Exploration is planning to establish fracking wells on the Port au Port Peninsula, pending approvals from government and the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.

Fishermen concerned about industry if fracking approved, West coast fishermen wary of possible problems

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, fracking, natural resource management, tar sands

Scientific American: High Levels of Arsenic Found in Groundwater Near Fracking Sites

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article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=high-levels-of-arsenic-found-in-ground-water-near-fracking-sites

study: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4011724

Natural gas has become a leading source of alternative energy with the advent of techniques to economically extract gas reserves from deep shale formations. Here, we present an assessment of private well water quality in aquifers overlying the Barnett Shale formation of North Texas. We evaluated samples from 100 private drinking water wells using analytical chemistry techniques. Analyses revealed that arsenic, selenium, strontium and total dissolved solids (TDS) exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s Drinking Water Maximum Contaminant Limit (MCL) in some samples from private water wells located within 3 km of active natural gas wells. Lower levels of arsenic, selenium, strontium, and barium were detected at reference sites outside the Barnett Shale region as well as sites within the Barnett Shale region located more than 3 km from active natural gas wells. Methanol and ethanol were also detected in 29% of samples. Samples exceeding MCL levels were randomly distributed within areas of active natural gas extraction, and the spatial patterns in our data suggest that elevated constituent levels could be due to a variety of factors including mobilization of natural constituents, hydrogeochemical changes from lowering of the water table, or industrial accidents such as faulty gas well casings.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, natural resource management, tar sands

The Guardian: A Texan tragedy: Plenty of oil, but no water

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A Texan tragedy: Plenty of oil, but no water, Texan drought sets residents against fracking

By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian

Sunday, August 11, 2013 13:35 EDT

Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.

“The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes,” she said, blinking back tears. “I went: ‘dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind.”

Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.

Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry’s outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.

In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart’s case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking.

The town – a gas station, a community hall and a taco truck – sits in the midst of the great Texan oil rush, on the eastern edge of the Permian basin.

A few years ago, it seemed like a place on the way out. Now McGuire said she can see nine oil wells from her back porch, and there are dozens of RVs parked outside town, full of oil workers.

But soon after the first frack trucks pulled up two years ago, the well on McGuire’s property ran dry.

No-one in Barnhart paid much attention at the time, and McGuire hooked up to the town’s central water supply. “Everyone just said: ‘too bad’. Well now it’s all going dry,” McGuire said.

Ranchers dumped most of their herds. Cotton farmers lost up to half their crops. The extra draw down, coupled with drought, made it impossible for local ranchers to feed and water their herds, said Buck Owens. In a good year, Owens used to run 500 cattle and up to 8,000 goats on his 7,689 leased hectares (19,000 acres). Now he’s down to a few hundred goats.

The drought undoubtedly took its toll but Owens reserved his anger for the contractors who drilled 104 water wells on his leased land, to supply the oil companies.

Water levels were dropping in his wells because of the vast amounts of water being pumped out of the Edwards-Trinity-Plateau Aquifer, a 34,000 sq mile water bearing formation.

“They are sucking all of the water out of the ground, and there are just hundreds and hundreds of water trucks here every day bringing fresh water out of the wells,” Owens said.

Meanwhile, residents in town complained, they were forced to live under water rationing. “I’ve got dead trees in my yard because I haven’t been able to water them,” said Glenda Kuykendall. “The state is mandating our water system to conserve water but why?Š Getting one oil well fracked takes more water than the entire town can drink or use in a day.”

Even as the drought bore down, even as the water levels declined, the oil industry continued to demand water and those with water on their land were willing to sell it. The road west of town was lined with signs advertising “fresh water”, where tankers can take on a box-car-sized load of water laced with industrial chemicals.

“If you’re going to develop the oil, you’ve got to have the water,” said Larry Baxter, a contractor from the nearby town of Mertzon, who installed two frack tanks on his land earlier this year, hoping to make a business out of his well selling water to oil industry.

By his own estimate, his well could produce enough to fill up 20 or 30 water trucks for the oil industry each day. At $60 (£39.58) a truck, that was $36,000 a month, easily. “I could sell 100 truckloads a day if I was open to it,” Baxter said.

He rejected the idea there should be any curbs on selling water during the drought. “People use their water for food and fibre. I choose to use my water to sell to the oil field,” he said. “Who’s taking advantage? I don’t see any difference.”

Barnhart remained dry for five days last month before local work crew revived an abandoned railway well and started pumping again. But residents fear it is just a temporary fix and that next time it happens they won’t have their own wells to fall back on. “My well is very very close to going dry,” said Kuykendall.

So what is a town like Barnhart to do? Fracking is a powerful drain on water supplies. In adjacent Crockett county, fracking accounts for up to 25% of water use, according to the groundwater conservation district. But Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, argues fracking is not the only reason Texas is going dry – and nor is the drought. The latest shocks to the water system come after decades of overuse by ranchers, cotton farmers, and fast-growing thirsty cities.

“We have large urban centres sucking water out of west Texas to put on their lands. We have a huge agricultural community, and now we have fracking which is also using water,” she said. And then there is climate change.

West Texas has a long history of recurring drought, but under climate change, the south-west has been experiencing record-breaking heatwaves, further drying out the soil and speeding the evaporation of water in lakes and reservoirs. Underground aquifers failed to regenerate. “What happens is that climate change comes on top and in many cases it can be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back, but the camel is already overloaded,” said Hayhoe.

Other communities across a bone-dry south-west are resorting to extraordinary measures to keep the water flowing. Robert Lee, also in the oil patch, has been hauling in water by tanker. So has Spicewood Beach, a resort town 40 miles from Austin, which has been trucking in water since early 2012.

San Angelo, a city of 100,000, dug a pipeline to an underground water source more than 60 miles away, and sunk half a dozen new wells.

Las Cruces, just across the border from the Texas panhandle in New Mexico, is drilling down 1,000ft in search of water.

But those fixes are way out of reach for small, rural communities. Outside the RV parks for the oil field workers who are just passing through, Barnhart has a population of about 200.

“We barely make enough money to pay our light bill and we’re supposed to find $300,000 to drill a water well?” said John Nanny, an official with the town’s water supply company.

Last week brought some relief, with rain across the entire state of Texas. Rain gauges in some parts of west Texas registered two inches or more. Some ranchers dared to hope it was the beginning of the end of the drought.

But not Owens, not yet anyway. The underground aquifers needed far more rain to recharge, he said, and it just wasn’t raining as hard as it did when he was growing up.

“We’ve got to get floods. We’ve got to get a hurricane to move up in our country and just saturate everything to replenish the aquifer,” he said. “Because when the water is gone. That’s it. We’re gone.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/11/a-texan-tragedy-plenty-of-oil-but-no-water/?utm_source=Raw+Story+Daily+Update&utm_campaign=2cd20bb36a-8_11_138_11_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1b6404e40c-2cd20bb36a-180476769

energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, natural resource management, tar sands

CommonDreams: Fracking-Harmed Residents Demand Reopening of EPA Poisoned Water Investigations

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http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2013/08/13-2

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 13, 2013
3:01 PM

CONTACT: Food & Water Watch

Seth Gladstone – sgladstone[at]fwwatch[dot]org, 718.943.8063

Action Comes on Heels of Report Showing EPA Officials Ignored Evidence from Philadelphia Office Finding Pollution in Dimock Drinking Water

WASHINGTON – August 13 – Pennsylvania residents and activists personally harmed by the hazards of fracking gathered today at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. to call for the reopening of the investigation into drinking water contamination in Dimock, PA. A recent report in the Los Angeles Times revealed that EPA officials in Washington chose to close an investigation of Dimock drinking water despite evidence gathered from agency investigators based in Philadelphia that found “significant damage to the water quality,” from poisonous contamination likely caused by fracking. The EPA PowerPoint Presentation was released last Monday on DeSmog blog by investigative journalist Steve Horn. Evidence of drinking water contamination due to fracking was similarly ignored by the EPA in Pavillion, Wyoming and Weatherford, Texas. The resident-activists delivered more than 50,000 petitions to new EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy calling on her to reopen investigations in Dimock, PA as well as in Pavillion, WY and Weatherford, TX. They are also calling on EPA to provide safe drinking water to residents while these investigations recommence.

“For years now, I have had to live with toxic, poisoned fracked water in my home,” said Ray Kemble, a former gas industry employee turned whistleblower and an affected Dimock area resident. “When EPA finally stepped in and tested my water, I thought ‘Thank God. Someone is finally here to help us.’ But then it became apparent to those of us on the ground that they were playing politics. EPA officials literally told us officially that our water was safe to drink but then told us off-the-record not to drink it. Now the truth is out and we want justice.”

In 2010, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection concluded that a fracking well drilled by Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation was responsible for methane contamination of a large aquifer in Dimock, PA resulting in the contamination of the drinking water of 19 families. The PA DEP enacted a fracking moratorium in the area and promised to build a water line from a nearby town to the residents. Then they rescinded that promise leaving Dimock residents to fend for themselves.

During the next few years, Cabot Oil and Gas paid for water deliveries to the residents and then abruptly stopped December 2011. Residents and advocates demanded the EPA and the federal government step in and in January 2012, the EPA commenced water deliveries while conducting its own investigation into groundwater contamination caused by drilling and fracking operations. In the summer of 2012, the EPA concluded its investigation and stated that Dimock’s water wasn’t contaminated from drilling and fracking operations, however the Los Angeles Times now reports that internal documents show regional EPA staff members said the exact opposite. Staff members warned their superiors that several wells had been contaminated with methane and substances such as manganese and arsenic, most likely from local gas drilling and fracking.

“I helped sound the alarm and called EPA when Cabot Oil and Gas stopped water deliveries to outspoken residents in Dimock, PA,” said Craig Stevens, a resident from the neighboring town of Silver Lake Township, who has also been adversely been affected by fracking operations in the region. “The people in this country deserve better then this. These fracking corporations should not be allowed to cause citizens harm and then have the federal government cover up the water contamination. Enough is enough. We aren’t going away until we have law, order and safe drinking water.”

Residents argue this isn’t the first time the EPA has stepped back from connecting the evidence from its own studies of water contamination to unconventional gas drilling and fracking operations. Dimock’s story is emblematic of a troubling pattern in EPA groundwater investigations related to fracking.

In late-2010 in Weatherford, Texas, after evaluating samples from a water well near drilling and fracking operations, the Environmental Protection Agency believed the situation was so serious that it issued a rare emergency order that said at least two homeowners were in immediate danger from a well saturated with flammable methane. More than a year later, the agency rescinded its mandate and refused to explain why. However, in an Associated Press story that later emerged, the EPA had scientific evidence against the driller, Range Resources, but changed course after the company threatened not to cooperate with a national study about hydraulic fracturing. In response to this threat and industry pressure, regulators set aside an analysis that concluded the drilling could have been to blame for the contamination.

More recently, the EPA abandoned the fracking study in Pavillion, WY, which found benzene, a known carcinogen, at 50 times the level that is considered safe. However, even with this evidence, the EPA stepped away from this study and instead handed it over to the state of Wyoming, whose lead politicians have repeatedly vocally supported fracking. Worse, the research will be funded by EnCana, the very company whose drilling and fracking operations may have caused the groundwater contamination.

“The purpose of the EPA is to protect all Americans from the types of health and safety hazards fracking so obviously caused in Dimock and elsewhere,” said Emily Wurth, director of water programs at Food & Water Watch, the organization that led the petition collection effort. “It’s time for Gina McCarthy and the EPA to do its job and stand up for public health, not continue wilting under pressure from the oil and gas industry to simply maintain the dangerous status quo.”
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Food & Water Watch is a nonprofit consumer organization that works to ensure clean water and safe food. We challenge the corporate control and abuse of our food and water resources by empowering people to take action and by transforming the public consciousness about what we eat and drink.