Prank Signs on Rest Area Drinking Fountains Target Gas Drilling
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
27 June 2011
By Don Hopey
The professionally printed sign bearing the banner message "SAFE TO
DRINK" and affixed to a drinking fountain in the Pennsylvania
Turnpike's Midway Service Plaza looked official at first glance, even
if it seemed to state the obvious.
But something didn't look quite right to Tonya Markiewicz, who stopped
in for a drink June 8 while on a trip to Philadelphia and New York
City, and it had nothing to do with the stream of cold water arching
from the fountain.
The message of the sign, which bore what purported to be a Pennsylvania
Department of Environmental Protection logo in the upper left hand
corner and has since been discovered in several other turnpike service
plazas, was coyly equivocal. It read: "This water is most likely safe.
If you have any concerns about contamination due to hydraulic
fracturing, expose water to flame."
That procedure -- unsafe at best and potentially fatal at worst if the
water contained ignitable concentrations of methane -- was depicted in
a graphic that shows a hand holding a lit match under a water faucet.
That raised a big red flag for Ms. Markiewicz.
"I didn't want to try to drink the water after seeing that sign," said
Ms. Markiewicz, a Braddock resident, who took a photograph of it.
"After reading closely it occurred to me it was posted as part of an
activist project, but it was so well done. It gets right at you when
you're about to consume the water."
At the bottom of the sign, posted by an as yet unknown activist
prankster, was a list of symptoms from drinking contaminated water,
including "headaches, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, hair loss, itchy
skin and kidney failure," and a DEP phone number to call for more
information.
Kevin Sunday, a DEP spokesman, confirmed that the not-so-subtly
subversive sign was not posted by the department. He noted that its
appearance at the Midway Service Plaza near Harrisburg roughly
coincided with the June 7 rally in Harrisburg by hundreds of people
protesting Marcellus Shale gas well drilling and development.
"That's not from DEP," Mr. Sunday said last week, noting that the "E"
in the DEP logo on the sign was different from the DEP's real logo.
Bill Capone, a Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission spokesman, said last
week that after inquiries by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the bogus DEP
signs were found on water fountains in "most of the service plazas west
of Harrisburg." He said they were probably up on the drinking fountains
for almost two weeks and viewed by hundreds of turnpike travelers and
service plaza attendants who didn't raise questions about its message,
which he termed, "odd, curious and somewhat alarming."
"We found them in Somerset and New Stanton and others, and we are
having them removed," he said.
He said not only do the signs appear official but the contact number
for more information is a working DEP phone line that belonged to Katy
Gresh, the department's spokeswoman in its Southwest District office in
Pittsburgh before her promotion to head the DEP's Harrisburg media
office in March.
The signs' water contamination test, using a lighted flame, is a
reference to problems caused by faulty well casing and drilling
operations at Marcellus Shale gas wells in Dimock, Susquehanna County,
that allowed high concentrations of methane gas from shallower
formations to contaminate well water at several homes. A homeowner
there was able to ignite his tap water, a dramatically explosive scene
shown in the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary film "Gasland" by Josh
Fox, who, coincidentally, spoke at the anti-drilling rally.
Myron Arnowitt, state director for Clean Water Action, one of the
environmental organizations that helped organize the rally, said last
week that he hadn't seen the prank signs and doesn't endorse them, but
thought them "an amusing way to raise some public awareness."
"Of course it's not a good idea to give the public misleading
information on water quality and we would want any signs to be clearly
factual," he said. "And as far as I know, any of the activists I've
been in touch with, no one is taking credit for it."
Don Hopey: dhopey@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1983.