HEALTH EFFECTS: The side effects of natural gas drilling remain largely unexplored by scientists.
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On a summer evening in June 2005, Susan Wallace-Babb went out into a neighbor's field near her ranch in Western Colorado to close an irrigation ditch. She parked down the rutted double-track, stepped out of her truck into the low-slung sun, took a deep breath and collapsed, unconscious.
A natural gas well and a pair of fuel storage tanks sat less than a half-mile away. Later, after Wallace-Babb came to and sought answers, a sheriff's deputy told her that a tank full of gas condensate—liquid hydrocarbons gathered from the production process—had overflowed into another tank. The fumes must have drifted toward the field where she was working, he suggested.
The next morning Wallace-Babb was so sick she could barely move. She vomited uncontrollably and suffered explosive diarrhea. A searing pain shot up her thigh. Within days she developed burning rashes that covered her exposed skin, then lesions. As weeks passed, anytime she went outdoors, her symptoms worsened. Wallace-Babb's doctor began to suspect she had been poisoned.
"I took to wearing a respirator and swim goggles outside to tend to my animals," Wallace-Babb said. "I closed up my house and got an air conditioner that would just recycle the air and not let any fresh air in."
Wallace-Babb's symptoms mirror those reported by a handful of others living near her ranch in Parachute, Colo., and by dozens of residents of communities across the country that have seen the most extensive natural gas drilling. Hydraulic fracturing, along with other processes used to drill wells, generates emissions and millions of gallons of hazardous waste that are dumped into open-air pits. The pits have been shown to leak into groundwater and also give off chemical emissions as the fluids evaporate. Residents' most common complaints are respiratory infections, headaches, neurological impairment, nausea and skin rashes. More rarely, they have reported more serious effects, from miscarriages and tumors to benzene poisoning and cancer.
ProPublica examined government environmental reports and private lawsuits and interviewed scores of residents, physicians and toxicologists in four states—Colorado, Texas, Wyoming and Pennsylvania—that are drilling hot spots. Our review showed that cases like Wallace-Babb's go back a decade in parts of Colorado and Wyoming, where drilling has taken place for years. They are just beginning to emerge in Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus Shale drilling boom began in earnest in 2008.
Concern about such health complaints is longstanding—Congress held hearings on them in 2007 at which Wallace-Babb testified. But the extent and cause of the problems remains unknown. Neither states nor the federal government have systematically tracked reports from people like Wallace-Babb, or comprehensively investigated how drilling affects human health.
"In some communities it has been a disaster," said Christopher Portier, director of the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) and the National Center for Environmental Health. "We do not have enough information on hand to be able to draw good solid conclusions about whether this is a public health risk as a whole."
Exemptions from federal environmental rules won by the drilling companies have complicated efforts to gather pollution data and to understand the root of health complaints. Current law allows oil and gas companies not to report toxic emissions and hazardous waste released by all but their largest facilities, excluding hundreds of thousands of wells and small plants. Many of the chemicals used in fracking and drilling remain secret, hobbling investigators trying to determine the source of contamination. The gas industry itself has been less than enthusiastic about health studies. Drillers declined to cooperate with a long-term study of the health effects of gas drilling near Wallace-Babb's town this summer, prompting state officials to drop their plans and start over.
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19 Comments
Add CommentCount me as skeptical of the anecdote leading off this story. Three is no way a spill of gas condensate of this magnitude is going to cause loss of conciousness a half mile away. It's not even very likely if one is standing right next to it unless the vapors are sufficient to displace enough oxygen near the person.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExplosive diarrhea? Sounds more like food poisoning.
Wow, are you a medical doctor, a toxicologist, or anyone REMOTELY qualified to provide an opinion on this subject? It's apparent that you didn't even READ the rest of the article, because the story goes much deeper than that one case. Typical of dirty energy shills like you though, either knowing or unknowing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, and the dirty energy companies get to decide who does the research? Remember the "cancer studies" done by the tobacco companies? Regardless, how come we allowed all this widespread drilling without even TRYING to discern the health and environmental effects it would cause? I'll tell you why: campaign contributions and soft money from the fracking companies bought them a special exemption from environmental laws. This was a political and economic decision to give them this exemption, not scientific. If we aren't going to listen to science in this country anymore, why don't we all start living like the Amish?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's obvious that not enough has been done to study the effects of fracking. Common sense tells me that if you inject chemicals into rock formations to break them up, those chemicals will find their way into groundwater. It would be ridiculous to assume they can accurately predict exactly where and how far the rock will fracture. Shale is semi-porous anyhow.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat really bothers me the most is that the oil and gas companies are allowed to keep secret what chemicals they use to frack calling them trade secrets! They might as well have a license to dump toxic waste, which apparently they are doing. Spill antifreeze and the EPA can fine you. Pump it into the ground and it's O.K. Not to mention arsenic and many other chemicals they don't have to tell anyone about.
What's up with open air 'holding tanks' of toxic wastes from fracking? Using that waste water to spray on roads to keep dust down?
No wonder fracking is now economically viable. They don't have to follow many rules and are not held responsible for their actions.
It seems to me that the oil and gas companies can delay or outright block any investigations, and have probably run the well in question dry and moved on before anything could be done, except the damage they leave behind.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not an eco-weenie, but I do care about the environment and people's health. I'm all for developing our natural resources, but in a safe, smart way that doesn't harm people and the environment. If it's too expensive to do it right, then it's probably more expensive to do it wrong.
Of course one thing on the gas and oil companies side is that it can take decades for the effects to show up in enough cases that they have to admit guilt.
Natural gas also contains the suffocating gas CO2 which disperses badly and has killed many in africa.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"If it's too expensive to do it right, then it's probably more expensive to do it wrong."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood point, good line. A minor addition - "going forward, it's ten, a hundred, or a thousand times more expensive to do it wrong," but the "no regulations" people expect taxpayers to foot that bill. As for the sick and the dead along the way, well, you know.... They don't call it creative destruction for nothing.
Yep, sounds like one of the many indirect subsidies that dirty energy sources currently enjoy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnybody here ever frack a well? Anybody here ever drill a well?.... Oh... that would be me. Fracking has been going on for 50 years. The chemicals in frack fluids are usually pretty boring stuff. The companies don't want to disclose what's in it for competitive reasons. If there was anything nasty in it it would be easy for the Fed's to trace and track it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost frack fluids are composed of nothing more than water and Nitrogen gas or CO2 with some soap as a foaming agent to allow the sand to be entrained easier. Now, this doesn't stop the frack companies from charging outrageous amounts of money for the product, they just don't want everyone to know what their mark-ups are. All of them claim to have special potions, but personally, I'd be more worried about the aspartame in a Diet Coke that the additives in a frack fluid.
But speaking of Coke, maybe Sault and Eco-Steve can get together and force Coke to disclose their recipe? It's responsible for obesity and tooth decay around the world. It's caused untold human suffering... go get them.
And on to the ground water issue. I spoke with a groundwater contamination expert at a conference. He told me that in 30 years he has never seen a case where the oil company polluted some ones well. Not one case. He has seen however, the oil companies paying people off because it was cheaper and better PR to write a check than to prove the point. He felt that this was a huge mistake that would come back and bite them and it looks like it has.
Now, where do the contaminated wells come from? From the water well drilling company screwing up and allowing surface run off water to contaminate the well.
So Sault, is one of the direct subsidies that you enjoy filling up your car? Heating your home? Wearing fleece on your eco-treks? Paddling a plastic white water canoe?
So like I'm sorry for you guys losing your lives or health or business or whatever, but it's important to remember what's important. Shareholder equity. If you don't like losing everything - just leave and stop complaining. These sick people are just so selfish. Suck it up or GO! Venezuela and Cuba have refuge programs, and stable governments. If you're really lucky Canada might let you in.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf only I had a dollar for every time I've heard these selfish little people complaining about hard working, job creating corporations. God knows the only thing that can get things going again is another bubble.
What I see, in the end, is a sort of rivalry between oil/gas companies and environmental groups, where the oil/gas companies like to underestimate the problems and the environmentalists like to blow everything out of proportion by turning the whole issue into propaganda.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou're rather short-sighted and vulgar. I understand your argument, because, I have used it many times myself when you hear of forest fires and landslides destroying fancy homes. Why go settle on top of a hill unless you're, say, for example, a coffee planter.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut, to say 'sick people are selfish' is ridiculous. Obviously, you don't seem to have a grasp of the innate drive of a human being to survive, no matter what. So, if it means complaining about what they believe is the cause of their deteriorating health, then that's how it goes. Those guys aren't scientists either.
One can easily ask you to go find a job somewhere else. If I'm paying to live where I want to, I get to have a say in what goes around the area that may affect my health.
It's a complex issue. Siding with one party because you relate to them doesn't really help. The argument you make about job-creating corporations is just as much valid as the one made by 'selfish' sick people.
The point here is to draw more conclusive evidence to correlate drilling/fracking to health and environmental issues. And then comes the real problem: What after?
Asking people to 'go away' is not a solution. It's silly and counter-productive.
Besides, we all know that if a scientist tells you something hurts, it may not always be true. But, at the same time, an expert who claims no correlation between two problems may also be wrong. The least we can all be is open-minded to both sides.
Unfotunately I don't have time to read the entire article but Wallace-Babbs symptons sound very much like an allergic reaction to something growing in her fields. Something new maybe growing or it's just a bumper crop of something she's already allergic to.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article is 11 screens long, but, at the very beginning of it there is a glaring logical fallacy that makes you reluctant to go through the rest. The Colorado woman suffered, reportedly, from gas condensate. Condensate has nothing to do with the production method, be it fracking or traditional, it is always there. So do those fracking-related issues also apply to traditional production? If yes how come we are being told so only today, after a hundred years of production on a massive scale?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOddly enough, the most neutral and well balanced reporting on fracking that I've seen in ages is in the Sept 2011 (?) issue of Popular Mechanics. It's a sad day when Popular Mechanics beats the pants off of SCIAM in terms of understanding what science is supposed to be all about.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo what does hydraulic fracturing have to do with the gas condensate that was leaking from a production tank that caused Ms. Wallace-Babb’s sickness? The problem was due to a leak in the production tank on the surface, and not down the well in the subsurface where the frac occurred (probably months earlier). Why bring fracking into this discussion of her sickness at all? It’s a non sequitur. Do the authors know that this well was indeed fracked? To me, it’s clear that the authors, and their editors, are ill-informed about what they’re talking about --drilling and well completion operations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI live in Alberta, Canada. Fracking has been done here for half a century, I have never heard of a single case of either poisoning or serious upset with the process. I am a rural landowner with no interest in the petro industry. I have no reason to lie about it for my own benefit in other words and though there are sometimes odours from well drilling for a few days when they must flare until able to close the well head, that is about it. One year a very old 1947 vintage well blew its spud valves and there were emissions which I myself reported, It was shut in that night. Though there were visible clouds of petroleum/ water effluent blowing by, no one was injured by it and it was a non event. ONLY hydrogen sulfide emissions are highly toxic and immediate and they are not condensates nor liquid. They are more toxic than cyanide and thus when one smells them it is in a very low dilution. Strong concentrations just kill you dead. No emissions of this sort is permitted anywhere in North America of course. Condensates are pretty mundane and are rarely much more than paint thinner equivalents. If however companies inject benzene, that is a different story as that is a known carcinogen but the symptoms described sound like something extraordinary and unlikely to be mysterious if it were the result of the condensates at the tank farm described. It would be an open and shut case if this were in fact caused by any chemicals from the site and a 1000 metre distance makes all of it implausible. Sorry, but I do not buy much of the rumour and fear mongering and reminds me of those that want wi-fi banned from schools and believe also that cell towers are the work of the devil. I am naturally concerned with air and ground pollution as I live right near the Devonian Oil and Gas Fields but I sleep well at night and am not concerned that there is a diabolical plot to cover up emissions and pollution. The companies that work around here do their best and their best can be pretty good. All rolled their eyes at the disaster and incompetence in the Gulf but that is the exception and not the rule. It is also true that there are a lot of desparately ill people who do have medical problems that if there were a good health system in place in the US perhaps these mysteries would have been solved. Consider the context of such problems in the complexion of that and solve the latter and perhaps it will solve the former concerns also. Research is needed of course and medical attention for such sad cases but not blind blame.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBesides science, another area that is lagging is the court system. Particularly, we've seen how the courts have lagged behind when it comes to meting out remedies in oil spills (BP, Exxon), gas leaks, etc. This is a shame as a majority of injury suits have to do with toxic exposure, especially in a work-related environment. Thus we have: science lagging, and courts lagging even behind science. See also: http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2011/09/23/top-common-personal-injury-claims/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell that answers one question now I need an informative site about, <a href="http://www.blackdogdrilling.com">water well drilling</a>
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow, it seems like I just directed a summer camp right outside that area. Is that like <a href="http://www.budswaterwells.ca/en/services.html">water well drilling</a>, or something? I hope that it wasn't too dangerous.
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