As natural gas drilling rises in Pennsylvania, a new report from a nonprofit journalism center reveals that authorities in at least three states are now connecting contaminated drinking water to the fracturing of rock during gas extraction.
Bay Daily back in January wrote about the small township of Dimock in northeastern Pennsylvania, where a family’s water well exploded on New Year’s day because of methane released by drilling.
Officials with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection concluded that methane in the drinking water of several homes in that area north of Scranton came from drilling. The drilling often uses a process called “fracking,” in which water is forced into the ground to fracture the rock and push the gas out.
Now, a new online publication called ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom formed to serve the public interest, reports that these types of complaints about drinking water are not just arising in Pennsylvania – but also in Ohio, Colorado and elsewhere.
“A string of documented cases of gas escaping into drinking water -- not just in Pennsylvania but across North America -- is raising new concerns about the hidden costs of this economic tide and strengthening arguments across the country that drilling can put drinking water at risk," ProPublica writes.
"Near Cleveland, Ohio, an entire house exploded in late 2007 after gas seeped into its water well. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources later issued a 153-page report that blamed a nearby gas well's faulty concrete casing and hydraulic fracturing -- a deep-drilling process that shoots millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into the ground under explosive pressure -- for pushing methane into an aquifer and causing the explosion.”
In Garfield County, Colorado, a new study concluded that natural gas drilling hurt the quality of drinking water in dozens of wells, according to ProPublica.
"It challenges the view that natural gas… is isolated from water supplies by its extreme depth," said Judith Jordan, the oil and gas liaison for Garfield County, who has worked as a hydrogeologist with DuPont and as a lawyer with Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection. "It is highly unlikely that methane would have migrated through natural faults and fractures and coincidentally arrived in domestic wells at the same time oil and gas development started, after having been down there ... for over 65 million years."
In the Chesapeake region, drilling in Pennsylvania has soared in recent years, with 4,280 gas and oil drilling permits issued by the state in 2003 and 7,924 in 2008, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
How much is this boom threatening our water? Write in to Bay Daily if you have any opinions or facts to contribute.
Here is the version of the story that ran in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
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