Cross-posted from Grist
More than 70 years ago, a chemical
attack was launched against Washington state and Nevada. It poisoned
people, animals, everything that grew, breathed air, and drank water.
The Marshall Islands were also struck. This formerly pristine Pacific
atoll was branded “the most contaminated place in the world.” As their
cancers developed, the victims of atomic testing and nuclear weapons
development got a name: downwinders. What marked their tragedy was the
darkness in which they were kept about what was being done to them.
Proof of harm fell to them, not to the U.S. government
agencies responsible [PDF].
Now, a new generation of downwinders is getting sick as an emerging
industry pushes the next wonder technology — in this case, high-volume
hydraulic fracturing. Whether they live in Texas, Colorado, or
Pennsylvania, their symptoms are the same: rashes, nosebleeds, severe
headaches, difficulty breathing, joint pain, intestinal illnesses,
memory loss, and more. “In my opinion,” says Yuri Gorby of Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, “what we see unfolding is a serious health
crisis, one that is just beginning.”
The process of “fracking” starts by drilling a mile or more
vertically, then outward laterally into 500-million-year-old shale
formations, the remains of oceans that once flowed over parts of North
America. Millions of gallons of chemical and sand-laced water are then
propelled into the ground at high pressures, fracturing the shale and
forcing the methane it contains out. With the release of that gas come
thousands of gallons of contaminated water. This “flowback” fluid
contains the original fracking chemicals, plus heavy metals and
radioactive material that also lay safely buried in the shale.
The industry that uses this technology calls its product “natural
gas,” but there’s nothing natural about upending half a billion years of
safe storage of methane and everything that surrounds it. It is, in
fact, an act of ecological violence around which alien infrastructures —
compressor stations that compact the gas for pipeline transport, ponds
of contaminated flowback, flare stacks that burn off gas impurities,
diesel trucks in quantity, thousands of miles of pipelines, and more —
have metastasized across rural America, pumping carcinogens and toxins
into water, air, and soil.
Sixty percent of Pennsylvania lies over a huge shale sprawl called
the Marcellus, and that has been in the fracking industry’s sights
since
2008.
The corporations that are exploiting the shale come to the state with
lavish federal entitlements: exemptions from the Clean Air, Clean Water,
and Clean Drinking Water Acts, as well as the Superfund Act, which
requires cleanup of hazardous substances. The industry doesn’t have to
call its trillions of gallons of annual waste “hazardous.” Instead, it
uses euphemisms like “residual waste.” In addition, fracking companies
are allowed to keep secret many of the chemicals they use.
Pennsylvania, in turn, adds its own privileges. A revolving door
shuttles former legislators, governors, and officials from the state’s
Department of Environmental Protection into gas industry positions. The
DEP itself is now the object of a
lawsuit that
charges the agency with producing deceptive lab reports, and then using
them to dismiss homeowners’ complaints that shale gas corporations have
contaminated their water, making them sick. The people I interviewed
have their own nickname for the DEP: “Don’t Expect Protection.”
The downwinders
Randy Moyer is a pleasant-faced, bearded 49-year-old whose drawl
reminds you that Portage, his hardscrabble hometown in southwestern
Pennsylvania, is part of Appalachia. He worked 18 years — until gasoline
prices got too steep — driving his own rigs to haul waste in New York
and New Jersey. Then what looked like a great opportunity presented
itself: $25 an hour working for a hydraulic-fracturing subcontractor in
northeastern Pennsylvania.
In addition to hauling fracking liquid, water, and waste, Randy also
did what’s called, with no irony, “environmental.” He climbed into large
vats to squeegee out the remains of fracking fluid. He also cleaned the
huge mats laid down around the wells to even the ground out for truck
traffic. Those mats get saturated with “drilling mud,” a viscous,
chemical-laden fluid that eases the passage of the drills into the
shale. What his employer never told him was that the drilling mud, as
well as the wastewater from fracking, is not only highly toxic, but
radioactive.
In the wee hours of a very cold day in November 2011, he stood in a
huge basin at a well site, washing 1,000 mats with high-pressure hoses,
taking breaks every so often to warm his feet in his truck. “I took off
my shoes and my feet were as red as a tomato,” he told me. When the air
from the heater hit them, he “nearly went through the roof.”
Once at home, he scrubbed his feet, but the excruciating pain didn’t
abate. A “rash” that covered his feet soon spread up to his torso. A
year and a half later, the skin inflammation still recurs. His upper lip
repeatedly swells. A couple of times his tongue swelled so large that
he had press it down with a spoon to be able to breathe. “I’ve been
fried for over 13 months with this stuff,” he told me in late January.
“I can just imagine what hell is like. It feels like I’m absolutely on
fire.”
Family and friends have taken Moyer to emergency rooms at least four
times. He has consulted more than 40 doctors. No one can say what caused
the rashes, or his headaches, migraines, chest pain, and irregular
heartbeat, or the shooting pains down his back and legs, his blurred
vision, vertigo, memory loss, the constant white noise in his ears, and
the breathing troubles that require him to stash inhalers throughout his
small apartment.
In an earlier era, workers’ illnesses fell into the realm of
“industrial medicine.” But these days, when it comes to the U.S.
fracking industry, the canaries aren’t restricted to the coal mines.
People like Randy seem to be the harbingers of what happens when a toxic
environment is no longer buried miles beneath the earth. The gas fields
that evidently poisoned him are located near thriving communities. “For
just about every other industry I can imagine,” says
Anthony Ingraffea of Cornell University, coauthor of a landmark
study
[PDF] that established fracking’s colossal greenhouse-gas footprint,
“from making paint, building a toaster, building an automobile, those
traditional kinds of industry occur in a zoned industrial area, inside
of buildings, separated from home and farm, separated from schools.” By
contrast, natural gas corporations, he says, “are imposing on us the
requirement to locate our homes, hospitals, and schools inside their
industrial space.”
The death and life of Little Rose
Little Rose was Angel Smith’s favorite horse. When the vet shod her,
Angel told me proudly, she obligingly lifted the next hoof as soon as
the previous one was done. “Wanna eat, Rosie?” Angel would ask, and
Rosie would nod her head. “Are you sure?” Angel would tease, and Rosie
would raise one foreleg, clicking her teeth together. In Clearville,
just south of Portage, Angel rode Little Rose in parades, carrying the
family’s American flag.
In 2002, a “landman”
knocked on the door and asked
Angel and her husband Wayne to lease the gas rights of their 115-acre
farm to the San Francisco-based energy corporation
PG&E (Pacific
Gas & Electric.) At first, he was polite, but then he started
bullying. “All your neighbors have signed. If you don’t, we’ll just suck
the gas from under your land.” Perhaps from weariness and a lack of
information (almost no one outside the industry then knew anything about
high-volume hydraulic fracturing), they agreed. Drilling began in 2002
on neighbors’ land and in 2005 on the Smith’s.
On Jan. 30, 2007, Little Rose staggered, fell, and couldn’t get up.
Her legs moved spasmodically. When Wayne and Angel dragged her to a
sitting position, she’d just collapse again. “I called every vet in the
phone book,” says Angel. “They all said, ‘Shoot her.’” The
couple couldn’t bear to do it. After two days, a neighbor shot her. “It
was our choice,” says Angel, her voice breaking. “She was my best
friend.”
Soon, the Smiths’ cows began showing similar symptoms. Those
that didn’t die began aborting or giving birth to dead calves. All the
chickens died, too. So did the barn cats. And so did three beloved dogs,
none of them old, all previously healthy. A 2012
study [PDF]
by Michelle Bamberger and Cornell University pharmacology professor
Robert Oswald indicates that, in the gas fields, these are typical
symptoms in animals and often serve as early warning signs for their
owners’ subsequent illnesses.
The Smiths asked the DEP to test their water. The agency told them
that it was safe to drink, but Angel Smith says that subsequent testing
by Pennsylvania State University investigators revealed high levels of
arsenic.
Meanwhile, the couple began suffering from headaches, nosebleeds,
fatigue, throat and eye irritation, and shortness of breath. Wayne’s
belly began swelling oddly, even though, says Angel, he isn’t heavy.
X-rays of his lungs showed scarring and calcium deposits. A blood
analysis revealed cirrhosis of the liver. “Get him to stop drinking,”
said the doctor who drew Angel aside after the results came in.
“Wayne doesn’t drink,” she replied. Neither does Angel, who at 42 now
has liver disease.
By the time the animals began dying, five high-volume wells had been
drilled on neighbors’ land. Soon, water started bubbling up under their
barn floor and an oily sheen and foam appeared on their pond. In 2008, a
compressor station was built half a mile away. These facilities, which
compress natural gas for pipeline transport, emit known carcinogens and
toxins like benzene and toluene.
The Smiths say people they know elsewhere in Clearville have had
similar health problems, as have their animals. For a while they thought
their own animals’ troubles were over, but just this past February
several cows aborted. The couple would like to move away, but can’t. No
one will buy their land.
