Leaked EPA Documents Expose Decades-Old Effort to Hide Dangers of Natural Gas Extraction

by Democracy Now, March 4, 2013

Efforts by lawmakers and regulators to force the federal government to better police the natural gas drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," have been thwarted for the past 25 years, according to an exposé in the New York Times. Studies by scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on fracking have been repeatedly narrowed in scope by superiors, and important findings have been removed under pressure from the industry. The news comes as the EPA is conducting a broad study of the risks of natural gas drilling with preliminary results scheduled to be delivered next year. Joining us is Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, a firm that tracks environmental spills and releases across the country, based in Ithaca, New York, where fracking is currently taking place. [includes rush transcript]

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Efforts by lawmakers and regulators to force the federal government to better police [the] natural gas drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," have been thwarted for the past 25 years, according to an exposé in the past week in the New York Times. Studies by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency on fracking have been repeatedly narrowed in scope by superiors, and important findings have been removed under pressure from the industry, according to the Times. For example, last year, the EPA planned to call for a moratorium on fracking in the New York City watershed, but the advice was removed from the publicly released letter sent to officials in New York. The news comes as the EPA is conducting a broad study of the risks of natural gas drilling, with preliminary results scheduled to be delivered next year.

AMY GOODMAN: Walter Hang is the president of Toxics Targeting, a firm that tracks environmental spills and releases across the country. He’s joining us from Ithaca. And joining us viaDemocracy Now! video stream is Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Gasland. In it, Josh travels the United States to meet people whose lives have been impacted by natural gas drilling. The film was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival last year.

But let’s start with Walter Hang. Walter, talk about the significance of this exposé and the information about the industry thwarting EPA’s efforts to regulate fracking for over a quarter of a century.

WALTER HANG: Well, the most important thing is that the natural gas industry has said all along that there’s never been a confirmed problem with horizontal hydrofracking in Marcellus Shale. They’ve said this practice has been used for decades, it’s safe, it’s not problematic. The first installment of the New York Times series basically brought to light that in the autumn of 2008, there was so much natural gas drilling wastewater being dumped into municipal treatment plants along the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, and these plants were not designed, constructed or maintained in any way to take out the very high salt content, the toxic chemicals associated with petroleum, or the radioactive nucleotides. And so, this contamination was going into the river in such incredible volumes that essentially it impacted a 70-mile stretch of the river, and 850,000 people didn’t have any drinking water. Subsequent studies show that actually the water became brackish. They started to find salt-loving diatoms flourishing in the water.

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