Put down your lunch. Wait until all the children are gone from the room. Then watch this disturbing video by The New York Times about air pollution from natural gas drilling and its possible health effects, on both people and (gulp) newborn baby goats.
It's a good time to take a look at the regulation of air emissions from drilling sites, as Pennsylvania's new governor proposes to suspend and reconsider key air pollution controls governing the drilling industry, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.
Anyone interested in the gold rush of gas extraction in shale formations across the U.S. should read the investigation published by The New York Times on Sunday. The Times uncovered some fascinating new details about how often drilling wastewater is released, only partially treated, back into rivers while it still has naturally occurring radioactive material (picked up underground) in concentrations hundreds of times higher than would be allowed by federal drinking water standards.
UPDATE: On March 2, The Times reported that while drilling companies boast about how often they recycle waste water, these claims are inflated -- and polluted water mixed with radioactive materials is sometimes just dumped on roads, where it can run off into streams or drinking water supplies.
True, people do not drink wastewater directly. And even wastewater dumped into rivers or onto roads would become diluted, so the human health impact of this radioactivity is unclear.
But it is interesting that waste treatment plants that receive frack water do not generally treat the water to remove radioactive materials before releasing it to rivers, according to The Times. And sometimes downstream there are cities and towns that get their drinking water from these waterways, according to The Times.
For example, in Elk County, Pa, the Ridgway Borough’s public sewage treatment plant is receiving about 20,000 gallons of drilling waste per day, according to the newspaper. The operator of the plant told The Times that the facility was not equipped to remove radioactive material and was not required to test for it.
“Documents filed by drillers with the state, show that in 2009 this facility was sent water from wells whose wastewater was laced with radium at 275 times the drinking-water standard and with other types of radiation at more than 780 times the standard,” the Times reported.
Another fascinating fact concerns the air pollution that can rise from natural gas drilling.
“Air pollution caused by natural-gas drilling is a growing threat, too,” the Times reports. “Wyoming, for example, failed in 2009 to meet federal standards for air quality for the first time in its history partly because of the fumes containing benzene and toluene from roughly 27,000 wells, the vast majority drilled in the past five years."
"In sparsely populated Sublette County in Wyoming, which has some of the highest concentrations of wells, vapors reacting to sunlight have contributed to levels of ozone higher than those recorded in Houston and Los Angeles.”
Wow. Who would have imagined the cowboys of Wyoming riding through LA-style smog? I'm not sure this is the future envisioned by advocates of this "clean" fuel.
By Tom Pelton
Chesapeake Bay Foundation
Air pollution can be defined as the addition of undesirable materials into the atmosphere either due to natural phenomena or due to human activity on earth that adversely affect the quality of air and hence affect the life on the Planet Earth.
http://www.greenliving9.com/air-pollution-facts-air-pollution-levels.html
Posted by: Christino | 05/16/2011 at 07:21 AM
As long as the world consumes more energy than the planet can provide, water pollution will take a back seat to "progress." In the meantime, everyone should filter all the water they drink and use at home. It's the only way to protect yourself -- if not the environment.
Posted by: HealthyWater4Everyone | 08/30/2011 at 05:17 PM