A letter to the editor published in the Butler Eagle on April 26, 2013 with the original title If you See Something, Say Something

The April 21 Butler Eagle article “Natural gas development thriving in Butler County” focuses on the positives that the fracking boom has brought to Butler County, while downplaying the damages.
The article reports that there have been “just 41 violations reported across all wells (in Butler County), resulting in about $11,000 total in fines. Most wells that have been issued violations have received only one, while no site has received more than three citations from the DEP (Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection).”
One thing many people overlook when assessing these numbers is that violations are assigned to a unit (or a well) and not a pad. A pad can have numerous wellheads.
For example, according to the DEP’s website, there are seven wellheads on the Voll/Soergel pad on Woodlands Road. Three thousand feet to the west sits the Gilliland site with 10 wellheads. Combined, they have four recorded violations, according to the DEP website on oil and gas.
None of the numerous “unintentional returns” and “discharges” into streams during pipeline construction are reported in the DEP system.
One such example was the February 2011 leak into Crab Run next to the Gilliland well. At that time, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission was investigating more than a dozen such spills into Connoquenessing Creek and its tributaries. There is no way of knowing how many have occurred in the county.
Many pads also house compressor stations to push the gas through the pipeline. Last week, it was reported that MarkWest, Rex Energy’s midstream partner in the area, was found by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to be in violation of the Clean Air Act. MarkWest operates many of the compressor stations, including the one on the Voll/Soergel pad, and the cryogenic plant in Connoquenessing. Its plant in Jackson Township is located about a mile from the Seneca Valley School District’s secondary school campus, and the Jackson supervisors have just approved a third plant right next door.
The third plant will be larger than the previous two combined.
If we are going to peddle the exaggerated short-term benefits of toxic fracking, should we not also be studying the devastation and violations? Should we not look at the whole process and not just the narrow view of the industry’s public relations campaigns?
In the middle of the biggest expansion of its responsibilities in recent history, the DEP’s budget has been slashed to historic lows. The recently resigned head of the agency, Michael Krancer, stated that he placed growth of the natural gas industry above oversight.
Additionally, as the deadly explosion in West, Texas, clearly demonstrated, a lack of documented violations does not make a facility safe. Far from it. It often points to a lack of proper oversight.
It has therefore been left to investigative journalists, grassroots organizations with limited resources, and concerned taxpayers to shine a light on the dangers of this industry.

Below is a list of pertinent events in the current Woodlands water contamination fiasco.

• In late 2010, Rex Energy commenced its shale-gas drilling operations in the Woodlands area of Connoquenessing Twp., Butler County. By January 2011, at least a dozen households that previously had good clean water for at least a decade, all suddenly found themselves with a host of water problems, ranging from discoloration (orange, purple, black), to foul odors, to getting sick when they or their pets drank the water, to the water suddenly disappearing from their wells.
  
• In Dec. 2011, Rex Energy announced that, according to rigorous scientific testing done by the lab they hired, Environmental Service Laboratories Inc., there was no way that their drilling operations had anything to do with water contamination complaints in the Woodlands. The PA Dept. of Environmental Protection later backed up these findings.

• A February 2012 Associated Press article reported that initial post-drilling water quality tests in the Woodlands conducted by the DEP showed man-made industrial contaminants in the water – a multi-chemical mix that suggested either multiple sources of contamination or one industry that uses many chemicals. Shale-gas drilling is the only industry in the Woodlands area. It also noted that the chemicals found in those initial post-drilling results were not even tested for in the results that exonerated Rex Energy from blame.

• A follow-up AP report revealed that Rex Energy gas wells near the Woodlands neighborhood had developed casing problems during the drilling process. Neither Rex nor the DEP had disclosed this fact to Woodlands residents or the public, either at the time of the incident or during the later discussions of possible water contamination in the area. Faulty gas-well casings have been a common factor in documented water-contamination incidents linked to natural gas drilling.
• In early November 2012, both the Associated Press and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on court depositions by two former DEP employees-turned-whistleblowers, stating that the DEP routinely creates incomplete lab reports and uses them to dismiss complaints that Marcellus Shale gas development operations have contaminated residential water supplies. According to one deposition, a special lab code for Marcellus Shale water contamination complaints, “942 Suite Code,” is used statewide. In a Post-Gazette file review of DEP water quality reports generated under that code, it was found that those reports didn't disclose all of the contaminants found in well water samples. The water complaints in these cases were then dismissed because the abbreviated reports did not support the property owner complaints. One of the areas mentioned in the Post-Gazette's report on its file review was The Woodlands.
  
• In August-September 2012, Rex Energy commenced another round of drilling and fracking. By October, the number of Woodlands households reporting water problems had risen to at least 25.

In the face of the above factual statements, I have two questions to ask the citizens of Butler County: 1.) Are the Woodlands water contamination problems related to shale-gas drilling in the area? 2.) How do we go about getting honest accountability from county, state and local officials regarding this problem, and from our “sacred cash cow,” the shale-gas drilling industry?

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a national environmental group, contacted MOB in August with a request to visit Butler County to see what is happening with unconventional well drilling.   The President, Frances Brenenke, brought two board members and 6 staff members to Butler to see the impact toxic fracking is having on people and communities. 

Two members of Marcellus Outreach Butler, Ping Pirrung and Dennis McCann, hosted a lunch at their home in Middlesex Township on August 27 for our visitors.  Janet and Fred McIntyre shared how their lives have been turned upside down and their health compromised  since drilling began in the Connoquenessing.  Woodlands.

At the end of the luncheon, Raina Ripple, Director of the Southwest Health Center,  told the visitors that the stories of people impacted in Butler County are the same as the stories she is hearing in Washington, Greene and Fayette Counties.  People are sick and living with contaminated water and breathing air that forces them to stay indoors.  And what is so upsetting to her is that “no one is doing anything to help these people – not the state or local governments, not the medical profession.”

The NRDC visitors were visibly moved by what they heard and this was reinforced when they piled into cars and took a tour of the shalefields in Butler County.  With Janet McIntyre and John Stolz as guides, a caravan of cars traveled down Brownsdale Road where there are 4 drilling sites within a  mile radius from one another.   At one site in the Woodlands,  the liner from a pond which had held contaminated flowback water had been carelessly left by the side of the road.  After visiting several drilling sites, a compression station and the gas processing plant,  our guests had to travel south to Washington County where Ron Gulla was hosting a similar event for them the following day to show them the impacts in Southwestern PA.

What were the results of NRDC’s tours of fracking sites, like their visit to Butler County?   Check out the impressions of  Frances Brenenke’s, President of NRDC, tour of western PA as captured in her blog.

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/fbeinecke/calling_for_national_fracking.html

On September 19th, NRDC launched the Community Fracking Defense Project. This new project, which is launching in five states—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and North Carolina—will provide assistance to towns and other local governments that want added control over the siting of and/or protections against the harms of fracking in their communities.

For example, NRDC legal and policy staff, together with local partners, will:

•    Assist in drafting local laws and land use plans that control the extent of fracking within their borders and/or limit the harmful effects of fracking.

•    Work to re-assert communities’ rights to protect themselves under state law.

•    Defend relevant zoning provisions and other local laws that are challenged in court.

Kate Sidding, a NRDC attorney, filed an amicus brief in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on behalf of a number of municipalities in support of a lower court decision striking down portions of Act 13, a recently enacted Pennsylvania law that severely limits the ability of local governments to use their zoning powers to control where fracking occurs.

MOB was happy to host NRDC’s visit and is encouraged by their response and actions.  We need more powerful organizations to step forward and take a stand like NRDC is doing.  As more people and organizations stand up and make their voices heard, we increase our chances of stopping this destruction and getting permanent solutions for the people whose lives have been so negatively impacted.

-Dianne Arnold

An article in the July 8 Butler Eagle details how Rex Energy is teaming up with Pennsylvania American Water to construct a frack-water pipeline for its natural gas operations in Lancaster Twp. Since the water line is not a PA Department of Environmental Protection mandate, homeowners in this well-to-do area can tap into this water line for a discount fee of $30, instead of the usual $1,000.

Meanwhile, two miles over the hill on the poor side of town, several families in the Woodlands area of Connoquenessing Twp. have been without potable water since Feb. 29, when Rex Energy had water buffaloes removed from the area, with hundreds of gallons of this precious resource being spilled on the ground in the process. These families must now rely on weekly shipments of donated bottled water delivered by area churches for drinking and for cooking, for brushing their teeth and washing their faces.

And while Rex's frack-water pipeline was put on the fast track, the “feasibility study” for a water LIFE line to The Woodlands has experienced numerous unexplained delays that have families there on edge.  One wonders if the Woodlands residents will get the discount rate, if/when a water line is ever extended to their area. Clearly the DEP is not mandating that ANYTHING be done with this situation.

Where is our sense of priorities?

One might wonder why the residents of The Woodlands go through the ordeal of depending on weekly “water drives” for water when both Rex Energy and the PA DEP have told them their water is safe to drink.

One word: health.

Soon after Rex Energy began its drilling operations in the area, the well water at several residences in The Woodlands “coincidentally” began to go bad. People got sick from drinking the water, some seriously. After receiving complaints of groundwater contamination, Rex Energy provided these residents with water buffaloes while THEY investigated the complaints (another example of the fox guarding the henhouse).  After drinking the clean water from the water buffaloes, the residents stopped getting sick.  When the DEP told them their water was “safe to drink,” they resumed drinking their well-water and started getting sick again. Some were even told by their doctors not to drink their well-water. So they depend on donated bottled water and whatever they can afford to buy on their own. Their health is worth the ordeal.

Both Rex Energy and the PA DEP insist that drilling had “nothing to do” with water contamination in the Woodlands area. Rex has produced “evidence” of same via testimony from a hydrogeologist that is totally ignorant of the physics of hydraulic fracturing. Further, Dr. Bernard Goldstein, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, claims in a February 2012 Associated Press article that the strange mixture of chemicals found in one resident's post-drilling well-water test results point to either multiple sources of contamination or an industry that uses many chemicals. Rex Energy is the only industry in the local area. The DEP suggested that its own lab may have caused the contamination, in which case, says Dr. Goldstein, the DEP has an obligation to re-test the water. “DEP cannot just simply walk away.”

But the DEP has walked away, as has Rex Energy, as have state, county and township officials, leaving the residents of The Woodlands in the lurch.

Many of the residents of The Woodlands are low-income residents, “les miserables,” the expendables – sacrificed so that we may have our illusory “energy independence,” and the gas industry and a select group of landowners may have their profits.

The entire situation is abhorrent.

j.p.m.