Noise Pollution Hard On Heart As Well As Ears : NPR
May 19, 2011
Report: hundreds of gas wells drilled near schools, hospitals – News – The Times-Tribune
May 6, 2011
eport: hundreds of gas wells drilled near schools, hospitals – News – The Times-Tribune.
Report: hundreds of gas wells drilled near schools, hospitals
Published: May 6, 2011
A state environmental group is calling on lawmakers to restrict natural gas drilling near places people live, learn and work after it released a study Thursday showing hundreds of wells have been planned or drilled next to schools and hospitals.
The study by PennEnvironment found that Marcellus Shale gas wells have been permitted or drilled within two miles of 320 day cares, 67 schools and nine hospitals in the state, putting “our most vulnerable populations at risk,” PennEnvironment field director Adam Garber said.
State law restricts drilling within 200 feet of an occupied building regardless of its use, but local and state elected officials have introduced bills and ordinances to expand that buffer.
The PennEnvironment study found that the closest day care is 400 feet from a permitted well site, the closest school is 900 feet away and the closest hospital is half a mile away.
Although the study shows that a school and day care in Lackawanna County are each within two miles of permitted well sites, the permits for those wells expired without drilling taking place.
In Susquehanna County, wells have been drilled on Elk Lake School District property, and another well is permitted within 2,000 feet of a district school. In Wyoming County, Tyler Memorial Hospital is about a mile and a half from the closest permitted well.
The study did not look at the proximity of gas processing plants or compressor stations to schools, day cares and hospitals and it did not take into account traffic violations or accidents involving trucks operating near those facilities.
Mr. Garber said blowouts and spills at shale wells in the state demonstrate the hazards of the extraction process. A recent blowout of a Chesapeake Energy well in Bradford County that allowed toxic wastewater to reach a waterway was in a remote area, he said.
“God forbid it happen next to an elementary school,” he said.
Andrea Mulrine, president of the League of Women Voters of Lackawanna County, said the report should spur legislative action to make sure drilling is done responsibly.
“The industry has moved with a lightning pace across the commonwealth and moved without the appropriate legislation in place at the state, local and county levels,” she said. “Legislation has to move faster than it’s moving right now.”
An industry group panned the report, saying it “fundamentally disregards the facts.” The group, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, also questioned the credibility of the report’s authors and reviewers.
“It’s unfortunate that some activists continue to peddle this kind of misinformation,” coalition spokesman Travis Windle said.
Contact the writer: llegere@timesshamrock.com
Protecting our Children – Sandra Steingraber May 13-Vestal
May 3, 2011
A FREE TALK BY DR. SANDRA STEINGRABER Poster Poster 2/page
Author whose book has been featured as an HBO movie “Living Downstream”
The audio for this event is here:
http://changetheframe.com/audio/sandra_steingraber_vestal_may13-2011/steingraber-audio.mp3
Friday, May 13, 2011 7:00 pm (doors open at 6:30 pm)
Clayton Ave Elementary School, 209 Clayton Ave, Vestal, NY
Dr. Sandra Steingraber is a mother, biologist, ecologist and cancer survivor who has won the Rachel Carson award for her writing about the connection between our health and the environment. She looks at the toxic, ecologically fractured world our children now inhabit and invites all parents and those concerned to attend this event and learn about the increasing toxic load we all have to carry. Toxins have been implicated in such problems as childhood cancers, asthma, autism, allergies, reproductive problems and autoimmune problems. Dr. Steingraber will be available for a book signing of her new book, “Raising Elijah,” following the talk.
*Sponsored by Binghamton Regional Sustainability Coalition
“Steingraber’s book is a deeply thoughtful, at times frightening, but ultimately hopeful book that describes in compelling and lyrical detail the two great, intertwined ecological crises of our time – the crisis of toxic chemical exposure and the crisis of global warming. She argues that mastery of these crises will require heroic action, societal action on a scale as great as that which ended slavery in the United States, and is essential to save our planet and our children.”
-Philip J. Landrigan, M.D., MSc, Director, Children’s Environmental Health Center, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
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“This could be the most important and inspiring parenting book ever written. With fierce love and hard science, Sandra Steingraber convinces us that protecting children from the poisons that surround them cannot be left to conscientious mothers and fathers alone. It must instead become our society’s highes collective priority.” – Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine |
Some Seekers of Rural Life Move Out of Pennsylvania as Gas Rigs Move In | Reuters
May 3, 2011
Some Seekers of Rural Life Move Out of Pennsylvania as Gas Rigs Move In | Reuters.
By Elizabeth McGowan at SolveClimate
Tue May 3, 2011 10:30am EDT
The Aubrees were the lone holdouts against a developer’s plan to tap gas in their small town. Now, living in the shadow of drilling rigs, they’re leaving
Elizabeth McGowan, SolveClimate News
Editor’s Note: SolveClimate News reporter Elizabeth McGowan traveled to Northeastern Pennsylvania in late March to find out how the gas drilling boom is affecting the landscape and the people who call it home. This is the fourth in a multi-part series. (Read parts one , two and three)
MONTROSE, Pa.—After three consecutive nights of tossing and turning, Anna Aubree was so desperate for sleep that she packed a pillow, a blanket and Jasmine the family golden retriever into her car early one March morning.
The 60-something retiree drove seven miles to the relative peace and quiet of the local high school parking lot just to try to refresh her exhausted self by catching a few winks.
All she sought was a brief respite from the constant barrage of pounding, banging, booming and grinding that penetrates the walls of the little yellow one-story house she shares with her husband, Maurice.
“This is my humble abode. But the truth is, I want out,” she told SolveClimate News in her thick Brooklyn accent while seated at a dining room table covered with stacks of research documents. “We’re surrounded. This noise is horrible. And it never stops. It’s all night long.”
Anna and Maurice AubreeThe Aubrees bought their 3.75-acre wedge of paradise off a dirt road in rural Pennsylvania in 1988, settling there permanently from Long Island four years later. They planted passels of Colorado spruces along its borders and sketched out plans for a retirement refuge that included a horse farm for their three sons and yet-to-arrive grandchildren.
Two decades ago, hardly anybody thought about their prefabricated house in the tiny Susquehanna County community of Forest Lake resting atop what geologists refer to as the “sweet spot” of Marcellus Shale. It’s considered the drilling nirvana of Northeastern Pennsylvania because the band of black sedimentary rock — remnants of an ancient sea bed now buried deep underground — is consistently 400 feet thick and saturated with treasured natural gas.
Holdouts in a Doughnut Hole
A year ago in May, on Mother’s Day, the Aubrees discovered that all of their farming neighbors had opted to take advantage of lucrative leasing offers from the Pittsburgh offices of Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation.Rig behind the Aubrees’ property
The Aubrees, situated on a comparative sliver of land, were the lone holdouts.
Even though they didn’t sign a lease, they soon started to find out what it means to live in the midst of an energy boom. Last summer, Cabot began orchestrating a series of seismic tests involving helicopters, dynamite and “thumper trucks” that help companies determine where to situate their wells and accompanying infrastructure.
By October, Cabot orchestrated a heavy-duty equipment movement to clear the land just a stone’s throw from the Aubrees’ property line. Soon, a lengthy roadway led to a staging area designed to accommodate a spacious pad for a series of wells.
As autumn turned to winter, the company continued setting up a jarring and complex network of drilling architecture. Come February, Anna and Maurice were treated to the ominous view of 142-foot metal drilling rig when they peeked out their back windows. Now, one well is about complete and at least seven more are in the preparation stages.
“It’s eerie looking,” Anna said about the looming, lighted behemoth that resembles some sort of set-up from a NASA rocket launch. It’s especially otherworldly at night. “We couldn’t even open a window during the summer because all of that machinery was so loud.”
She spent the summer, fall and winter calling agency after agency, hoping to find somebody who could offer relief from the cacophony. But she couldn’t even find evidence of a municipal or county noise ordinance.
“Cabot told us that we’re in a doughnut hole,” Anna explained. “And all everybody else tells us is to take the money and sign the lease we were offered. But we’ve made it clear to Cabot that we’re not interested in a lease.”
Not Everybody Is a Petroleum Engineer
Upon hearing about the Aubrees’ plight from SolveClimate News, Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the natural gas advocacy group Energy in Depth, extended his sympathies from his Washington, D.C., office. He admitted that gas companies should be rethinking the way they reach out to the general public.
“Folks don’t know their stuff about Marcellus Shale drilling and quite frankly why do we expect them to?” Tucker asked in an interview. “It’s our job to educate them. They’re not petroleum engineers.”
No doubt, drilling for natural gas creates construction and industrial sites that are loud, dirty and inconvenient, he stressed, even though companies are constantly seeking to mitigate those drawbacks.
“For years, the industry has focused its communication efforts on engaging financial analysts, regulators and landowners with gas on their property,” he said. But this issue of Marcellus Shale drilling “has garnered so much attention that our audience needs to be expanded to include the general public. It makes sense to do that. A lot of producers are starting to do that.”
Gas companies’ greatest assets, he concluded, are informed landowners.
“We’re going to be there for at least 40 years,” he said. “Why do we want to start off on the wrong foot by trying to take advantage of people?”
Long, Loud Time Coming
While the Aubrees’ house might not be in the shadow of a drilling rig forever, harvesting gas from the Marcellus Shale isn’t a quick in-and-out venture either.
Drilling road and infrastructure next to the Aubrees’ houseIt can take up to eight months to create a functioning well, according to information Energy in Depth provided via a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article.
Each stage is labor intensive and reliant on high-volume internal combustion engines. Crews are often working 24/7 because so much of the drilling equipment is so expensive to rent.
Site construction, which includes clearing and leveling acreage for the well site, the well pad, the accompanying roadway in and out, and short-term quarters for workers takes a minimum of two months.
Each vertical well, which can be 4,000 to 10,000 feet deep, takes at least two weeks to drill. Many pads can accommodate up to 10 wells. Horizontal drilling, which can extend about a mile but is about 3,000 feet on average, adds another two weeks per well to the timeline. Trucks use the newly carved roadway to haul away the “cuttings” — the soil, rock and other pieces of earth dislodged by drilling — to landfills.
The actual hydraulic fracturing of a well takes three or four days, but preparation can take up to two weeks because it’s such a technically precise operation. The water, sand and chemicals used in the fracturing process then have to be extracted from the well before companies can begin to harvest natural gas. Expelling what’s known as “flowback” lasts at least a week.
Those last two stages require millions of gallons of freshwater to be trucked in and “flowback” to be carted away when it can no longer be recycled for fracking. Plus, machinery is needed to install the underground pipelines to deliver the natural gas to its destination.
Once a well is “delivering” natural gas — and most are expected to do so for anywhere from five years to 30 years, or beyond — the site left behind can appear quite tame and unobtrusive to passersby.
Indeed, the roadways to the drilling pad are permanent fixtures. And, sets of meters and brine tanks poking up through the ground are the only other intruders visible for the long-term. Wells are monitored electronically from afar and well tenders also make regular rounds to physically check on them.
Drilling Sites Forever Changed
Cabot’s Pittsburgh offices hired George Stark as the company’s director of external affairs more than a year ago when tension over hydraulic fracturing began peaking. In Pennsylvania, his company opted to lease land for drilling solely in Susquehanna County because of its abundant natural gas supply in the Marcellus Shale and access to an existing transcontinental pipeline.
Cabot gas drilling site near Montrose, Pa.He wasn’t familiar with the particulars of the Aubrees’ situation but he is aware many county residents assume the somewhat foreboding drilling rigs are fixtures that will mar landscapes forever.
Cabot, he said, prides itself on partnering with a nonprofit sportsmen’s group, the Quality Deer Management Association, to rehabilitate acreage that was cleared and flattened to make way for drilling. The company doesn’t restore the original topography but it does put preserved topsoil back in place. As well, Cabot is collaborating with a local seed company to hasten the reclamation process and minimize erosion.
“Of course, the land will never be the same,” Stark explained to SolveClimate News as he pointed to a completed and functioning well site off a rural Pennsylvania road near Montrose. “But we’re not abandoning the site and letting whatever would grow there take over. What we don’t have is an attitude that we’re going to do whatever we want. We restore the site in a respectful manner.”
“This notion of a moonscape is wrong,” he continued. “I don’t think what people are left with in the long term can be called scarring. I think we leave the land much better afterward than most extractive industries.”
Executing an Exit Plan
Tucker’s sympathies and Stark’s restoration assurances, however, are of little consolation to Anna and Maurice Aubree. Their sense of security and serenity has dissipated into the ether.
“I see ourselves as the silent sufferers here,” Anna said. “Who can speak for me? Where can my voice be heard?”
Though she has tried to drown out the drone of diesel generators and 18-wheeler engines with Doris Day tapes rented from the library, sleep in any room of her house comes in fits and starts. That lack of rest exacerbates her challenges with asthma and a sore back.
“I moved up here to maintain my health,” said Anna, who cared for hospitalized veterans on Long Island. “But we’re stuck. You don’t know how we’re praying.”
At the end of January, the two opted to put their house on the market. Ironically, the “For Sale” sign that vibrates in the spring breeze is planted in their front yard just a short walk from a message painted on slate and propped on their front porch that cheerily declares: “A Day in the Country is Worth a Month in Town.”
The thought of uprooting themselves and packing up all of their worldly belongings at this juncture in their lives makes them heartsick.
Even though they don’t blame their neighbors for benefiting from the natural bounty beneath their own land, neither of them can envision continuing to endure a situation where they feel constantly on edge.
“When you’re getting older, it’s extremely stressful and it’s hard all around,” said Maurice, 75, a retired driver for the local school district who admits to “sneaking in a few cries about it.”
“If you don’t laugh, you cry,” he added. “So you better learn how to laugh.”
Their sons, two live in New York and the third in Florida, are helping them sort out their next destination.
“We don’t know where we’re going,” said Anna while giving her pet dog a loving pat on the head. “But you know what? We’re going.”
See Also: Tiny Pennsylvania Land Trust Is Tempted by Marcellus Shale Gas Riches Fracking’s Environmental Footprint to Transform Pennsylvania Landscape Number-Crunching the Footprint of a Gas Fracking Boom, Forest by Forest MIT Web Tools Help Small Landowners Navigate Gas Leasing Frenzy
A Year After the Spill, “Unusual” Rise in Health Problems
April 21, 2011
A Year After the Spill, “Unusual” Rise in Health Problems.
A Year After the Spill, “Unusual” Rise in Health Problems
More cases of nosebleeds, coughs could be due to oil exposure.
Main Content
Oil-spill cleanup workers are swamped by a wave in Orange Beach, Alabama, in 2010.
Photograph by Tyrone Turner, National Geographic
Published April 20, 2011
Health issues that continue to plague Gulf Coast communities may be connected to the Gulf oil spill, experts say.
A year after the BP disaster, more people are reporting medical and mental health problems to nonprofits and doctors working in coastal areas. (Get more Gulf oil spill anniversary news.)
“We’re seeing patients who will come in and say my nose is bleeding all the time, my cough gets worse,” said James Diaz, director of the environmental and occupational health sciences program at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans.
Itchy eyes, water eyes, nosebleeds, wheezing, sneezing, and coughing are all symptoms of exposure to crude oil, Diaz said. “We are seeing a lot of that.
(Explore a human-body interactive.)
“We know a lot about the acute health effects of the compounds in petroleum because it’s a major industry here,” he said.
And these problems have “been very very predictable.”
Day and night, Marylee Orr fields calls from cleanup workers, fishers, and their wives as they connect the dots between their health and exposure to dispersants and crude oil. More than 1.8 million gallons (6.8 million liters) of dispersants—chemical agents used to break up oil—were dumped into the Gulf.
“If you look at the human health effects of the . . . dispersant, everything you read at the beginning [of] that factsheet is what I hear over the phone: chest pain, respiratory problems, dizziness, gastrointestinal problems,” said Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, based in Baton Rouge.
“I would love to be able to say everything’s OK and everything’s recovered—but it’s not that way yet.”
“Unusual” Spike in Health Troubles After Spill
In the early months of the Gulf oil spill, more than 376 people in Louisiana—the majority of whom were cleanup workers—reported acute health effects typical of exposure to crude oil: headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, cough, respiratory distress, and chest pain, according to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.
By early September, more than 2,100 acute health complaints related to the spill across the Gulf and elsewhere had come in, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
A health survey of nearly a thousand coastal residents conducted by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a health-justice nonprofit based in New Orleans, found that nearly three-quarters of those who believed they’d been exposed to crude oil experienced an “unusual increase in health symptoms.”
In two other surveys of Gulf coast residents also conducted by university public health researchers and sociologists, between 35 to 60 percent of respondents reported experiencing mental stress and physical symptoms.
By August, 52,000 people were participating in the oil-spill cleanup, which was managed by a joint federal-industry response team. However the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences didn’t secure funding to start a long-term study of cleanup workers’ health until several months after the spill began.
“The hardest things to predict are going to be what’s going to happen years and decades away,” Diaz said.
“We should be looking for evidence that exposure to these chemicals is causing damage at the chemical level to enzymes and causing damage at the molecular level to DNA.”
(Get a genetics overview.)
For instance, a study of cleanup workers from the 2002 Prestige oil spill in Spain found increased DNA damage, especially among those who worked along beaches. Such genetic changes can sometimes lead to cancer.
“We know the famous adage: The dose determines the poison,” Diaz said.
He added he’s most concerned for Gulf cleanup workers who worked offshore, where they were exposed to raining dispersant and fumes billowing off floating mats of burning crude.
(Also see “3 Surprising Ways Global Warming Could Make You Sick.”)
Oil Spill Created Anxiety, Depression
Preliminary research has also found Gulf residents have suffered psychological trauma. Already, two spill-related suicides have occurred.
“What we’re finding is that there are increases in symptoms of post-traumatic stress, generalized anxiety disorder, and of depression,” said Howard Osofsky, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Louisiana State University in New Orleans.
Osofsky is currently leading a study of residents in Louisiana’s four most heavily impacted parishes for the Louisiana Department of Social Services.
Calls to mental health and domestic violence hotlines in the Gulf area have increased since the spill began. Admissions to women’s shelters also have risen, Osofsky noted.
The majority of people in Osofsky’s surveillance area have reported tiredness; lack of energy; trouble sleeping; headaches; pain in their arms, legs, joints; stomach pain; and other gastrointestinal symptoms.
“These are the types of symptoms that can be related to anxiety and stress, but they can be medical symptoms that can be directly related to oil [exposure] as well,” he said.
The same trend is appearing in Alabama and Florida, according to a February study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Researchers compared the mental health of two Gulf communities, one in Alabama where the oil reached, and another in Florida that stayed oil-free.
“People in both communities displayed a significant amount of both anxiety and depression,” said study leader Lynn Grattan, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.
“But it’s economic impact—rather than oil reaching shores—which disrupted psychological adjustment and led to psychological health problems.”
In other words, the mental health toll of the oil spill reached beyond the population living near oiled beaches, the study found.
Gulf Residents Already Resilient to Tragedy
However, Gulf residents’ ability to cope in the face of past disasters—such as hurricanes—may help them weather this storm as well, Osofsky said.
(See “Gulf Wracked By Katrina’s Latest Legacy—Disease, Poisons, Mold.”)
“Individuals who’ve been able to cope may feel that they have greater strength, almost like they’re being inoculated by their experiences to have inner strength.”
University of Maryland’s Grattan is currently studying how resilient people adapt and manage stresses associated with the spill.
“So perhaps in future we can learn from their adaptive behaviors and help build and facilitate the coping and adaption of everyone after spills,” Grattan said.
Louisiana Environmental Action Network’s Orr draws strength and hope from her community.
“It’s not surprising that we’re seeing what we are, because we’ve never had anything like this before,” she said. “But we’re resourceful people and we’re very optimistic people.
After the double whammies of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and Gustav and Ike in 2008, “this is our third environmental disaster and, we hope, our last.”
GDACC 
