Study finds 'soup of toxic chemicals' in the air near Arkansas ExxonMobil spill site

RT: April 30, 2013 04:03

While many questions remain following ExxonMobil’s March 29 tar sands oil spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, a new independent study has revealed the existence of high levels of cancer-causing chemicals in the area.

The new research, co-published by the Faulkner County Citizens Advisory Group and Global Community Monitor, indicates that the 500,000 gallons of heavy bitumen oil released by a gash in ExxonMobil’s aging Pegasus pipeline has released hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) as defined by the 1990 US Clean Air Act.

According to a press release in conjunction with the new study, the total of 30 toxic chemicals include benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, n-hexane and xylenes. Consequences of exposure to these chemicals include damage to the human nervous system, muscular weakness and blurred vision, while breathing ethylbenzene and benzene in particular can cause cancer and reproductive issues.

According to April Lane of the Faulkner County Citizens Advisory Group, health reports collected from residents in the four weeks following the spill show they are demonstrating symptoms consistent with exposure to hazardous chemicals and independent air testing.

“Even four weeks later, residents are still feeling symptoms from the chemical exposure. People have consistently talked about gastrointestinal problems, headaches, respiratory problems, skin irritation including chemical burns, and extreme fatigue,” says Lane.

According to Dr. Neil Carman, a member of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club and a former member of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, analysis of these HAPs could present any number of public health concerns.

“Thirty toxic hydrocarbons were measured above the detection limits. Each of the thirty hydrocarbons measured in the Mayflower release is a toxic chemical on its own and may pose a threat to human health depending on various exposure and individual factors,” said Carman, who described the ambient air in the affected spill region as a “soup of toxic chemicals.”

The study comes only a week after another independent test performed by Opflex Solutions on nearby Lake Conway disputed ExxonMobil’s claims that bitumen heavy crude oil had not reached the lake.

While the oil giant’s official statement read that “the main body of Lake Conway and Palarm Creek remain oil free,” the CEO of Opflex, a company specializing in oil spill cleanups, confirmed a different truth.

"Yes, there's oil in Lake Conway and there's oil downstream flowing into the Arkansas River," said Smith. "I have found methylene chloride and barium in concentrations indicative of tar sands oil," he added.

According to Inside Climate News, which has been closely following ExxonMobil’s response during the Mayflower spill’s cleanup, a number of discrepancies in its statements make it unclear when the Pegasus pipeline began leaking, how the company found out about the initial spill, or how quickly the company moved to contain the breach.

As of yet, a definitive answer on how much oil spilled from the 22-foot-long pipeline gash remains in dispute. Three groups are currently looking into the spill: The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), US Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass) and Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel. McDaniel recently received over 12,500 pages of documents from ExxonMobil following a subpoena.

Last week, local news channel THV11 reported on a Mayflower town hall meeting hosted by the Faulkner County Citizens Advisory Group. At that meeting John Hammons, a local resident near a smaller body of water adjacent to Lake Conway, reported his concern of consequences from oil spill contamination:

"We can smell it. So I know it's there," Hammons said, who is concerned for his wife, who is seven months pregnant."She's broken out in hives, had nose bleeds, (and) respiratory problems," added Hammons.

See also:

ExxonMobil keeping quiet as Mayflower residents report increasing health problems

Fracking Wastewater Disposal Methods Leave Environment, Public Health at Risk

Thursday, May 10, 2012 by Common Dreams
New report from NRDC shows national implications for Pennsylvania's risky fracking wastewater practices

A report released Wednesday from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) shows that the five main ways of dealing with wastewater from fracking leave public health and the environment in jeopardy.

The report, co-authored by NRDC and an independent scientist, investigates the fracking wastewater disposal practices in Pennsylvania. It notes that of some of the fracking additives, "significant concern has been raised" regarding their nature, "with 29 identified as of particular concern for human health and 13 identified as probable or known human carcinogens. Among the most notable are 2-butoxyethanol (2BE), naphthalene, benzene, and polyacrylamide."

“Contaminated wastewater has long been one of our biggest concerns about fracking, and this report confirms that current practices put both the environment and public health at risk,” said NRDC attorney Rebecca Hammer. “Americans shouldn’t have to trade their safe drinking water for fuel. We need strong safeguards on the books to ensure oil and gas companies aren’t polluting our rivers, contaminating our drinking water or even risking man-made earthquakes when they come to frack in our communities.”

The report finds that better federal and state protections are needed to help protect human health and the environment.

“Pennsylvania and the entire Marcellus Shale region have geological limitations that make wastewater disposal a particularly vexing problem for the area,” said Kate Sinding, senior attorney at NRDC. “But the lessons learned there are applicable nationwide. It is critical states in this region that are already fracking clean up their act fast. And states like New York, where gas companies are still knocking on the door, must not let them in until they get this right.”

* * *

NRDC: Report: Five Primary Disposal Methods for Fracking Wastewater All Fail to Protect Public Health and Environment

The five most common disposal options for fracking wastewater currently in use are: recycling for additional fracking, treatment and discharge to surface waters, underground injection, storage in open air pits, and spreading on roads for ice or dust control. All of these options present significant risks of harm to public health or the environment. And there are not sufficient rules in place to ensure any of them will not harm people or ecosystems.

Some of these methods present such great threats that they should be banned immediately. These methods include treatment at municipal sewage treatment plants and subsequent discharge into surface waters, storage in open air pits, and road spreading.

* * *

When this wastewater is sent to municipal sewage facilities, harmful chemicals and other pollutants are merely diluted, rather than removed, and then released into surface waters, posing serious threats to the state’s rivers, lakes and streams, as well as drinking water supplies. Industrial facilities, too, are often not designed to treat the contents of the wastewater, and can also release it into waterways or send it for reuse, after it is processed. Complete information about where industrial facilities sent processed wastewater in Pennsylvania last year was not made available by the state.

* * *

The problem of what to do with this byproduct is growing as the volume of wastewater continues to increase rapidly with the expansion of fracking in the Marcellus Shale formation and nationwide. In Pennsylvania alone, total reported wastewater volumes more than doubled from the first half of 2011 to the second half.

* * *

Wastewater contains a variety of potentially harmful pollutants that can be toxic to humans and aquatic life, radioactive, or corrosive if they are released into the environment or if people are exposed to them. They can damage ecosystem health by depleting oxygen or causing algae blooms, or interact with disinfectants at drinking water plants to form cancer-causing chemicals. These pollutants include salts, oil, grease, metals, naturally occurring radioactive material, and a cocktail of chemicals used in fracking.

Fracking involves using blasting high volumes of water and sand, mixed with undisclosed chemicals, into the ground to break apart rock and release previously inaccessible pockets of natural gas. Wastewater is created when that water mixture returns to the surface immediately after fracking, and continues to emerge from the well after production begins along with polluted water contained naturally within the underground rock formation.

***

Thursday, May 10, 2012 by Democracy Now!

Vermont Set to Become 1st State to Ban Fracking 

 

Vermont is poised to become the first U.S. state to ban the natural gas drilling practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

The Vermont legislature has sent a measure imposing the ban to Gov. Peter Shumlin, who is expected to sign it into law. 

"Fracking" for Shale Gas: Neither Clean nor Green

Monday, December 5, 2011 by Tierramérica / Inter Press Service

by Stephen Leahy 

 

 

DURBAN, South Africa - Hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" is being used to tap the last remaining natural gas deposits across large areas of the United States and western Canada, fueling continued dependence on hydrocarbons instead of a shift to genuinely clean energy sources to cool the planet.

Called shale gas, these deposits represent a new and enormous source of fossil fuel.

"Fracking is driving exploration and drilling all over the United States," said Gwen Lachelt of the non-governmental organisation Earthworks’ Oil & Gas Accountability Project.

"The oil and gas industry is marching across America from Texas to North Dakota and from the east coast to California," Lachelt told Tierramérica.

There may be as much as 23,427 billion cubic metres (bcm) in recoverable gas from U.S. shale formations, according to the Annual Energy Outlook 2011, released in April by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The United States will consume 650 bcm of natural gas this year, the EIA projected. Globally, it estimates reserves of "unconventional gas" - the oil and gas industry term for shale gas and coal bed methane - at 915,000 bcm, with 100,000 bcm in Latin America.

However, that estimate is already out of date due to developments in fracking technology and exploration. The EIA estimate of shale gas in the United States in 2009 was less than half the 2011 estimate.

Fracking uses horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing with high pressure water and chemicals to fracture gas-bearing shale rock.

Holes are drilled vertically as little as 100 metres and as much as 3,000 metres into the shale, and then horizontally 1,000 metres along the shale formation. Chemicals and large amounts of water are pumped underground at high enough pressure to fracture the shale, releasing the gas into the pipeline.

The "dash for gas" as the industry pundits like to say is being driven by potential exports to Asia and the mistaken belief that natural gas is the "transition fuel" from coal to a low-carbon economy.

It is true that natural gas is "cleaner" in that it releases about 40 to 45 percent less carbon dioxide than coal does to produce the same amount of energy.

However, gas from fracking has a higher carbon footprint because more energy is needed to get the gas and because methane leaks out. Methane has 25 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide.

Switching from coal to gas as an energy source could result in increased global warming, not less, according to the study "Coal to Gas: The Influence of Methane Leakage", released in September by the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

This is mainly due to the methane leakage problem, which is common but unregulated.

Natural gas is mainly methane, so even if leaks are limited to one to two percent, it would only be slightly better than continuing to burn coal.

"Relying more on natural gas would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, but it would do little to help solve the climate problem," said study author Tom Wigley, a researcher at NCAR, in a press release.

In a report published Nov. 18, the U.S. Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Subcommittee on Shale Gas Production urged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to finally regulate fracking emissions of methane and other air pollutants.

While industry began fracking for gas in the late 1990s, there was a dramatic increase in 2005, after the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009) exempted fracking from regulations under the U.S. Clean Water Act. In recent years shale gas production has grown 48 percent annually, according to the EIA.

"Fracking has never been regulated. There is no real oversight of what they are doing," said Lachelt, who is from the central U.S. state of Colorado, one of the fracking hotspots.

People living near wells have long complained about contamination of their drinking water with chemicals and shown pictures of flames coming from their taps. But contamination is hard to prove because the fracking companies are not required to disclose the contents of the "fracking fluids" they use to keep the gas flowing, said Lachelt.

Fracking fluids are a mix of water, sand and a wide range of chemicals, some toxic like diesel fuel, she said.

With the public outcry growing, the oil and gas industry continues to claim fracking has never contaminated an underground aquifer. However, the industry has settled a number of claims with landowners over the years, but all of these have been sealed from the public and government officials.

Surprisingly, after more than 20 years of fracking, the EPA is conducting its first in-depth study of the risks to drinking water.

The results won't be known until the end of next year. However, preliminary results have shown that drinking water in some communities is contaminated by benzene, a known carcinogen, and that fracking was responsible, said Lachelt.

Meanwhile, some of Canada's most pristine wilderness in northeastern British Columbia is the home to a new shale gas industry that sends its gas across the Rocky Mountains to the Alberta tar sands to boil oil out the sands.

Almost all of the gas produced in British Columbia is for export to Alberta or the United States. Now there is a massive expansion underway with the recent approval to build a liquefied natural gas plant on the West coast to ship gas to lucrative Asian markets, said Tria Donaldson of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, an environmental NGO based in Vancouver.

"Fracking is using huge amounts of fresh water in a region that suffers water shortages," Donaldson told Tierramérica. Millions of liters of water are needed for each well and the industry has obtained rights to take 275 million liters from local rivers, lakes and streams every day.

Sixteen companies were fined in October for failing to account for how much water they were taking. According to media reports the fines were less than 1,000 dollars.

"Northeastern British Columbia is a key habitat for grizzly bears, caribou and others. Fracking operations are moving into untouched areas, building roads, drill pads and wastewater ponds," said Donaldson

"There is nothing clean or green about shale gas as an energy source."

No Fracking Way

Monday, June 13, 2011 by OtherWords
In addition to poisoning our water, homes, and bodies, fracking is eroding the quality of life in rural America.
by Wenonah Hauter

 

Flames exploding from kitchen taps. Livestock dropping dead from tainted water. People in small towns noticing an unusual stench, experiencing acute headaches, and blacking out.

These aren't scenes from a horror movie. They're the increasingly common results of natural gas drilling throughout the United States.

Many state and federal lawmakers see natural gas as the answer to our nation's need for new energy sources. Yet extracting gas through a process called hydraulic fracturing — more commonly referred to as "fracking" — poses unacceptable risks to the American public.

Fracking requires large quantities of water and a cocktail of toxic chemicals that have been shown to poison water resources in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

To date, at least 1,000 cases of water contamination have been documented near drilling sites around the country. In some cases, residents can no longer drink from their taps, and in at least one instance, a home near a fracking site exploded after a gas well leaked methane into its tap water.

Fracking can also compromise air quality. People in Dish, Texas, located near 11 natural gas compression stations, know this from firsthand experience. Residents there complained of headaches and blackouts, a strange odor in the air, and a sudden rash of blindness among their livestock. A private environmental consultant sampled air from Dish and found that it contained high levels of neurotoxins and carcinogens, including benzene.

The correlation between fracking and serious public health problems is further reinforced by studies conducted by the Endocrine Disruption Network, which found that 25 percent of fracking chemicals could cause cancer, and 40 to 50 percent could affect the nervous, immune, and cardiovascular systems.

In addition to poisoning our water, homes, and bodies, fracking is eroding the quality of life in rural America. New wells bring fleets of noisy, polluting trucks to small towns. Scenic vistas are replaced by fracking wells, harming tourism and recreation industries. In Wise County, Texas, properties with gas wells have lost 75 percent of their value. While companies promise minimal impacts, the process often devastates farming operations when fracking fluids poison water supplies, sometimes even killing livestock.

Yet despite these problems, the United States is currently experiencing a boom in natural gas production, drilling into rock that is only now accessible thanks to so-called innovations within the industry. Between 2000 and 2010, fracked shale gas increased from 1 percent to 20 percent of the domestically drilled natural gas supply.

The natural gas industry's influence has fueled much of this growth. Between 2005 and 2010, the largest natural gas producers and two trade associations spent more than $370 million lobbying on behalf of industry interests.

Such unchecked influence has allowed the natural gas industry to expand while doing little to protect consumers from its effects. Fracking is exempt from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and companies are not legally required to disclose the chemicals used in fracking operations, claiming them as proprietary "trade secrets."

In the absence of strong federal leadership, it's up to state and local governments to protect their residents. Last year, New York State passed a six-month moratorium on fracking. In late May, Eric Schneiderman, the state's Attorney General, launched a lawsuit against the federal government for not fully assessing the environmental impacts of proposed fracking operations along the Delaware River, which supplies drinking water for 15 million Americans. To date, at least 44 municipalities across the country have passed measures to ban fracking.

Such developments point to a public backlash against this dirty, polluting process, but federal government involvement is essential too. President Barack Obama should institute a national ban on natural gas fracking. Doing so would protect public health and our essential resources, sending the message that our communities are more important than the interests of the big oil and gas companies.

The report, The Case for a Ban on Gas Fracking, is available at http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org

Mystery illnesses plague Louisiana oil spill crews

By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, April 17th, 2011

RACELAND, Louisiana — Jamie Simon worked on a barge in the oily waters for six months following the BP spill last year, cooking for the cleanup workers, washing their clothes and tidying up after them.

One year later, the 32-year-old said she still suffers from a range of debilitating health problems, including racing heartbeat, vomiting, dizziness, ear infections, swollen throat, poor sight in one eye and memory loss.

She blames toxic elements in the crude oil and the dispersants sprayed to dissolve it after the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010.

"I was exposed to those chemicals, which I questioned, and they told me it was just as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid and there was nothing for me to worry about," she said of the BP bosses at the job site.

The local doctor, Mike Robichaux, said he has seen as many as 60 patients like Simon in recent weeks, as this small southern town of 10,000 bordered by swamp land and sugar cane fields grapples with a mysterious sickness that some believe is all BP's fault.

Andy LaBoeuf, 51, said he was paid $1,500 per day to use his boat to go out on the water and lay boom to contain some of the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spewed from the bottom of the ocean after the BP well ruptured.

But four months of that job left him ill and unable to work, and he said he recently had to refinance his home loan because he could not pay his taxes.

"I have just been sick for a long time. I just got sick and I couldn't get better," LaBoeuf said, describing memory problems and a sore throat that has nagged him for a year.

Robichaux, an ear, nose and throat specialist whose office an hour's drive southwest of New Orleans is nestled on a roadside marked with handwritten signs advertising turtle meat for sale, says he is treating many of the local patients in their homes.

"Their work ethic is so strong, they are so stoic, they don't want people to know when they're sick," he said.

"Ninety percent of them are getting worse... Nobody has a clue as to what it is."

According to a roster compiled by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a total of 52,000 workers were responding to the Gulf oil spill as of August 2010.

The state of Louisiana has reported 415 cases of health problems linked to the spill, with symptoms including sore throats, irritated eyes, respiratory tract infections, headaches and nausea.

But Bernard Goldstein, an environmental toxicologist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said the US government's method of collecting health data on the workers is flawed.

For instance, a major study of response workers by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was not funded until six months after the spill, a critical delay that affects both the biology and the recall ability of the workers.

"It is too late if you go six months later," he told AFP.

Benzene, a known carcinogen present in crude oil, disappears from a person's blood within four months, Goldstein said.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, are pollutants that can cause genetic mutations and cancer. They are of particular interest in studying long-term health, but without a baseline for comparison it is difficult to know where they came from -- the oil spill or somewhere else in the environment.

"They last in the body for a longer period of time but they also get confounded by, if you will, obscured by, other sources of PAHs," like eating barbecued meat or smoking cigarettes, said Goldstein.

Further blurring the situation, Louisiana already ranks very low in the overall health of its residents compared to the rest of the United States -- between 44th and 49th out of the 50 states according to government data.

Some similar symptoms, including eye irritation, breathing problems, nausea and psychological stress, have been seen among responders to the Prestige oil tanker spill off Spain in 2002 and the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 off Alaska.

Local chemist Wilma Subra has been helping test people's blood for volatile solvents, and said levels of benzene among cleanup workers, divers, fishermen and crabbers are as high as 36 times that of the general population.

"As the event progresses we are seeing more and more people who are desperately ill," she said.

"Clearly it is showing that this is ongoing exposure," Subra said, noting that pathways include contact with the skin, eating contaminated seafood or breathing polluted air.

"We have been asking the federal agencies to please provide medical care from physicians who are trained in toxic exposure."

She said she has received no response.

Asked for comment, BP said in an email that "protection of response workers was a top priority" and that it had conducted "extensive monitoring of response workers" in coordination with several government agencies.

"Illness and injury reports were tracked and documented during the response, and the medical data indicate they did not differ appreciably from what would be expected among a workforce of this size under normal circumstances," it added.

Any compensation for sick workers would fall under state law, and "BP does not make these determinations, which must be supported by acceptable medical evidence."

For Simon, her way of life has been completely altered. She said she takes pain relievers every day just to function.

A couple of weeks ago, she read in a local newspaper that other ex-cleanup workers were feeling sick too, and her grandmother urged her to see a doctor.

"I never put the two together. I am just realizing that this is possibly related," she said.

BP Oil Spill Toxic Clouds Reach Shore--Benzene: 3400ppb & Hyrdrogen Sulfide: 1200ppb

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