Fracking With Food: How the Natural Gas Industry Poisons Cows and Crops
By Byard Duncan,
July 30, 2010
On the morning of May 5, 2010, nobody could say for sure how much
fluid had leaked from the 650,000-gallon disposal pit near a natural
gas drill pad in Shippen Township, Penn. -- not the employees on site;
not the farmers who own the property; not the DEP rep who came to
investigate.
But there were signs of trouble:
Vegetation had died in a 30’ by 40’ patch of pasture nearby. A “wet
area” of indeterminate toxicity had crept out about 200 feet, its
puddles shimmering with an oily iridescence. And the cattle: 16 cows,
four heifers and eight calves were all found near water containing the
heavy metal strontium. Strontium is preferentially deposited in cows’
bones at varying levels depending on things like age and growth rates.
Since slaughtering 28 cattle on mere suspicion can devastate a farmer
financially, nobody knows what, if anything, the cows ingested. They're
now sitting in quarantine.
The Shippen Township incident isn’t the first time hydraulic
fracturing, a controversial gas extraction technique that involves
shooting water, sand and a mix of chemicals into the ground to release
gas, has been blamed for livestock damage. But for farmers in the
northeast whose land sits atop the gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation,
it is a wake-up call – an event that raises questions about fracking’s
compatibility with food production.
“I’ve already heard from a couple of customers that they’re concerned
about the location of a drill site near my farm – in terms of the
quality and safety of my food,” said Greg Swartz, a farmer in
Pennsylvania’ s Upper Delaware River Valley. Swartz, who sells all his
products locally, fears that leaked fracking fluid could seep into his
soil, bioaccumulate in his plants and cost him his organic
certification. “There very well may be a point where I am not
comfortable selling vegetables from the farm anymore because I’m
concerned about water and air contamination issues,” he said.
Air contamination – specifically the production of ozone – is what
worries Ken Jaffe, another farmer in Meredith, NY. When excess methane
gas, coupled with volatile compounds like benzene, toluene and xylene,
are released into the air in a process the gas industry calls “venting,”
it can inhibit lung function and wreak havoc on plant life. In Sublette
County, WY, fracking has been blamed for ozone levels that are
comparable to those in Los Angeles.
Without healthy pasture, Jaffe said, his cows won’t grow. Which means
his beef won’t sell. “The economics of my operation are in part based
on how many animals I can graze per acre and get them to grow fat,” he
told me. “And if I have less grass and less protein and less clover,
then I have a problem.”
Over the past two years, horizontal hydraulic fracturing has garnered
a lot of attention. Advocates of the practice believe the staggeringly
high amounts of gas it makes accessible could serve as a
“cleaner-burning” bridge between fossil fuels and renewable energy
sources. But critics blame fracking for a whole range of problems --
house explosions, flammable drinking water, chronic sickness, crop
failure and air contamination, to name a few. In 2005, the Bush
administration introduced the Energy Policy Act, which exempted
hydraulic fracturing from several key environmental regulations,
including parts of the Clean Water Act and CERCLA (Superfund). Since
then, drilling operations (along with corresponding environmental
problems) have begun to extend like spiderwebs across states like
Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, and Pennsylvania.
For all their concerns, farmers like Swartz and Jaffe comprise only one
side of a larger debate over drilling. Leasing one’s land, after all,
carries the promise of a comfortable retirement -- sometimes even
millions of dollars. And with milk prices making small-scale dairy
operations harder and harder to maintain, many farmers are looking for
the light at the end of the pipeline.
Some have found it. According to one Penn State study, Pennsylvania
made a $2.95 billion profit from drilling in 2008 alone; the state also
gained 53,000 new jobs. And in the Windsor/Deposit area of New York, 300
property owners have signed a lease with XTO Energy that covers 37,000
acres and is worth $90 million (notably, the lease contains a provision
that indemnifies drillers against damage to livestock). Though New York
is still waiting on its Department of Environmental Conservation for the
go-ahead to start horizontal drilling, much of the state’s topography
has already been carved, cordoned and auctioned off to eager gas
companies.
“The way things are now financially, it would be hard to turn
[leasing] down,” said Richard Dirie, a dairy farmer near Youngsville,
NY. “Farming is definitely a physical occupation. You definitely reach
an age where -- I don’t care if you want to do it or not -- you just
can’t do it anymore.”
Dirie has not yet leased his land. But at 59, he’s not sure he would
reject an offer if it came his way. “I keep saying, ‘I hope they don’t
come and talk to me.’ That way I don’t have to make a decision, you
know?”
Gas drilling raises a lot of questions for farmers short on options.
Is it worth the risk to retire comfortably? What are the implications
for future use of the land? Perhaps most importantly: How does fracking
affect crops, livestock and, by extension, the people who consume them?
Answers are scarce.
“There’s a lot going on out there and we don’t know most of it,” Swartz said.
The Knowledge Vacuum
It’s with good reason that Jaffe describes fracking’s relationship to
food as “a knowledge vacuum.” Pennsylvania’ s Department of Agriculture
can’t say for sure whether or not any cows in the state came into
contact with fracking fluid before the Shippen Township incident in May.
Nor can it guarantee similar things won’t happen in the future. “We
hope that this is the exception rather than the rule,” said spokesman
Justin Fleming. “We hope that this is an extraordinarily rare
occurrence.”
A representative for the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service --
the organization in charge of testing milk and meat for chemicals –
neglected to comment on whether or not heavy metals like the strontium
found in Shippen Township were considered “adulterated” under the
Federal Meat Inspection Act. He also did not immediately comment on
whether naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORMS) -- known to
surface after a well has been fractured – fall under the act’s clause
banning meat from being “intentionally subjected to radiation.”
Scientists, too, are grappling for information. Though there exists
an increasingly comprehensive catalog of knowledge about water problems
related to fracking, little work has been done to determine how the
practice affects animals and crops.
“I see very little research being done on cows,” said Theo Colborn, founder of
the non-profit Endocrine Disruption Exchange.
Because animal testing with many chemicals known to be involved in
fracking has historically failed to deal with instances of a) limited
exposure and b) prolonged exposure, no one really knows what the
potential health effects are – for cows or humans.
“It’s very difficult to deal with this problem,” Colborn said. “Who has the
money? Who can perform the tests?”
Certainly not the federal EPA. Earlier this year, it announced plans
to launch a two-year study of hydraulic fracturing’s effects on water.
According to an EPA spokesperson, no part of that study will deal with
plants or animals.
And yet, there is significant anecdotal evidence that suggests
fracking can seriously compromise food. In April 2009, 19 head of cattle
dropped dead after ingesting an unknown substance near a gas drilling
rig in northern Louisiana. Seven months before that, a tomato farmer in
Avella, Penn. reported a series of problems with the water and soil on
his property after drilling started: he found arsenic levels 2,600 times
what is recommended, as well as dangerously high levels of benzene and
naphthalene – all known fracking components. And in May 2009, one farmer
in Clearview, Penn. told Reuters he thought that gas drilling
operations had killed four of his cows.
Occurrences like these aren’t just limited to the eastern U.S. In
Colorado, a veterinarian named Elizabeth Chandler has documented
numerous fertility problems in livestock near active drill sites,
including false pregnancy, smaller litters and stillbirths in goats;
reduced birth rates in hogs; and delayed heat cycles in dogs.
In another case, Rick Roles, a resident of Rifle, Colorado, reported
that his horses became sterile after three disposal pits were installed
near his home. Like those in Chandler’s study, Roles’ goats began
yielding fewer offspring and producing more stillbirths. Roles himself
suffered from swelling of the hands, numbness and body pain – symptoms,
he said, that subsided when he stopped eating vegetables from his garden
and drinking his goats’ milk.
Actual scientific studies are few and far between, but what’s out
there paints a pretty damning picture. One, titled “Livestock Poisoning
from Oil Field Drilling Fluids, Muds and Additives,” appeared in the
journal Veterinary & Human Toxicology in 1991. It examined
seven instances where oil and gas wells had poisoned and/or killed
livestock. In one such case, green liquid was found leaking from a tank
near a gas well site. The study’s authors found 13 dead cows, whose
“postmortem blood was chocolate-brown in color.” Poisoning cases
involving carbon disulfide, turpentine, toluene, xylene, ethylene, and
complex solvent mixtures “are frequently encountered,” the study
concluded.
Another study, this one conducted in Alberta, Canada in 2001,
investigated the effects of gas flaring on the reproductive systems of
cattle near active gas and oil fields. Its conclusions: “One of the most
consistent associations in the analysis was between exposure to sour
gas flaring facilities [as opposed to “sweet” ones, which contain more
aromatic hydrocarbons, aliphatic hydrocarbons and carbon particles] and
an increased risk of stillbirth. In 3 of the 4 years studied, cumulative
exposure to sour flares was associated with an increased risk of
stillbirth.”
'Rare Cases'
When questioned about fracking and food, America’s Natural Gas Alliance,
an organization composed of the nation’s leading gas production and
exploration companies, neglected to get into any specifics. Instead, it
offered this response:
“In rare cases where incidents have occurred, companies have worked
with the appropriate regulatory authority to identify, contain and
correct the issue, and to implement measures to ensure they don’t recur.
ANGA member companies understand and respect people’s concerns about
the safety of their water and air, and we are committed to engaging in
dialogue with community members, policymakers and stakeholders to talk
about the safety of natural gas production and the opportunities natural
gas offers communities across our country.”
Environmental groups have a markedly different perspective on the
issue. “There’s a lot of violations that happen out there that are never
documented,” said Wes Gillingham, program director of Catskill Mountainkeeper.
When we talked, Gillingham took out an enormous aerial photo of a
drill rig. One disposal pit was surrounded by gray blotches of moisture:
leaked fracking fluid. “The stuff that’s coming up – this stuff is
getting into the environment,” he said, pointing at the blotches.
“You’ve got heavy metals and normally occurring radioactive materials,
all of which bioaccumulate in a grazer. That stuff is coming up in the
grass where the grass is growing.”
So what sorts of concerns should people have about eating animals
that have themselves ingested xylene, benzene, heavy metals, radioactive
material? Gillingham, like so many farmers, federal officials and
industry reps, can’t say for sure.
“It’s a serious issue in terms of potential contamination getting to
market and nobody knowing about it,” he said. “It’s an important piece
of research that needs to be done.”
http://www.alternet .org/story/ 147634/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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