Water quality?
As we all know, there has been a lot of conversations and complaints about the quality of our drinking water. In the following context, I will shed light on what has happened to our water quality over the past six years.
In the past, we all are aware that our streams used to run red from the iron being placed in our waterways by mining operations. For a long time there were no clean water standards and the mining companies were given the freedom to discharge their contaminated water into our water resources.
Then President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Following this lead, the states began to develop their own agencies to protect our water and air. The state of Pennsylvania even amended its Commonwealth’s Constitution to include Article 1, section 27, which provides every citizen of Pennsylvania pure water and clean air. This amendment was passed unanimously by both the state’s houses twice.
For some reason this act is now under extreme attack by our own state government. They seem to forget that when the act came up for a vote by the people, it received four times more votes than any of the candidates running for office at that time. The bill was four times more popular than any political candidate. It seems now that the politicians have forgotten that vote?
This brings us to 2008 and the development of the slick water hydro-fracking gas drilling industry in our state. If you think back to that time and remember all the promises that were made by the Marcellus Gas drilling companies, you can see the “snow job” we were handed. The movie “Promised Land” and parts 1 and 2 of “Gas Land” depicts what has taken place in the drilling saga. We were promised great wealth and safe drilling standards.
Let us first look at the wealth and the cost to our environment. Some people received $5 an acre while others received $5,000 dollars an acre for up-front payments. The question is, “Is it all not the same gas?” Then if we look at the safety of the drilling process, we see many situations that damaged the environment. Range Resources was fined $4.1 million for their impound ponds leaking into our drinking water aquifers. EQT is now being fined over $4.2 million in the central part of the state for environmental problems caused by drilling operations. Alpha Resources was fined $27.5 million and ordered to invest an additional $200 million, $150 million of which goes to Greene County and into building reverse osmosis plants to treat their mining discharges.
You may ask yourself why I mentioned a mining operation when I was talking about gas drilling. It is simple. The chemicals being discharged from the mining operations and abandoned mine operations contain chemicals associated with Marcellus Gas drilling – not mining operations. By the time you read this article, the EPA will have been in our areas checking on complaints on this very topic. The DEP of our state is very lax at this time in controlling the on-going drilling operations. About 12 percent of the current wells being drilled will never be visited by a DEP inspector.
The water from these wells must go somewhere. Many people think that “Flow Back” is being monitored by the DEP. If this is true, then where did the recent incident of frack water being dumped into the Waynesburg Boro sewage treatment plant come from? Let us think about this concept. If the DEP can not visit all the current wells being drilled, how can the DEP follow the movement of thousands of water trucks and where they go? Did you know that in Belle Vernon there is a municipal waste dump that is permitted to take 80 percent of is raw material from drilling operations? What do you think is being dumped in that landfill? Its leach runs into a small stream and eventually ends in the Mon River above Pittsburgh.
As for our local water situation, Tri-County Water is having a terrible time with Trihalomethane in their water system. Everyone wants to blame the water treatment plant. This plant operated for years without any problems. Why is there a problem now? The municipal water treatment plants were not designed to deal with the current raw water problems. They were not designed to treat for bromides, strontium, Radium 226 and radium 228. After November, the water pollution division of the DEP has promised to come to our area and test for certain chemicals in our water and also to test for endocrine disrupters. There are certain chemicals being used in drilling that do possess the ability to disrupt the natural genetic development in all living organisms. When these results become available, I will share them to the public.
As for our water quality and how safe it is, well, who really knows? There are so many new chemicals being introduced into our environment that the water companies can not test for all of them.
Our water companies are not equipped to deal with this onslaught of new chemicals. In fact, there are certain chemicals being used in drilling that have no tests to detect them. The only way to ensure safe drinking water is to prevent the raw water from being inundated with these new environmentally hazardous chemicals. Remember, the key for clean air and water is prevention. Maybe we should adopt the following ideal, “Prevention is the key to preservation.”
If one always has faith in a higher being, one can always find comfort in time of need.