There are more than 6,000 active gas wells in Pennsylvania. And
every week, those drilling sites generate scores of complaints from the state’s
residents, including many about terrible odors and contaminated water.
How the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection handles those
complaints has worsened the already raw and angry divide between fearful
residents and the state regulators charged with overseeing the burgeoning gas
drilling industry.
For instance, the agency’s own manual for dealing
with complaints is explicit about what to do if someone reports concerns about
a noxious odor, but is not at that very moment experiencing the smell: “DO NOT
REGISTER THE COMPLAINT.”
When a resident does report a real-time alarm about the air quality in or
around their home, the agency typically has two weeks to conduct an
investigation. If no odor is detected when investigators arrive on the scene,
the case is closed.
“The time that it takes them to respond is something people are concerned
about,” said Matt Walker, a community outreach director for the Clean Air Council in
Pennsylvania, an environmental advocacy organization. Waiting a few days
to two weeks to respond to odor complaints, he said, is “way too long.”
George Jugovic, who served as a regional director for the DEP until 2012, agrees.
Jugovic said the department is only set up to respond quickly to potential
emergencies.
“It’s a problem,” said Jugovic, who since leaving the department has served as
counsel to a local environmental group.
Rebecca Roter said she experienced the problem first
hand last year. On a cool April evening in 2013, Roter
said she was cooking dinner in her Susquehanna County home when a “nauseating”
smell overwhelmed her. Roter said she walked out to
her front porch, pulled her gray hoodie over her nose and mouth and quickly
drove her car to the site of a nearby gas well being fracked.
Roter
said she saw plumes of dust rising into the air. That evening, Roter said she wrote to the DEP, recounting the events of
the day and requesting that they send out a field agent to follow up. Four days
later, the agency sent out an investigator.
The DEP later notified Roter in writing that
the investigator had found “nothing out of line” and that it had concluded that
“the operation appeared to be conducted as per standard procedure.”
Roter
said she is convinced the investigator simply didn’t detect any smell when he
responded 96 hours after her report. The odor has recurred repeatedly in the
months since, she said, and she has no idea how alarmed to be.
The concerns of residents like Roter are
not likely to be eased by a study published today in Reviews on
Environmental Health, a peer reviewed journal. The study, researchers say, confirms what
they have long suspected about natural gas operations — that emission
levels from these sites spike drastically over short periods of time, making it
hard to assess the true threat to people’s health.
Researchers at the Southwest
Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project
collected real-time readings of particulate matter — soot, dust and
chemicals — in 14 homes in Washington County, a heavily drilled part of
the state. They found repeated episodes during which measures of contaminated dust
rose sharply, to dangerous levels in the course of a day.
David Brown, the lead researcher on the study, said that a person
in such circumstances could get what amounted to a full day’s exposure in half
an hour.
The American
Petroleum Institute did not respond to repeated
requests for comment. The Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association declined to comment on the Environmental Health Project’s study
but said that the oil and gas industry is “heavily regulated” and that the
association’s member companies “strive to comply with numerous federal and
state air quality related rules, regulations, and reporting requirements.”
Still, residents like Roter, who has
over 20 gas wells within a mile of her house, fear that the exposure to
contaminants could quickly add up. It’s one of the reasons, she says, she is frustrated
by the DEP’s response to her complaints.
DEP spokeswoman Lisa Kasianowitz defended the department’s performance
on complaint investigations.
“DEP has been prompt and responsive in regards to air quality
concerns surrounding the natural gas industry,” she said in response to
questions from ProPublica. She added that the
department had recently toughened oversight of the industry, and that oil and
gas companies were no longer exempt from complying with basic permitting
requirements.
Kasianowitz provided ProPublica with
some recent statistics on complaints and inspections, and she promised to make
department’s officials available to be interviewed. Later, after ProPublica filed a freedom of information request seeking
more detailed information on dozens of the department’s investigations,
Kasianowitz said the officials could not be interviewed.
The information provided by the DEP shows that between 2011 and
2014, the department received over 2,000 complaints about oil and natural gas
operations. Water quality issues featured prominently in the list of
complaints. The DEP also registered 110 of the complaints as odor issues.
In Southwestern Pennsylvania, a corner of the state that has seen extensive
fracking operations, there were 617 registered complaints over those years,
including 47 involving troubling odors.
In one-third of the cases that were investigated, inspectors
reported that no odors were detected at the time of inspection and closed the
case. Inspectors typically visited residents within a week of filing the
complaint.
In only a handful of cases did the inspectors detect odors during
their visit and follow up by citing the company involved. The citations, known
as a Notice of Violation, required the operators to correct the problem, but
did not carry fines.
ProPublica’s request for more details on the investigations and violations is
still pending.
John Quigley, a former director of the Pennsylvania Department of
Conservation and Natural Resources, said the need for greater transparency in
the oversight of the fracking industry was real and urgent.
***
In 2007, Pennsylvania produced close to 10 billion cubic feet
of gas from the Marcellus formation. By 2012, that number had grown to over two trillion cubic feet. With this dramatic increase in gas production, concerns
about environmental pollution and public health have risen sharply and the DEP has
become a target for anger among worried residents.
Activists and environmental groups have accused the agency of
being overly deferential to the gas industry, and defensive and slow moving in
its dealings with the public.
“It was very top down, very secretive and
paranoid about who the enemies were,” said Jugovic,
the former agency official, who left the department when Corbett succeeded
Rendell as governor. “The control on information was significant.”
Earlier this month, Chris Abruzzo, the
current head of the DEP, publicly acknowledged criticism
about the agency’s transparency issues and said he wanted to change public
perception of the agency.
Critics of the state’s dealings with the gas industry have long
highlighted the history of financial ties between the industry and state
officials, including former Democratic
Gov. Ed Rendell and current Republican Gov. Tom
Corbett.
Last year the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit watchdog
organization focused on the intersection of government and business, released a report on what it
called Pennsylvania’s
revolving door between the government and the
gas industry. It concluded that at least 20 DEP employees have also held energy
industry jobs either before or after their agency jobs.
Gov. Corbett’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
***
ProPublica obtained an internal complaints manual used by the DEP to
maintain a consistent approach in dealing with environmental complaints. The
manual directs staff to assign routine air quality issues a priority level of
2. The category comprises complaints that are “serious but not likely to
escalate within 7-10 days but pose an existing or potential adverse impact on
the environment or public health.”
According to the internal complaint manual, DEP complaint
coordinators, who answer calls on regional complaint hotlines, are responsible
for assigning response priority levels.
In 2012, the Clean Air Council, which has been tracking the DEP’s
enforcement of regulations related to air quality, sent a letter to the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, complaining about the alleged shortcomings of Pennsylvania’s
oversight.
The council said it had been contacted by many residents who
asserted that complaints they had filed with the DEP had never been fully
investigated. In some cases, the council claimed, residents had said the DEP’s
complaint hotline had not been working when they called.
“People have been told
things like ‘stop calling’ and ‘if you’re air is bad, then maybe you shouldn’t
go outside,’” said Walker, the council’s community outreach director.
Kasianowitz did not respond to ProPublica’s
questions about allegations of inadequate or unprofessional behavior by agency
staff.
***
Gas drilling operations include several processes that release
toxic chemicals into the air. The type and level of chemicals released varies
from hour to hour depending on the type of activity taking place on the well
pad.
Despite this, researchers and regulators seeking to assess the
health threat of fracking operations have typically used measurement devices
that capture air emissions over longer periods of time, often 24 hours.
These levels are then, in many cases, compared to the EPA’s
National Ambient Air Quality Standards, which were created over 40 years ago at
a time when large, 24-hour-a-day sources of pollution such as coal fire plants
and steel mills were dominant.
“You can’t use 24-hour standards if the health effect occurs
within a few minutes,” said Brown, the lead author of the study released
Friday.
The question of whether episodic bursts of contaminated air from
fracking could pose an unappreciated but real health menace was first explored
in West Virginia in 2010.
West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection asked
Michael McCawley, then a professor at West Virginia
University’s Health Sciences Center, to study air emissions from
fracking operations in the state. McCawley found the
contaminants he detected at fracking sites fluctuated over a wide range.
Those findings mirror those in the Pennsylvania study published on
Tuesday.
Research
has shown that fracking operations can release an array of toxic chemicals — some
carcinogenic, others capable, at significant enough levels, of causing serious
neurological and respiratory damage. The worry, Brown says, is that these
chemicals are attached to the microscopic dust particles that he detected and
can reach the bloodstream after being inhaled.
McCawley and
Brown say that the wide fluctuations that they’re picking up on are also attributable
to operators not using the best available technology to limit possibly harmful
emissions.
State
and federal regulations, for instance, do not require operators to use
equipment that would capture all emissions during drilling. Often, gases are
vented or flared into the air. The regulations also don’t consider activities,
like diesel truck traffic, that degrade air quality at the fracking site.
“The law requires best technology,” said McCawley,
and the data, he says, is telling us that the gas drilling industry is “not
working according to the strict definition of the law.”
