DEP does little to curb drilling fears
It seems simple.
Right now, there are undertakings here in southwestern Pennsylvania — Marcellus shale drilling — that could potentially harm our health and well-being. Let’s leave aside for a moment the ethics of the energy companies themselves. Maybe shale drilling will bring no measurable adverse effects (a spate of recent stories of radioactivity released by hydraulic fracturing suggests otherwise … but I digress). Maybe it’ll bring about an economic boom that sustains us for decades to come. But let’s leave aside all that. Whether or not real consequences will befall us as a result of hydraulic fracturing, if they haven’t begun to already, it’s common sense that we should monitor the health of our environment — especially our drinking water — to the absolute best of our ability in the meantime. Right? When our health and our environment are at stake, doesn’t it seem like a bare minimum requirement to keep an eye on things?
Yet, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection keeps showing that it’s not doing everything it can to monitor what’s happening in the shale fields. Recently, Rachel Morgan, a reporter for ShaleReporter.com, revealed that, DEP’s standard water testing software codes only monitor for the presence of about half of potential contaminants in our drinking water and in many cases monitor for less than that. The more stringent codes, which test for 45 potential contaminants, have not been used once in the last two years.
Instead, the DEP most often utilizes software codes that monitor for just 14 potential contaminants. This leaves out tests for a whole host of toxic metals and chemicals, such as, according to Morgan, “ammonia, Kjeldahl nitrogen, nitrate and nitrite, phosphorus, carbon, cyanide (distilled and weak acid dissociable), sulfide, beryllium, boron, fluoride, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, lead, thallium, molybdenum, silver, antimony, tin, titanium, phenols and mercury.”
Here, we are talking about something as simple as implementing a computer code that already exists in the DEP’s arsenal of testing procedures. Suite Code 946 — which tests for 45 contaminants — was developed for DEP use in 2008. We’re not talking about thousands or even hundreds of extra dollars for more advanced testing supplies or procedures. The technology is there. It’s just not being used.
The DEP’s attempts at an explanation for this are deeply unsatisfactory and in fact nearly incomprehensible. According to Morgan, here’s what DEP Spokesman Kevin Sunday had to say: “DEP grants its inspectors the discretion to request various analyses from the laboratory. These suites and standard analysis codes are one component used in our investigations, and there are, of course, others. DEP personnel use these tools and others when conducting investigations into a water supply complaint from gas extraction activities. Such investigations are necessarily site- and fact-specific.”
What Sunday seems to suggest here is that the water testing codes are just one facet of the DEP’s water testing procedures. But do the other tests make up for the gaps the codes leave out? Do they test for mercury, ammonia, cyanide? He doesn’t say.
It’s really difficult to explain this away. And trust me, I want to. I want to trust the government organization that exists, ostensibly, to protect us. Maybe the DEP is stretched thin thanks to the influx of drilling and sheer number of drilling sites to follow up on, and the anti-spending environment of our state government likely squeezes the DEP’s budget. But it seems more likely that the DEP is hiding something. The bottom line is, we have a right to complete, accurate knowledge. Monitoring is the only power we have.
And if, as Steve Forde — vice president of policy and communications for the Marcellus Shale Coalition — suggests in a 蘑菇视频 letter to the editor that the potential negative consequences of shale drilling are based in “hyperbole and sensationalism,” an extensive smorgasbord of tests would do a lot to prove that shale drilling is safe and quiet those accusations.
The Marcellus Shale Coalition and energy companies should work with the DEP to increase the stridency of its testing procedures. To prove its innocence, and the safety of its drilling procedures, if nothing else. To be fair, Forde says he supports a DEP study which will evaluate naturally-occurring radioactive material which is a byproduct of drilling, but it’s clear this is just a small facet of the potential damages drilling causes.
We’re still in a pre-consequence stage as drilling takes its hold on our area — at least insofar as individual lives are concerned. But without sufficient testing, we’ll never know the extent of what’s in store for us.