Fracked

EPA Finds Compound Used in Fracking in Wyoming Aquifer

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, Nov. 10, 2011, 1:10 p.m.

As the country awaits results from a nationwide safety study on the natural gas drilling process of fracking, a separate government investigation into contamination in a place where residents have long complained [1] that drilling fouled their water has turned up alarming levels of underground pollution.

A pair of environmental monitoring wells drilled deep into an aquifer in Pavillion, Wyo., contain high levels of cancer-causing compounds and at least one chemical commonly used in hydraulic fracturing, according to new water test results [2] released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The findings are consistent with water samples the EPA has collected from at least 42 homes in the area since 2008, when ProPublica began reporting [3] on foul water and health concerns in Pavillion and the agency started investigating reports of contamination there.

Last year -- after warning residents not to drink [4] or cook with the water and to ventilate their homes when they showered -- the EPA drilled the monitoring wells to get a more precise picture of the extent of the contamination.

The Pavillion area has been drilled extensively for natural gas over the last two decades and is home to hundreds of gas wells. Residents have alleged for nearly a decade [1] that the drilling -- and hydraulic fracturing in particular -- has caused their water to turn black and smell like gasoline. Some residents say they suffer neurological impairment [5], loss of smell, and nerve pain they associate with exposure to pollutants.

The gas industry -- led by the Canadian company EnCana, which owns the wells in Pavillion -- has denied that its activities are responsible for the contamination. EnCana has, however, supplied drinking water to residents.

The information released yesterday by the EPA was limited to raw sampling data: The agency did not interpret the findings or make any attempt to identify the source of the pollution. From the start of its investigation, the EPA has been careful to consider all possible causes of the contamination and to distance its inquiry from the controversy around hydraulic fracturing.

Still, the chemical compounds the EPA detected are consistent with those produced from drilling processes, including one -- a solvent called 2-Butoxyethanol (2-BE) -- widely used in the process of hydraulic fracturing. The agency said it had not found contaminants such as nitrates and fertilizers that would have signaled that agricultural activities were to blame.

The wells also contained benzene at 50 times the level that is considered safe for people, as well as phenols -- another dangerous human carcinogen -- acetone, toluene, naphthalene and traces of diesel fuel.

The EPA said the water samples were saturated with methane gas that matched the deep layers of natural gas being drilled for energy. The gas did not match the shallower methane that the gas industry says is naturally occurring in water, a signal that the contamination was related to drilling and was less likely to have come from drilling waste spilled above ground.

EnCana has recently agreed to sell its wells in the Pavillion area to Texas-based oil and gas company Legacy Reserves for a reported $45 million, but has pledged to continue to cooperate with the EPA's investigation. EnCana bought many of the wells in 2004, after the first problems with groundwater contamination had been reported.

The EPA's research in Wyoming is separate from the agency's ongoing national study of hydraulic fracturing's effect on water supplies, and is being funded through the Superfund cleanup program.

The EPA says it will release a lengthy draft of the Pavillion findings, including a detailed interpretation of them, later this month.

Colburn Project Accepted

After more than ten years of trying, Patriot on the Kennebec: Major Reuben Colburn, Benedict Arnold and the March to Quebec 1775 will be published in spring 2012 by The History Press. It will part of their War and Military Series.

Gone from LA

I sold my place in LA and hauled the remaining possessions 865 miles across the Nevada basin and range to the contrasting edenic world of the Wood River Valley. Long may its waters flow over my feet.

1977 Silver Streak Supreme Saturn

My trailer is for sale in Sunland, CA. It's a classic and has served me well as it will anyone who buys it.

San Fernando Valley Recycler

Out of LA

I've finally made a permanent move from LA to the Ketchum, Idaho area, which is a great improvement over the hostile concrete jungle of La La. I'm a part time reporter for the Idaho Mountain Express when not fly fishing Silver Creek. Life is good in all areas including housing and at long last, romance. Here's to that!

Eh Tu Brute?

The Truth deniers can't handle.

Shame on the Obama Justice Department

For prosecuting Tim DeCristopher.

Gasland

I'm rooting for Gasland tonight, a chilling documentary by Josh Fox about hydrofracking for natural gas.

It didn't win. I guess money trumps Benzene in drinking water but they are both related.

Living in the Singular Dream World

Livingston, Montana novelist Walter Kirn has been active all week on Twitter, working through his thoughts on the Arizona tragedy. I credited some of this nervous Twittering to his recent attempt to quit smoking, but it's much more than that. He knows this character firsthand from his novel, The Unbinding serialized on Slate a few years ago. We've become a nation of individual isolationists walking around in a dreamworld of our own making, desperately trying to shut out all reality. We're a mosaic, cordoned apart by walls. The more wealthy we become, the bigger the walls we build. We don't know our neighbors and more to the point we don't want to. After all, they could be trouble. Some, tragically, are.

Global Warming Mapped

NASA Observatory Red means fever.

Driving On the Rim in Livingston, Montana

 Courtesy of The New York Times

Berl Pickett, the self-deprecating memoirist in Tom McGuane’s Driving on the Rim, may well be the average, small town physician in Montana, but I doubt it. McGuane presents Berl’s recollections the way a cowboy on horseback chases calves in a cutting horse competition, which happens to be the McLeod author’s avocation. He goes for the critter at hand and then returns for another, in no particular order. We never learn what Berl looks like, and true to literary form, we have no disparate image sprung on us later, leaving us content with our own. Despite Pickett’s awkwardness, he manages to punctuate life in his hometown of Livingston, Montana with three rocky romances. That is, if you don’t count his initiation to love by his own aunt in Idaho, much to his parents’ dismay.

Berl witnesses his patients’ relationships going bad, intervening as best he can, while trying to build one of his own. When his first girlfriend, Tessa, an opportunist who formerly shacked up with an art collector decades her senior, presents with a fatal, self-inflicted knife wound, Pickett does his professional best to save her. But he knows he never had a chance in either regard. For reasons unknown, other than small town vindictiveness, he is accused of negligence and blamed for Tessa’s death, which results in losing his license to practice.

While on a fishing trip to the remote Dean River in British Columbia, the events of 9-11 take place without Berl’s knowledge. When his plane doesn’t arrive, he waits for two days and then walks to the nearest town. When he learns what happened in New York, it fuels his feeling of disconnectedness. He drives back to Livingston in an Oldsmobile 98 that he finds on a lot in Vancouver and then uses the car to wander around for the rest of the story. He paints houses, all the while trying to assess how the bizarre events of his life, including the malpractice charge and the strange relationships with virtually everyone could have happened.

Along the way, Berl recounts his life story. He tells of caring for his parents, members of the World War II generation, his dad a veteran of the Huertgen Forest. His mother was a religious fanatic who ultimately had to be committed in her twilight years. His father didn’t wait for the rapture as his mother did but hoped, at least, to get out of the wind. Anyone who has been to Livingston knows this feeling.

The book has funny and poetic moments and even a macabre twist at the end that concerns Berl Pickett’s great, but doomed-from-the-start love, Jocelyn, and her villain sidekick. In the end, Pickett triumphs by attrition, and he learns as Dorothy in OZ did that the secret to life was with him all along, and that some things will remain unknowable until further notice.

The Media Has Failed in Covering the Climate Crisis

Cool It is the same collection of non sequiturs Lomborg has always used. He acknowledges the problem but dodges the solution and that is the price of carbon. It's the perfect way to do nothing, and assure disaster will smack us where we live. The problem with global warming is that everyone is implicated. There's the fear.
About Climate Bill
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Income rates grow more under Democratic presidencies than Republican ones.

Income disparity: Growth rates 1948-2005 The trick is how they get poor and middle income people to vote Republican. Will they do it again with all of these dirt poor tea baggers? We'll see.

Dispatches From the Culture Wars

"From 1962-2001, the average growth in total federal spending under Republican presidents has been 7.57%; under Democrats, 6.96%. Bush certainly did not help those averages any after 2001. During that same period, the average yearly deficit under Democrats was $36 billion; the average under Republicans was $190 billion. So under Republicans, spending grows more but revenues grow less because they always insist on tax cuts."

Salter Reynolds On Driving on the Rim

Susan Salter Reynolds has a unique take on Tom McGuane's Driving on the Rim in the LA Times. All of the reviews are stellar and the opening chapters are amazing. I can't wait to get my copy. I'll be at the LA event on Nov. 4. I finally met Tom two years ago in Missoula after doing a story for The Livingston Enterprise on he and his longtime friend and fellow author and screenwriter William "Gatz" Hjortsberg of Livingston, Montana. On stage, Tom reminds me of Mark Twain. He's that good.

The Difficulty of a Global Warming Script

The Difficulty of a Global Warming Script

No matter the complexity of the plot, there is no story people want to see. In the harsh reality of what is to come, they really don't want to look. They should.