On a cold, overcast afternoon in January 2003, two tanker
trucks backed up to an injection well site in a pasture outside
Rosharon, Texas. There, under a steel shed, they began to unload
thousands of gallons of wastewater for burial deep beneath the earth.
The waste – the byproduct of oil and gas drilling – was
described in regulatory documents
as a benign mixture of salt and water. But as the liquid rushed from
the trucks, it released a billowing vapor of far more volatile
materials, including
benzene and other
flammable hydrocarbons.
The truck engines, left to idle by their drivers, sucked the fumes
from the air, revving into a high-pitched whine. Before anyone could
react, one of the trucks backfired, releasing a spark that ignited the
invisible cloud.
Fifteen-foot-high flames enveloped the steel shed and tankers. Two
workers died, and four were rushed to the hospital with burns over much
of their bodies. A third worker died six weeks later.
What happened that day at Rosharon was
the result of a significant breakdown in the nation's efforts to regulate the handling of toxic waste, a
ProPublica investigation shows.
The site at Rosharon is what is known as a
"Class 2" well. Such wells
are subject to looser rules and less scrutiny than others designed for
hazardous materials. Had the chemicals the workers were disposing of
that day come from a factory or a refinery, it would have been illegal
to pour them into that well. But
regulatory concessions won by the
energy industry over the last three decades made it legal to dump
similar substances into the Rosharon site – as long as they came from
drilling.
Injection wells have proliferated over the last 60 years, in large
part because they are the cheapest, most expedient way to manage
hundreds of billions of gallons of industrial waste generated in the
U.S. each year.
Yet the dangers of injection are well known: In
accidents dating back to the 1960s, toxic materials have bubbled up to
the surface or escaped,
contaminating aquifers that store supplies of
drinking water.
There are now more than 150,000 Class 2
wells in 33 states, into which oil and gas drillers have injected at
least
10 trillion gallons of fluid. The numbers have increased rapidly
in recent years, driven by expanding use of
hydraulic fracturing to
reach previously inaccessible resources.
ProPublica analyzed records summarizing more than 220,000 well
inspections conducted between late 2007 and late 2010, including more
than 194,000 for Class 2 wells. We also reviewed federal audits of state
oversight programs, interviewed dozens of experts and explored court
documents, case files, and the evolution of underground disposal law
over the past 30 years.
Our examination shows that, amid growing use of Class 2 wells,
fundamental safeguards are sometimes being ignored or circumvented.
State and federal regulators often do little to confirm what pollutants
go into wells for drilling waste. They rely heavily on an honor system
in which companies are supposed to report what they are pumping into the
earth, whether their wells are structurally sound, and whether they
have violated any rules.
More than 1,000 times in the three-year period examined, operators
pumped waste into Class 2 wells at pressure levels they knew could
fracture rock and lead to leaks. In at least 140 cases, companies
injected waste illegally or without a permit.
In several instances, records show, operators did not meet
requirements to identify old or abandoned wells near injection sites
until waste flooded back up to the surface, or found ways to cheat on
tests meant to make sure wells aren't leaking.
"The program is basically a paper tiger," said Mario Salazar, a
former senior technical advisor to the
Environmental Protection Agency
who worked with its injection regulation program for 25 years. While
wells that handle hazardous waste from other industries have been held
to increasingly tough standards, Salazar said, Class 2 wells remain a
gaping hole in the system. "There are not enough people to look at how
these wells are drilled … to witness whether what they tell you they
will do is in fact what they are doing."
Thanks in part to legislative measures and rulemaking dating back to
the late 1970s, material from oil and gas drilling is defined as
nonhazardous, no matter what it contains. Oversight of Class 2 wells is
often relegated to overstretched, understaffed state oil and gas
agencies, which have to balance encouraging energy production with
protecting the environment. In some areas, funding for enforcement has
dropped even as drilling activity has surged, leading to more wells and
more waste overseen by fewer inspectors.
"Class 2 wells constitute a serious problem," said John Apps, a
leading geoscientist and injection expert who works with the U.S.
Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "The risk
to water? I think it's high, partially because of the enormous number of
these wells and the fact that they are not regulated with the same
degree of conscientiousness."
In response to questions about the adequacy of oversight, the EPA,
which holds primary regulatory authority over injection wells, reissued a
statement it supplied to
ProPublica for
an earlier article in June.
"Underground injection has been and continues to be a viable
technique for subsurface storage and disposal of fluids when properly
done," a spokesperson wrote. "EPA recognizes that more can be done to
enhance drinking water safeguards and, along with states and tribes,
will work to improve the efficiency of the underground injection control
program."
Some at the EPA and at the Department of Justice, which prosecutes
environmental crimes, say the system's blind spots suggest that many
more violations likely go undiscovered – at least until they mushroom
into a crisis.
That's what happened at Rosharon.
The accident prompted the EPA to examine what else had been dumped at the site, ultimately
exposing a scheme
by a company that was not involved in the explosion, Texas Oil and
Gathering,
to pass off deadly chemicals from a petroleum refining plant
as saltwater from drilling.
The switch saved the company substantial fees by allowing it to
dispose of the material in a Class 2 well, instead of a more stringently
controlled well for hazardous waste, federal investigators said.
Texas Oil and Gathering's owner and operations manager were convicted
of conspiring to dump illegal waste and violating the
Safe Drinking
Water Act. Both declined to comment for this article.
Texas officials acknowledged that they had not looked beyond the
paperwork submitted by the operators using the well. The delivery trucks
weren't inspected; the wastewater was not sampled.
"Staff had no reason to believe at the time that such testing was
necessary at this facility,'' Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for the Railroad
Commission of Texas, which regulates the oil and gas industry activity
in the state, wrote in an email. "The likelihood of unpermitted material
being disposed of is low.''
William Miller, the EPA's chief investigator on the case, points out
that the only reason anyone was held accountable for injection-related
violations was because the site blew up.
"If you can get the stuff down the well how is anyone ever going to
know what it was?" said Miller, who retired from the EPA in 2011. "There
is no way to recover it. It's an easy way to commit a crime and not
have any evidence left of it afterwards."
States and Industry Resist Environmental Protections
One reason that Texas Oil and Gathering was able to dump toxic waste
for years without getting caught is that environmental regulations
governing how the oil and gas industry disposes of material underground
were weakened almost as soon as they were written.
A series of injection accidents beginning in the 1960s – involving pesticide waste in Colorado, dioxins in
Beaumont, Texas,
and drilling waste that spread for miles through a drinking water
aquifer in Arkansas – prompted lawmakers to impose tougher rules on
injection wells.
Wells were
divided into classes,
depending on the source of the waste they handled. Class 1 wells for
chemical, pharmaceutical and other industrial wastes, along with Class 2
wells for the oil and gas industry, were subjected to tough controls
under the
Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. From the start, the EPA says,
oil and gas waste was treated as less toxic than waste from other
industries, but all such material was seen as dangerous to drinking
water.
Companies drilling the wells were required to do geological modeling
to ensure that surrounding rock layers would not allow waste to escape
through fissures or fault lines. They also were required to check for
the presence of other wells that could be a conduit for contamination.
The EPA set baseline standards and mandated periodic inspections for
defects. In many cases, states oversaw their implementation.
The ink had barely dried on the new regulations when the oil and gas
industry – aided by sympathetic state regulators who thought their
existing oversight was sufficient – began arguing that its waste should
be treated differently.
Industry officials lobbied for state oil and gas agencies, some of
which already had rules in place, to oversee Class 2 wells, not federal
or local environmental officials. Some argued state energy regulators
had greater expertise in well construction and regional geology.
In 1980,
California Rep. Henry Waxman sponsored a measure that
allowed the EPA to delegate authority to oversee Class 2 injection to
state oil and gas regulators, even if the rules they applied varied from
the
Safe Drinking Water Act and federal guidelines.
A few years later, Dick Stamets, New Mexico's chief oil and gas
regulator at the time, told a crowd of state regulators and industry
representatives that the Waxman amendment was a biblical deliverance
from oppressive federal oversight for the drilling industry.
"The Pharaoh EPA did propose regulations and there was chaos upon the
earth," Stamets said. "The people groaned and labored, and great was
their suffering until Moses Section 1425 (the Waxman amendment) did lead
them to the Promised Land."
In the late 1980s, the EPA moved to impose more stringent measures on
injection wells after Congress banned injection of "hazardous" waste.
The new rules barred underground dumping unless companies could prove
the chemicals weren't a health threat. To earn permission to inject the
waste, companies would have to conduct exhaustive scientific reviews to
dispose of hazardous materials, proving their waste wouldn't migrate
underground for at least 10,000 years.
The energy industry moved preemptively to shield itself from these
changes, too. The
Safe Drinking Water Act prohibited the EPA from
interfering with the economics of the oil and gas industry unless there
was an imminent threat to health or the environment. The industry argued
that its waste was mostly harmless brine and that testing and
inspecting hundreds of thousands of wells for waste that would qualify
as "hazardous" would delay drillers or cost them a fortune.
"It would have been crippling to U.S. oil and gas production," said
Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations for the Independent
Petroleum Association of America. Fuller was a former staff member for
the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, whose ranking member
at the time, the late
Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, led the fight against
the hazardous waste rule. "So yes, the industry was very aggressively
seeking some mechanism to address those consequences."
Bentsen had won the industry a temporary reprieve in 1980 by
persuading Congress to redefine any substance that resulted from
drilling – or "producing" – an oil or gas well as "non-hazardous,"
regardless of its chemical makeup, pending EPA study. In 1988, the EPA
made it permanent, handing oil and gas companies a
landmark exemption.
From then on, benzene from the fertilizer industry was considered
hazardous, threatening health and underground water supplies; benzene
derived from wells for the oil and gas industry was not.
The effect was that the largest waste stream headed for underground
injection, that from the oil and gas industry, was exempted from one of
the most effective parts of environmental rules governing hazardous
waste disposal.
"A blanket exemption without any sense of what the actual chemistry
of these wastewaters is, is very concerning," said Briana Mordick, a
geologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Other protections also began to unravel, widening the gap between
Class 1 and Class 2 well regulations. Both regulators and the industry
regularly refer to drilling waste as "salt water" even though, according
to
a 2002 EPA internal training document
obtained by
ProPublica, "on any given day, the injectate of a Class
II-D well has the potential to contain hazardous concentrations of
solvents, acids, and other… hazardous wastes."
Once the wastes were defined as nonhazardous, there was little
justification for holding Class 2 wells to the same rules as other waste
being injected deep underground.
Today, for example,
Class 1 wells for hazardous waste
are tested for pressure continuously and are supposed to be inspected
for cracks and leaks every 12 months. Oil and gas wells – though the
goal is to inspect their sites annually – have to be tested only once
every five years.
Injection wells are known to cause earthquakes, so Class 1 wells
usually have rigorous seismic and geologic siting requirements. Often,
Class 2 wells do not. An EPA staff member might spend an entire year
reviewing an application for a new hazardous waste well. Class 2 wells
are often permitted in bulk, meaning hundreds can be green-lighted in a
matter of days.
Where Class 1 hazardous waste is injected, companies have to inspect a
two-mile radius for old wells, making sure contaminants will have no
avenue to shoot back up into drinking water aquifers or to the surface.
The minimum standard for oil and gas companies is to inspect within 400
yards, even though it is widely believed, according to internal EPA
memorandums obtained by
ProPublica, that such a rule is arbitrarily
defined, runs against "
much existing evidence" and "
may not afford adequate protection" of drinking water.
EPA officials acknowledge that their Class 1 regulations represent
the best practices to keep water safe and that the risk of a Class 2
well leaking is no different than the risk of a Class 1 well leaking.
The contrast in regulations reflects "varying legal authorities, not
varying levels of confidence," an agency spokeswoman wrote in an email,
referring to the mandate not to let environmental rules interfere with
the nation's drilling progress.
State injection regulators counter that much drilling-related waste
is put in the same geologic formations that produce oil and gas, in
which contaminants like benzene naturally occur. The water close to
these wells is often already undrinkable, they say, so lesser
protections make sense.
According to the EPA's most recent inventory, the number of Class 2 wells is near an all-time high.
Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and California use tens of thousands of Class
2 wells to push out oil and gas or dispose of
fracking fluids and
"produced" water, as the waste derived from drilling is called. In North
Dakota,
injection permits have increased tenfold, with more wells being permitted in one month – September 2011 –than is typical in an entire year.
New Mexico
issued twice as many permits last year as it did in 2007. Ohio injected
twice as much waste in 2011 as it did in 2006 and is evaluating
applications for dozens of new injection sites. largely for waste
exported by Pennsylvania and New York, where such wells are deemed
unsafe.
As much as 70 percent of the waste destined for Class 2 facilities
would be considered toxic if it were not for the loopholes in the law,
according to Wilma Subra, a chemist and activist who sits on the board
of
STRONGER, a partnership of oil and gas industry representatives and state regulators aimed at bolstering state standards.
Recently, Stark Concerned Citizens, an anti-drilling group, asked
Ohio regulators why radioactive materials such as radium weren't
identified or disclosed when injected into Class 2 wells.
"The law allows it," Tom Tomastik, a geologist with Ohio's Department
of Natural Resources and a national expert on injection well
regulation, replied in a Sept. 17 email. "It does not matter what is in
it. As long as it comes from the oil and gas field it can be injected."
Well Operators Game Safety Tests
When Carl Weller showed up, shovel in hand, at a Kentucky farm field
dotted with injection wells in June 2007, he was acting on a tip.
Weller, a contracted EPA injection inspector, was an expert in testing
for what regulators call "mechanical integrity," using air pressure to
check if wells have leaks or cracks.
Such tests are among the only ways to know whether cement and steel
well structures are intact, preventing brine and other chemicals from
reaching drinking water.
Using his shovel, Weller dug around the top of a well, unearthing the
steel tubing near the surface. A few inches down, he came across an
apparatus he had never seen before: A section of high-pressure tubing
ran out of the well bore and connected to a three-foot-long section of
steel pipe, sealed at both ends. The apparatus appeared designed to
divert air pumped into the well into the pipe instead, making the well
test as if it were airtight.
"The only reason that I know of that that device would be installed
would be to perform a false mechanical integrity test, more than likely
because the well itself would not pass," Weller testified in 2009 as
part of a case against the well's operator. The EPA did not make Weller
available to comment for this article.
When EPA inspectors kept digging, they found the buried devices on 10 more wells.
The case stunned regulators. Weller had been inspecting the site's
injection wells, which were used to enhance the recovery of oil, for the
better part of a decade, certifying them as safe. After the EPA's
discoveries, workers at the company that operated the wells, Roseclare
Oil,
accused its manager, Daniel Lewis, of having conspired to cheat the tests for much of that time.
In 2009, Lewis
was convicted
of a felony charge for gaming the safety tests on Roseclare's wells and
was sentenced to 3 years probation and a $5,000 fine. He maintains his
innocence, saying the wells were rigged by his father, who ran the
company's local operations until his death, but said such practices were
typical in Kentucky's oil and gas industry. "I'd say it's pretty
common," said Lewis, whose probation was commuted in 2011. "But it's
not something people go around talking about either."
From Lewis' perspective, injection well operators sometimes have
little choice but to try to fool inspectors. Many wells are decades old
and were drilled before the current regulations were written. Some are
decrepit, their cement aging and cracked. They also can't be easily – or
cheaply – repaired.
Lewis, who is now a part-owner of Roseclare and continues to run its
operations, said that before wells were due for EPA inspections he would
pretest them himself. If one failed, he'd enter problem-solving mode,
prepping the site for the EPA's arrival. Two of his employees testified
that he ordered them to fabricate and install the diverters.
"You go and work in it and try to get it to hold and it won't hold,"
Lewis said of the wells. "What are you going to do? It's kind of a
‘Don't ask, don't tell.'"
Randy Ream, the Assistant U.S. Attorney for Kentucky's Western
District who prosecuted the case against Lewis, called his scheme
unusually elaborate but agreed that efforts to get around the rules for
injection wells are common. Sometimes, he said, they result in the
contamination of private drinking water wells.
"We have people who have constructed wells that are not certified
injection wells, or we have people who will put their brine in a tank
and carry it over and put it in somebody else's well," Ream said. "One
guy, he's got oil coming out of his shower head."
"There is just so much brine," Ream added, "and you have to get rid of it."
So Many Wells, So Few Inspectors
One obstacle to more effective enforcement in Kentucky and elsewhere,
Ream said, is that regulators cannot always keep up with well tests and
inspections.
According to EPA records, Kentucky has 3,403 Class 2 wells, which are
supposed to be tested for mechanical integrity once every five years.
But since 2007, an average of just 253 wells a year have been tested,
less than half as many as there should have been to remain on schedule.
A spokeswoman for the EPA's regional office in Atlanta said in an
email that only half of Kentucky's injection wells are actively used and
only active wells can be tested. She said mechanical integrity tests
are performed on each well every 36 months, but did not address the
discrepancy between this schedule and the number of tests reflected in
EPA data.
The EPA employs just six people to check its wells across the
southeast, not just in Kentucky, but in Tennessee and Florida, too.
Those same people are also responsible for working with state inspection
programs in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi,
which have their own inspection staffs.
Most states aim to visit injection sites at least once a year, and
some meet or exceed that schedule, EPA records show. Ohio, for example,
recently added staff dedicated exclusively to injection oversight and
visits its active injection sites every 12 weeks. (Ohio also insists
that Class 2 wells meet many of the more stringent testing and
permitting regulations it uses for Class 1 hazardous waste wells.)
"Ohio's [rules] are based on what we felt we needed to develop to
continue to alleviate any concerns," said Tomastik, of Ohio's Department
of Natural Resources. "Obviously without regulatory presence in the
field, the operator is not concerned about operating within the
requirements."
But understaffing seems to be endemic across drilling states,
especially where state regulatory agencies are responsible for checking
both producing oil and gas wells and injection wells for waste or to
enhance production.
In Montana
, EPA auditors noted that inspectors are choosing which wells to inspect and have a "significant" workload. In North Dakota, EPA auditors
also noted the pressures of "exponential" growth and an "increasing workload."
To meet the goal of inspecting each well annually, Texas inspectors
would have to visit eight wells a day, every day, including Sundays and
Christmas. That's after Texas' Railroad Commission hired 65 staffers
last year to help inspect the state's 428,000 wells.
Nye, the commission's spokeswoman, said the state had sufficient
funding and inspected each of its commercial disposal wells twice last
year.
"The Commission has a stringent and comprehensive review process for
these wells," Nye wrote in an email. "Railroad Commission staff work
diligently to ensure saltwater disposal wells are not and will not be a
problem."
But inspectors don't check on private disposal wells, which are far
more numerous, with the same regularity. Nor do they keep a schedule for
when officials should conduct such visits.
Other states are struggling under similar burdens. In Wyoming,
inspectors would also have to check eight wells a day for each well to
be checked once a year – a pace possible if wells are clustered
together, experts said, but otherwise difficult to achieve. In West
Virginia and Kansas, inspectors would have to check seven wells per day.
Visiting injection wells often ranks low among inspectors' priorities unless there is an accident or spill, according to a 2007
Texas auditor's report.
The most urgent responsibility for regulators, beyond responding to
emergencies, is typically overseeing the development of new oil and gas
wells.
The result is that several years can pass between inspections of many
injection well sites. In 2010, state regulators visited less than half
of the Class 2 sites that a federal well inventory shows they were
responsible for monitoring,
ProPublica's analysis showed. EPA
inspectors checked on such wells even less frequently, visiting less
than one-quarter of the sites under their jurisdiction in 2010.
"I don't give a darn whether you have federal regulations, or a
squeaky clean permitting system," said Bill Bryson, a member of the
Kansas Geological Survey and the former head of Kansas' oil and gas
commission. "If you don't have somebody going out and looking at the
wells it doesn't do any good, and if you don't have the right people
looking … it doesn't do any good either."
Much of the problem with oversight comes down to money, critics say.
In some states, budgets and staff for oil and gas agencies have dropped
relative to the number of new wells being drilled over the last nine
years.
Kansas employs about the same number of inspectors as it did in 2003,
even though it drills four times as many new wells. New drilling has
nearly doubled in Louisiana over the same period, but the state's
enforcement staff has remained static and its oil and gas budget has
increased modestly. In Illinois, drilling has nearly doubled, while the
number of enforcement staff has been reduced.
Since the Underground Injection Control program is run under a
federal mandate, states rely partly on money from the EPA to fund
oversight and enforcement. Federal dollars make up 20 percent of Texas'
budget, for example. But in the last 22 years, the EPA's annual
operating budget for injection has remained about the same: $10 million.
Taking inflation into account, funding has dropped at least 40 percent
from 1990 to 2012, though the regulations for all well classes have only
grown more complex.
"The UIC program has been flat funded for years," said Dan Jarvis,
the field operations manager for Utah's Division of Oil, Gas and Mining.
"With more manpower, obviously you put them on the ground and you're
going to have better compliance. Our field people are some of the
greatest guys going, but they are overworked."
The EPA declined to disclose the operating budget for regional
offices that monitor waste wells under federal jurisdiction or oversee
state injection programs.
Documents show,
however, that in 2011 the agency suspended its travel budget for visits
to some of the states that have the largest injection programs,
including Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma.
"Do you think we are doing more now than we were doing 30 years ago?
No, there is no money," said Salazar, the former EPA injection expert.
"There are not enough people to know what is going on. It is the ideal
storm for industry. Less and less people, more and more things that the
EPA has to do."
Ultimately, much of the responsibility for meeting EPA standards
falls to companies themselves. Some operators routinely exceed the
minimum requirements of injection regulations, says Hughbert Collier,
who runs a Texas environmental engineering firm that consults with
injection well operators. They conduct their own integrity tests every
year and make sure employees visit well sites once a month.
But operators inclined to cut corners have little to hold them back.
"What most people would be surprised about is that regulators don't
have real good control over everything that goes on in the regulated
community," said Miller, the former EPA criminal investigator in Texas.
"Most of our environmental law requires self-reporting and that requires
honest people."
When violations are identified – such as the 140 times waste was
illegally injected and noted in the regulatory reports – the
consequences can be minimal, and only in rare cases do transgressions
rise to the level of criminal prosecution. In the three years of
national data reviewed by
ProPublica, which included more than 24,000
formal notices of violations, only one case was referred to criminal
investigators.
Usually, violations result in citations or informal warnings. If
operators do not address violations, then modest fines may be levied; in
some cases, wells are temporarily shut down. There is no central source
of information on the size of fines, but an audit of
Louisiana's injection program provides a glimpse: In 2011, the state collected an average of $158 for each violation.
After three deaths, two federal worker safety investigations and a
criminal prosecution, few injection sites nationwide received as much
regulatory scrutiny as those in Rosharon, Texas. Yet, despite all the
attention, the wells there later failed on the most basic level.
On Feb. 17, 2010, thousands of gallons of waste that had been deposited into these wells
gurgled to the surface
in what the Railroad Commission described as a "breakout." Materials
injected far below the earth had managed to migrate back up to the
surface, perhaps through an old well missed by regulators.
As of this June, investigators were still analyzing whether the
chemicals injected underneath the site had reached water supplies.
Concerned people from the U.S. and numerous other countries will join in a global campaign event Saturday to call for a ban of
hydraulic fracturing or “fracking." More than 150 events, on five continents, are planned for this weekend’s “
Global Frackdown” -- a day of action against fracking -- coupled with the promotion of the expansion of clean, sustainable energy options.
Concerns
about fracking, a process of extracting oil and gas from shale
formations, have increased over the past few years as a growing number
of communities encounter pressure from the well-funded industry to open
up their land and water to industrial drilling. New technologies have
made obtaining these deposits cheaper than had been possible in the
past, leading to a rapid expansion of fracking across the globe.
During the process of fracking, large quantities of fresh water,
coupled with chemicals and sand, are pumped into shale formations in
order to crack the rock and extract the fossil fuels.
The blend of
"proprietary" chemicals used in this process is largely kept
confidential, but studies have revealed that fracking fluids contain a
host of toxic substances, including known carcinogens and volatile
organic compounds (VOCs). Fracking has the documented potential to
contaminate drinking water sources. Fracking has also been shown to
foul both air and land -- in addition to
spoiling millions of gallons of fresh water
as part of the drilling process.
Fracking has been a contentious issue
in many countries that have large shale deposits, which may be located
where people live or set aside as natural wildlife areas or parks.
While communities across the globe continue to fight political or
legal battles over the use of land and water for the controversial
extraction process, Saturday’s day of action will be the first time such
efforts are coordinated internationally.
Citizens on Five Continents Call for a BanThe day of action, spearheaded by
Food & Water Watch,
has garnered participation of over 150 organizations worldwide.
Citizens in Argentina, the Czech Republic, China, Zimbabwe, and the
Ukraine, among other nations, will be speaking out on the same day that
resisting unlimited fracking is a universal fight.
“Since our water system is deeply interconnected, even if you don’t
have a fracking rig next to your house, your health, safety and
environment are at risk,” Anna Ghosh of Food & Water Watch
said.
Citizens will converge in front of parliament buildings in Bulgaria,
South Africa, and the Czech Republic, at the Golden Gate bridge in San
Francisco, and at Noosa Beach in Australia. A brigade of bicycles will
protest at the site of an injection well in
northern Spain.
Street theatre performances portraying the dangers of fracking will be
held in downtown Chicago and citizens will hand out information on
fracking at Madison's weekly farmers' market on the Capitol building
square, among other actions.
Day of Action Follows Protests in Brussels, Philadelphia, and Ottawa Some of the actions already started this week. On Tuesday, members of Green Parties from across Europe
gathered
in front of the European Parliament building in Brussels, Belgium,
holding murky cups of water along with their protest signs, to represent
the threat of water contamination that comes with fracking. The
European Union is currently in the process of deciding the future of how
the continent will move forward on regulating fracking.
This protest came in part in response to the European Parliament’s
Industry Committee passing a decision Tuesday that said no environmental
regulation amendments are needed to protect citizens from fracking. The
European Parliament Environment Committee voted the following day for a
more stringent approach to regulation. A European Commission
released
a report earlier this month calling for strict regulations because of
the threat that fracking poses to the health of Europe’s residents and
its environment.
On Thursday in Ottawa, the Council of Canadians, dressed in hazmat suits,
delivered
petitions signed by nearly 10,000 people asking for a moratorium on
fracking in that country until federal reviews have been completed. The
staff carried fake buckets of toxic fracking fluid to deliver along with
the petitions. The protesters had hoped to deliver the petitions to
Peter Kent, the Minister of the Environment, but the minister never made
an appearance.
About one thousand people gathered in Philadelphia Thursday for “Shale Gas Outrage,” organized by
Protecting Our Waters,
a Philadelphia-based nonprofit group. The protestors stood outside the
Pennsylvania Convention Center where inside Governor Tom Corbett spoke
to attendants of a Marcellus Shale industry conference. At the
convention, Corbett
called
those concerned about fracking the "unreasoning opposition" and touted
the industry as the "tip of the spear" of a new industrial revolution.
Corbett reportedly
received nearly $1 million from those in the oil and gas industry during his gubernatorial campaign.
Citizens Standing up to Powerful Industry, Gains Have Been MadeThese citizens are up against a powerful, well-funded oil and gas industry with an
aggressive public relations campaign to convince the world that fracking is benign. But despite their efforts,
victories
have been won by citizens hoping to protect their health and the
environment from the dangers fracking poses. Fracking has been banned in
France, Bulgaria, and the state of Vermont. There are also moratoriums
on new fracking wells in New Jersey and New York, as well as in Romania,
the Czech Republic, and the German region of North Rhine Westphalia.
New York is currently deciding whether to end the state's moratorium on
new wells in the state. Around two thousand individuals
marched in Albany in August to persuade Governor Andrew Cuomo not to lift the moratorium.
Within the first 24 hours of which she was named to cabinet, Quebec’s
new Natural Resources Minister Martine Ouellet said Thursday that she
does not think there is any safe way to extract shale gas. “Our position
is very clear: we want a complete moratorium, not only on exploitation
but also on exploration of shale gas. We haven’t changed our minds,” she
said.
A full list of events planned for the "Global Frackdown" is available
here.
