Pennsylvania Report Left Out Data on Poisons in Water Near Gas
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New York Times
2 November 2012
By Jon Hurdle
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/us/pennsylvania-omitted-poison-data-in-water-report.html?ref=naturalgas
PHILADELPHIA — Pennsylvania officials reported incomplete test
results that omitted data on some toxic metals that were found in
drinking water taken from a private well near a natural gas
drilling site, according to legal documents released this week.
The documents were part of a lawsuit claiming that natural gas
extraction through a method known as hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, and storage of the resulting wastewater at a site in
southwestern Pennsylvania has contaminated drinking water and
sickened seven plaintiffs who live nearby.
In a deposition, a scientist for the Pennsylvania Department of
Environmental Protection testified that her laboratory tested for
a range of metals but reported results for only some of them
because the department’s oil and gas division had not requested
results from the full range of tests.
The scientist, Taru Upadhyay, the technical director of the
department’s Bureau of Laboratories, said the metals found in the
water sample but not reported to either the oil and gas division
or to the homeowner who requested the tests, included copper,
nickel, zinc and titanium, all of which may damage the health of
people exposed to them, according to the federal Agency for Toxic
Substances and Disease Registry.
Ms. Upadhyay said that the bureau did not arbitrarily decide to
withhold those results. “It was not requested by our client for
that particular test, so we did — it is not on our final report,”
she said in a deposition on Sept. 26.
Another state environmental official, John Carson, a water quality
specialist, testified in a separate deposition that he had
received no training in what metals are found in the fluid used in
fracking. Critics say that fracking contaminates public water
supplies.
The defendants include Range Resources, a leading developer of
natural gas in Pennsylvania, and 16 other companies serving the
gas industry.
Kendra Smith, a lawyer for Loren Kiskadden, whose water was tested
by the Environmental Protection Department, contended that the
department purposely avoided reporting the full results of its
tests of Mr. Kiskadden’s water in June 2011 and January 2012,
after using a method established by the federal Environmental
Protection Agency known as 200.7. The method tests for 24 metals,
only eight of which were reported, Ms. Smith said.
“Testimony of Ms. Taru Upadhyay was quite alarming,” Ms. Smith
wrote Thursday in a letter to Michael Krancer, the state
environmental secretary. “She revealed what can only be
characterized as a deliberate procedure” by the oil and gas
division and the Bureau of Laboratories “to withhold critical
water testing results.”
Kevin Sunday, a spokesman for the department, said Ms. Smith had
failed to substantiate her “outrageous contention” that the
department omitted key markers in tests for substances that
typically occur in water samples from drilling in the Marcellus
Shale, a rock formation rich in natural gas.
“The battery of analyses we order during investigations are
thorough and give us the results we need to make sound
determinations, which we fully stand behind,” he said in a
statement.
Mr. Sunday said oil and gas division officials wanted to see only
the results they deemed relevant to determining whether drinking
water was being contaminated by Marcellus Shale gas drilling and
production. The remaining metals were present in concentrations
that were below federal standards for safe drinking water or had
no such standards attached to them, and so were seen as not being
useful to the analysis of whether gas drilling was affecting
ground water, he said.
Ms. Smith noted that the metals not reported in Mr. Kiskadden’s
tests have been identified by industry studies as being found as
contaminants in water produced from oil and gas operations.
In the suit, filed in the Washington County Court of Common Pleas
in May, Mr. Kiskadden lists health complaints — including nausea,
bone pain, breathing difficulties and severe headaches — that he
says are consistent with exposure to “hazardous chemicals and
gases through air and water.”
Toxicology tests on Mr. Kiskadden and the other six plaintiffs who
live within a mile of a Range Resources drill site and wastewater
pond in Amwell Township have found the presence of toluene,
benzene and arsenic in their bodies, according to the complaint.
The Amwell site is among those the E.P.A. is using in its national
investigation into whether fracking affects groundwater and
drinking water.
Companies like Range Resources insist that chemicals used in
fracking cannot enter public water sources because they are
insulated from aquifers by multilayered steel and concrete casings
and are deployed a mile or more underground beneath thousands of
feet of impervious rock.
State Representative Jesse J. White, a Democrat who represents
part of Washington County, accused the Environmental Protection
Department of manipulating water tests to hide what he called
“adverse results” from gas-drilling operations.
Range Resources did not return calls seeking comment, but the
Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, said that the state
lab had been endorsed as “well-managed, efficient and highly
functional” by the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 3, 2012,
on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline:
Pennsylvania Report Left Out Data on Poisons in Water Near Gas
Site.