The NO Frack Almanac – Vol 2, #1 – Winter/Spring 2013
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ALMANAC We’re citizens, not subjects. WINTER/SPRING 2013 VOLUME 2, NUMBER 1 We NY, but... The No Frack Free On September 6th, two activists were arrested in Manhattan, protesting against the Spectra gas pipeline. Among other things, they alleged that the pipeline, slated to start carrying “natural” (i.e. fracked) gas in November 2013, could also bring up to 30,000 cancer deaths to the city. Though we had known about the Spectra protests for a while, we took particular notice on this date, because on the same day, without any coordination whatsoever, three activists from upstate (including the editor of this paper), were arrested in Reading, New York, protesting Inergy’s plans to build a gas storage facility in local salt caverns. It seemed the upstate and downstate movements were more in sync than anyone realized, so we resolved to visit the city and see for ourselves what was up with the Spectra protests. We planned our visit for a day when there would be a community meeting on the pipeline that we’d be able to attend. Many advocacy groups are opposed to the pipeline, along with several political organizations like the Village Independent Democrats, the Three Parks Democratic Club, and Community Boards two and four. Our advisor, Clare Donohue, a kitchen and bath designer and a founder of the Sane Energy Project, ensured our welcome by sending this message to her fellow Spectra resisters: “It would be wonderful if we could convey to [The Almanac’s] rural audience why they are at risk from these pipelines and the policies of our mayor, which encourages the use of fracked gas in boilers, busses and power plants; of his stated intention to frack upstate outside of our watershed to supply the city with gas. Many people upstate believe that city folk do not care about them, that we have taken their water for decades and treated the area as a playground for the wealthy while they remain impoverished. They don’t all realize that we are in solidarity and have much common ground.” Thanks to that kind invitation, lots of people wanted to talk with us, and we met as many as we could. Sandra Koponen – an artist and one of the six anti-Spectra activists arrested on September 6th and/or September 12th (Sandra was arrested both times) – volunteered to be our guide. When we got to the city, she took us right to the Spectra construction site at Gansevoort St., where the 30- inch pipeline will enter Manhattan, at the western edge of Greenwich Village (the old Meatpacking District). That’s the site on the front cover. The blue- gray pipe rising out of the water is what’s called a “sacrificial joint,” a precursor to the final pipeline. Sandra admits to having a prior when it comes to civil disobedience. She spent a week in jail back in the Seventies, when she was 18, for demonstrating against the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California. It is worth digressing for just a moment to look back at that movement, which resulted in a clear loss for the protestors, despite thousands of civil disobedience arrests. The Diablo Canyon protestors, who felt the plant would be too dangerous, were ultimately overruled when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted unanimously to license the plant, calling it, “the most completely analyzed building in the world.” The commissioning of the plant was delayed at the last minute, though, when it was discovered that “the most completely analyzed building in the world” had been approved with the earthquake supports for the cooling pipes installed backwards. The plant was eventually brought on line anyway and, decades later, the Fukushima nuclear power plant, like Diablo Canyon sited on a coastal fault line, showed why the protesters were right that this was a bad idea to begin with. Nothing in this history has made Sandra repent her activism. “We are sort of in a war,” she says, “and people have to put themselves on the line.” She thinks fracking is “totally evil” and “blatantly about greed” and she is concerned that “the Marcellus shale has a very dangerously high concentration of radon that will be transported into people’s kitchens.” This is a crucial question, and one of the core issues raised by Spectra’s opponents. In a much- cited paper, Dr. Marvin Resnikoff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates, noted that “wellhead concentrations [of radon] in Marcellus shale are up to 70 times the average in natural gas wells throughout the U.S.” And because the shale gas fields of Pennsylvania (and maybe, someday, continued on page 2
Transcript
AlmAnAcWe’re citizens, not subjects.
Winter/spring 2013Volume 2, number 1
We NY, but...
The No Frack Free
On September 6th, two activists were arrested in
Manhattan, protesting against the Spectra gas pipeline.
Among other things, they alleged that the pipeline, slated to start carrying “natural” (i.e. fracked) gas in November 2013, could
also bring up to 30,000 cancer deaths to the city. Though we had known about
the Spectra protests for a while, we took particular notice on this date, because on
the same day, without any coordination whatsoever, three activists from upstate
(including the editor of this paper), were arrested in Reading, New York, protesting
Inergy’s plans to build a gas storage facility in local salt caverns. It seemed the upstate
and downstate movements were more in sync than anyone realized, so we resolved to visit the city and see for ourselves what was
up with the Spectra protests.
We planned our visit for a day when there would be a community meeting on the pipeline that
we’d be able to attend. Many advocacy groups are opposed to the pipeline, along with several political organizations like the Village Independent Democrats, the Three Parks Democratic Club, and Community Boards two and four. Our advisor, Clare Donohue, a kitchen and bath designer and a founder of the Sane Energy Project, ensured our welcome by sending this message to her fellow Spectra resisters:
“It would be wonderful if we could convey to [The Almanac’s] rural audience why they are at risk from these pipelines and the policies of our mayor, which encourages the use of fracked gas in boilers, busses and power plants; of his stated intention to frack upstate outside of our watershed to supply the city with gas. Many people upstate believe that city folk do not care about them, that we have taken their water for decades and treated the area as a playground for the wealthy while they remain impoverished. They don’t all realize that we are in solidarity and have much common ground.”
Thanks to that kind invitation, lots of people wanted to talk with us, and we met as many as we could. Sandra Koponen – an artist and one of the six anti-Spectra activists arrested on September 6th and/or September 12th (Sandra was arrested both times) – volunteered to be our guide. When we got to the city, she took us right to the Spectra construction site at Gansevoort St., where the 30-inch pipeline will enter Manhattan, at the western edge of Greenwich Village (the old Meatpacking District).
That’s the site on the front cover. The blue-gray pipe rising out of the water is what’s called a “sacrificial joint,” a precursor to the final pipeline.
Sandra admits to having a prior when it
comes to civil disobedience. She spent a week in jail back in the Seventies, when she was 18, for demonstrating against the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California. It is worth digressing for just a moment to look back at that movement, which resulted in a clear loss for the protestors, despite thousands of civil disobedience arrests.
The Diablo Canyon protestors, who felt the plant would be too dangerous, were ultimately overruled when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted unanimously to license the plant, calling it, “the most completely analyzed building in the world.” The commissioning of the plant was delayed at the last minute, though, when it was discovered that “the most completely analyzed building in the world” had been approved with the earthquake supports for the cooling pipes installed backwards. The plant was eventually brought on line anyway and, decades later, the Fukushima nuclear power plant, like Diablo Canyon sited on a coastal fault line, showed why the protesters were right that this was a bad idea to begin with.
Nothing in this history has made Sandra repent her activism. “We are sort of in a war,” she says, “and people have to put themselves on the line.” She thinks fracking is “totally evil” and “blatantly about greed” and she is concerned that “the Marcellus shale has a very dangerously high concentration of radon that will be transported into people’s kitchens.”
This is a crucial question, and one of the core issues raised by Spectra’s opponents. In a much-cited paper, Dr. Marvin Resnikoff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates, noted that “wellhead concentrations [of radon] in Marcellus shale are up to 70 times the average in natural gas wells throughout the U.S.” And because the shale gas fields of Pennsylvania (and maybe, someday,
continued on page 2
Gansevoort at sunset
[See “Accidents” box on page 3]. In and of itself, that doesn’t make natural gas more dangerous than other fuels (plenty of homes have burned down from wood stove fires, for example), but it does mean a gas pipeline is at its most dangerous in a densely populated urban setting. According to an organization called Planetsave, 1823 children live in the zip code where the pipeline will enter Manhattan, and many more come into the area each day to attend one of the three schools there.
We also spoke with JK Canepa, one of the founders of the New York Climate Action Group. She said, “Let me talk to your audience in upstate New York.” She had something very much on her mind that she wanted to convey:
“I come from the coal regions of Pennsylvania. I saw men in their forties with wrinkles on their faces
We NY, but...
New York) are only hours away from NYC, the radioactivity will not have time to decay. As a result, Dr. Resnikoff predicted, there would be 1,182 to 30,448 excess cancer deaths over the lifetimes of the 11.9 million metropolitan area residents likely to be exposed to the gas in their homes. Radon could affect upstate homes too, but they are likely to be better ventilated and, thus, safer than unvented NYC apartments.
Before Sandra walked us to our next stop, we tried to talk with the two security guards we saw on duty. One basically just told us to shoo. The other said, “I wish you the best [but] by me losing my job, I’m not going to help your cause.” By this time, the sun was setting, and in one of those anomalies that keeps life interesting, the area of this potential engine of doom almost looked like it was graced by heaven.
We arrived at our designated West Village meeting space and found a lot of activists eager to talk with us, starting with Erik McGregor, a photographer and documentarian, who says he regularly posts information on at least 20 websites and a similar number of Facebook pages,
trying to get the anti-pipeline-anti-fracking story out to the public.
“Unfortunately,” McGregor acknowledges, “the corporate media has done a great job distracting people, pulling them away from the real issues and bombarding them with advertising about how clean, safe and beneficial is the gas industry and this gas boom that will supposedly bring all the benefits to the city. I want them to know that this gas is coming with poison and has been placed in a very dangerous area, where a simple accident will create a crater that will level the neighborhood.”
This is another of the core issues. McGregor is, of course, right that pipelines do sometimes explode
lined with seams of coal. Their deaths were spelled out on their faces. I saw my state devastated once, and when we tried to recover, devastated again. Pennsylvania is completely toxic now, most of the state, even where my grandchildren are growing up right outside Philadelphia… So I’m connected very emotionally and deeply to the tragedy of fracking… We care about where the gas comes from. We care about the complicity that we ourselves have every time we turn on the stove… There’s nothing like fracking for destruction.”
Indeed, the overall need to stop fracking by shutting off the market for fracked gas is a critical part of the anti-pipeline movement. Conversely, pipeline activists point out that the more the vast New York City market opens up to fracked gas, the more pressure there will be to frack upstate.
Sherry Lane, who we met with next, made a point of saying that she lived “within the zone,” meaning the potential blast zone if the pipeline goes up. She was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit, trying to stop the pipeline, being brought by Sane Energy Project (as well as NYC Friends of Clearwater, NYH20, United for Action, Village Independent Democrats, Food and Water Watch and several other individual plaintiffs). The plaintiffs contested the pipeline in the state court system on procedural grounds, saying that legal requirements hadn’t been followed. When we met Sherry, no ruling had been issued.
“It looks like Spectra just went ahead and did what they wanted to do,” Sherry told us, wondering why the eventual outcome of their legal case seemed of so little consequence. Coincidentally, Inergy’s Reading, New York salt cavern gas storage project, where protestors were arrested on September 6th, has also been getting what are, essentially, interim permits and proceeding apace as if nothing can stop it. Sherry says, “They’re walking all over people like us.”
(A judge subsequently dismissed the Sane Energy Project lawsuit, ruling that the matter belonged in federal court. The plaintiffs have chosen not to appeal because, among other reasons, two federal suits are already in progress. One is being brought by Jersey City and the advocacy group No Gas Pipeline [nogaspipeline.org]. The pipeline is slated to run through Jersey City before crossing the Hudson, and unlike NYC’s Bloomberg, Jersey City’s mayor, Jeremiah T. Healy, has warned, “The safety of our citizens is going to be put in terrible jeopardy.” The Jersey City suit asks the court to overturn the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [FERC] decision permitting the pipeline and alleges, according to Derek Fanciullo, one of Jersey City’s lawyers, “that FERC long ago abandoned its regulatory responsibilities in favor of becoming a business partner to [energy] companies like Spectra.” The Sierra Club and Food and Water Watch are also plaintiffs, and have brought a second suit in a different jurisdiction.)
Photographer Joan Beard, another activist we met with, not only has an apartment in the blast zone, but takes her son to a nursery school that’s in it too. She says she loves the city, but has little confidence in how it’s run. “There isn’t anybody who lives around here who hasn’t seen water or steam just coming up from the street. They’ve seen smoke coming out of a manhole… I watched the towers come down. So many people died unnecessarily, and that was partly because of the terrorists and partly because people who were inside the buildings were told to stay in the buildings… So do I
POB 237, Hector, NY 14841855-UNFRACK(855-863-7225)
All text by Jeremy Weir Alderson and all photos by Liz Alderson unless otherwise marked.
What we Believe...In our original statement of purpose, we wrote that the No Frack Almanac was a place to tell our side of the story. It is still that. But as we enter our second year of publication, we want to state our beliefs simply and unambiguously, so there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind what viewpoint we represent. We believe that fracking is a war against humanity. We believe that fracking is tyranny. We believe that we are defending America.
continued from page 1
Erik McGregor
Credit SourCe: Sane energy ProjeCt
Spectra Danger Zone Caption: The danger radius (broader than just the blast zone) around the Spectra pipeline
JK Canepa
Sherry Lane
Joan Beard
2 | the no Frack Almanac | Winter/spring 2013
AccidentsConsolidated Edison’s representative, Anthony Leto, presented this slide during his talk at the Community Board 2 meeting we attended:Clearly, Consolidated edison wants people to think that the risks from piping massive quantities of gas into the city only have to do with third-party damage or corrosion. there have been lots of gas accidents caused by these factors, and we’re glad that Con ed is preparing for such contingencies, no matter that we cannot know how successful they’ll be at preventing them. But those aren’t the only contingencies.
We present here a list of some natural gas pipeline accidents that caused fatalities but are not of a type, or not fully of a type, that Con ed says it is preparing for.
october 10, 1955 – a crew cleaning a natural gas pipeline in orleans, indiana accidentally dislodges a coupler, releasing gas. two members of the crew are killed, three are injured, one severely, and two trucks are “literally melted,” according to a press report.
december 6, 1957 – as a crew is working on a municipal gas line in the basement of a drug store in Villa rica, georgia, an explosion erupts, killing 12 persons and injuring 20.
September 25, 1959 – a blast, apparently caused by a valve failure in a natural gas pipeline, kills one worker and critically injures another in newtown, Pa.
october 27, 1960 – two members of a gas company crew are killed when a 16-inch gas pipeline they are repairing explodes, just east of Checotah, oklahoma.
january 2, 1963 – a Pacific, gas & electric gas line explosion in San Francisco injures nine firefighters, most of them critically. a fire department battalion chief is knocked down by the blast and dies of a heart attack. in a retrospective on the explosion, the San Francisco Chronicle writes, “documents contained in a mountain of just-released Pg&e paperwork show that over the years, the company has found flawed welds up and down the 50-mile line. But there is no evidence in the records that in all that time, the company ever revealed the problems to state regulators.
February 7, 1964 – two young maintenance men in richardson, texas die of asphyxiation when a natural gas pipeline ruptures and they are overcome by the fumes.
March, 1968 (exact date uncertain) – Four workers are killed when natural gas from a pipeline being tested explodes in Portland, oregon.
May 6, 1969 – the cap blows off a 24-inch gas main in Suburban Pittsburgh that was being worked on. the cap punctures another nearby gas main, causing an explosion that kills one and injures nine.
november 17, 1971 – two workers are asphyxiated trying to stop a natural gas leak in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and four more are asphyxiated trying to save the first two.
March 24, 1972 – a gas explosion, probably caused by faulty pipeline installation, kills three in annandale, Virginia.
june 1975 (exact date unavailable) – gas seeping from an open gas main seeps into a home in east Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, which explodes, killing one. Subsequent investigation shows that gas company workers had falsified records to show that the main was closed.
december 15, 1977 – a failing compression coupling, joining a plastic gas main to a steel gas main, allows gas to migrate into two buildings in Lawrence, Kansas. the resulting fire and explosion kills two and injures three.
november 30, 1981 – natural gas leaks into a section of 26-inch pipeline being worked on by a welder in Flatwoods, West Virginia. the welder’s assistant is killed in the resulting explosion.
november 25, 1984 – a 30-inch natural gas pipeline ruptures near jackson, Louisiana and kills five. a subsequent investigation determines that the pipe had been laid improperly.
February 22, 1985 – a failed gasket in an underground natural gas line causes an explosion that kills two in Sharpsville, Pennsylvania
March 13, 1986 - a water main crew in Chicago Heights, illinois, accidentally snags a gas main, causing gas to leak into a nearby house, killing one and injuring another. the official accident investigation report notes, “although gas company personnel arrived on the scene approximately 10 minutes before the explosion and shut off the gas at the meter, neither they nor the contractor’s crew had made an effort to warn or evacuate the residents of the house.”
december 12, 1990 – a leaking valve between distribution systems causes a natural gas explosion at Fort Benjamin Harrison in indianapolis, killing two and injuring 24. an investigation blames the accident on the army’s “inadequacies” in managing its gas distribution system at the fort.
july 17, 1991 – as a corroded section of 10-inch natural gas pipeline is being removed in Mapleton, Michigan, a coupling is dislodged and the pressure of escaping gas kills one worker and injures five others.
december 28, 1991 – excavation work dislodges a coupling on a natural gas line, causing gas to leak into a wooden apartment building in Santa rosa, California. two persons are killed and three others are injured. an investigation revealed that the utility involved, Pacific gas and electric, had declined to install excess flow valves on their pipes, which might have prevented the accident.
january 17, 1992 – a gas explosion, perhaps caused by a failing pressure regulator, destroys a Chicago neighborhood, killing three. For two years thereafter, calls for a full public investigation are allegedly ignored.
june 7, 2010 – a natural gas pipeline explodes in johnson County, texas. one worker is killed and six are injured. an inquiry found that the operator of the pipeline had violated many regulations.
September 9, 2010 – a 30-inch natural gas pipeline ruptures in San Bruno, California. eight people are killed. Witnesses report that the initial explosion causes a wall of flame more than 1000 feet high. thirty-five homes are completely destroyed. the pipeline, which had been installed in 1956, was found to have many defective welds.
February 9, 2011 – a natural gas explosion and fire in allentown, Pa kills five people. reportedly, the explosion was caused by a leak in an 83-year-old cast-iron gas main that had been recommended for replacement more than 30 years before because of repeated leaks.
trust the infrastructure? Do I trust the people who are in charge of evacuating people? Do I trust the mayor to tell people the truth about what’s going on if there is an emergency? I do not.”
It was getting on towards time for the community meeting, but we managed to squeeze in one last interview, with Kim Franczek, a handbag designer, who has been active with Occupy Wall Street. “Occupy Wall Street bussed out to Staten Island the day after Hurricane Sandy hit to aid everybody who
needed help out there…We were helping people dig stuff out of their basements. We brought water pumps to their houses and pumped out the water. [We] were the first responders, and some people didn’t understand why Occupy Wall Street was out there, and it’s because we are disaster responders. We’re
responding to the disaster of Wall Street.“All of the gas companies and oil companies are
completely destroying people’s lives so they can turn profits… They offshore their profit and then funnel it back in... Everything is funneled through Wall Street… Mayor Bloomberg wants to say he’s some green mayor. If he would really like to be considered a green mayor, he would start investing in clean renewable energy [but] he’s so beholden to the oil and gas industry that he’s willing to turn his back on the people.”
THE COMMUNITY MEETINGWe walked to the Village Community School, on West 10th St., for the big community forum hosted by Community Board 2, where representatives of Spectra and Con Edison were going to face the public. When we got there, several fortitudinous members of the local constabulary were present, but none of them would tell us why they were lined up outside a simple community meeting. They said that not one of them was designated to act as a public affairs liaison.
The meeting room, a cafeteria, was divided between representatives of Con Ed (Consolidated Edison) and Spectra on one side, members of the community board in the middle, and opponents of the pipeline everywhere else. So far as could be judged from the audience comments during the two-hour meeting, not a single person had shown up in support of the project, other than the ones paid to be there. When a Con Ed representative showed a graphic listing “Project Benefits,” laughter broke out in the room.
This was hardly surprising. According to Clare Donohue, during the public comment period, nearly 5000 people filed comments against the pipeline, while only 22 filed in support of it, all but one of them connected to the project.
The moderator, who was also the head of the community board, started by promising, “We’ll give everybody a chance to talk,” before turning the meeting over to Christian DiPalermo, who described himself as “a consultant to Spectra Energy here in New York on government and community affairs” (he is also a vice-president of TLM Associates, a public relations firm, that, besides Spectra, lists among its clients Eli Lilly & Company, the manufacturers of Prozac, Cialis, and Thimerosal, which in December 2012 agreed to pay a $29 million fine to settle charges of bribing officials in Russia,
Brazil, China and Poland). DiPalermo began by saying, “It’s nice to see
many of you again. We’ve been reaching out to the community after more than two and a half years…” This was, apparently, his way of explaining they were there because they had to be there under the terms of a pre-trial settlement in the Sane Energy Project lawsuit against them.
He turned the floor over to Ed Gonzalez, Spectra’s main spokesperson at the meeting, and Anthony Leto, Section Manager of Gas Transmission Planning and Pipeline Integrity for Con Ed. Gonzalez and Leto each made presentations that were interrupted many times, but the audience was quieted by the moderator’s repeated promise that everyone would have a chance to ask their questions after the initial presentations.
When question time came around, a board member cited improper welds on the San Bruno, California pipeline that exploded in 2010, killing eight people, and noted that, “the guarantees that
PG&E had undertaken were completely different from what they built.”
In response, Leto twice mentioned something about defective pipe that shouldn’t have been used being the real cause of the San Bruno inferno. The first time he said it, somebody in the back shouted, “San Bruno exploded because of the negligence of a utility company,” but Leto never gave a reason why Con Ed would be more trustworthy than PG&E.
Liz, the Almanac’s intrepid photographer, asked the Spectra representative if they had an emergency plan, and he said they did. Feeling that, till then, they hadn’t heard anything about emergency planning, the audience was immediately abuzz and wanted to know just exactly what this emergency plan consisted of. Gonzalez explained that Spectra had consulted with other agencies but wanted to have its own personnel deal with the pipeline if there was a problem. “What we’re working on now,” he said, “is how the staffing will be placed and coordinated, the work here in Manhattan, and what we’re doing is the staffing will be placed appropriately to deal with that.” That was pretty much the entire answer.
Kim Franczek
Anthony Leto
Winter/spring 2013 | the no Frack Almanac | 3
Gonzalez, left, and DiPalermo, right, seemingly sleepwalking through the meeting
continued on page 4
4 | the no Frack Almanac | Winter/spring 2013
Monika Hunken, one of the anti-pipeline arrestees, read a question that we quote from here at length:
“Spectra has been cited by the Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for seventeen inadequacies in its pipeline safety operations, such as surveillance, emergency plans, welding procedures, including failure to describe the communications process with fire, police and public officials during an emergency, failing to define conditions for deeming a pipeline unsafe. In 2010, Spectra Energy was the number one greenhouse gas polluter in British Columbia, number seven on US EPA top civil penalty ranking for toxic PCB pollution, so how can you promise us that you will have these safety precautions in place? And why are you not required to file an environmental impact statement?”
Gonzalez said that the company did have an environmental impact statement and then, inexplicably, started to walk off. It seemed like some evil force had suddenly taken control of his shoes and was compelling him to leave the front of the room without answering the safety question. Fortunately, this hideous power from the dark side, whatever it may have been, only had a limited ability to subvert the human will. When someone asked him where the environmental impact statement was available, Gonzalez overpowered the shoe demon long enough to turn back towards the audience and say, “It’s available at our website, yesgaspipeline.org.”
But it was a seesaw battle. No sooner had Gonzalez finished giving the web address than his shoes took over again, dragging him off stage before he could answer the safety question. When audience members insisted that he answer it, he rallied and returned to the front of the room, but then, perhaps overcome with the effort, he couldn’t remember why he’d come. He turned to Monica Hunken and asked, “I’m sorry, you’re questions on safety were?”
Perhaps not realizing the struggle Gonzalez was having with his shoes, Hunken said that the guy from Con Ed hadn’t answered the environmental impact statement question yet. So Leto got up and explained that Con Ed was regulated by the Public Service Commission, which didn’t require them to file an environmental impact statement. But that was kind of beside the point, because while Leto was speaking, Gonzalez’s shoes took over yet again, and he was again heading back to the side of the room without answering the safety question.
The moderator tried to move on, but Dave Publow, another of the arrestees, objected, “The Spectra guy never addressed the safety questions she brought up!” A woman demanded, “How do we know that you’re not going to violate them here?” An older man raised his voice, “We don’t know. We can’t know.” The question of whether Spectra could be trusted was now captivating the room’s attention like a poltergeist at a paranormal convention, something which, one might have thought, would have made Gonzalez’s shoes force him right back into the shadows, but it turned out to have just the opposite effect. Somehow, the proliferating doubts about Spectra’s general trustworthiness miraculously restored Gonzalez’s memory as to the specifics of Hunken’s question.
With the confidence of a man convinced the shoe demon was gone for good, Gonzalez strode
back onto the floor and said this to people afraid for their businesses, their neighborhoods, their lives and their children: “What I believe you were just citing, it was a notice of amendment that USDOT cited us for, and what it was was we needed to go through and make modifications to our standard operating procedures for our facilities. At no time were we in violation of being able to safely operate our pipeline, and part of what the [unintelligible] process of USDOT is, is they go through and they perform inspections on us for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that was described earlier and we talked about. That’s the lead agency for us to permit the project and we described to them how we were going to build the facility. But as I had in my presentation, we’re building our facility in compliance with the USDOT, part 192 of the federal code. USDOT is the entity that does oversight of our facilities, as far as the design, how do we design it, in meeting code, how are we constructing it, are we constructing it in compliance with what we defined in our specifications and the drawings, and then, once the pipeline is completed, are we operating and maintaining that facility for those requirements that we’ve defined. USDOT has come out several times. We’ve met with them multiple times already on the project in the design stages, explaining to them what we’re going to do, how we’re going to do it. They’ve come out several times and have inspected the construction aspects of the project, and they’re going to continue to do so. For us, it’s an ongoing process in insuring the safety of our facilities and the redundancy, and I think that’s the important part, is there’s layers and layers of safety that we’ve built into this. We just don’t go buy a piece of pipe from the shelf. Some companies do that, and that’s acceptable, it meets their requirements and it meets code. For us, we don’t. We look at redundancy “in the system, so what we do is --”
It was one of those things that gives New Yorkers a reputation for being cold and hard-boiled, because at this point, instead of shouting “Praise God,” in celebration of Gonzalez’s restored mental capacity, somebody snarkily interrupted, “What about the violations?” Unshaken, Gonzalez shot back, “I’ve explained the citations” and said the “record was closed” on them. With that, the discussion moved on.
(On the question of safety there is another ironic link between the upstate and downstate arrestees. Spectra is a 2006 spinoff of Duke Energy. On August 19, 2004, Duke Energy was operating a salt cavern gas storage facility in Moss Bluff, Texas – much like the Inergy project where the upstate protesters were arrested – when two explosions on succeeding days rocked the facility and sent up a plume of flame that was, reportedly, 1000 feet high.)
A gentleman stood up and pointed out that, since Con Edison had only a 20% stake in the pipeline (the other stakeholders are Chesapeake and Statoil), how could Leto say that all of the gas would be used in NYC? The possibility that NYC was being put at risk so that gas could be exported to China was a worry of the attendees and Leto didn’t fully assuage their fears. Instead of saying that all of the gas would be used in the city, as he had in answer to an earlier question, this time he said that 100% of the gas would be used “by Con Ed customers,” who, he said, “are allowed to purchase their own gas and have it transported.” When several people in the audience spontaneously said, “What?” Leto subsequently clarified that Con Ed customers could use the pipeline to transport gas into the city, but the matter was still left somewhat unclear.
A woman stood up and asked what, specifically, were they going to do to make a “direct assessment of the radon 222 that’s going to be entering, through the New York City pipeline from the Marcellus shale?” Gonzalez didn’t struggle with his shoes to answer this one. Instead, another representative of Spectra walked to the front of the room, amidst derisive catcalls from the crowd of “The Lawyer.”
He good naturedly introduced himself with, “I feel like I’m at a twelve step program, yes, I am a lawyer,” and everybody laughed. Then he continued, “Let me just say that the radon issue has been extensively documented,” and everybody groaned, but he went on anyway. “There have been hundreds, if not thousands of pages in the record about the radon.” The crowd said no to this, and after some back and forth, he read one sentence from a FERC ruling: “The project’s potential transportation of Marcellus sourced gas will not pose a health hazard to end users.” That satisfied no one.
Though she didn’t use these words, the original questioner implied that the few recent radon tests were rigged, because they had only been conducted on “safe wells.” To applause, she alleged that if the tests had been conducted on “high producing wells… this whole operation would be shut down.”
The lawyer, reading from a pad, responded, “First of all, both the U.S. EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy have looked at this issue.” The audience started voicing objections until the moderator broke in to say, “Let him finish.”
The lawyer went on more testily, “You may not like the results, but they’ve done hundreds of tests.” He further asserted that Spectra had done its own testing “on wells that were producing in Pennsylvania. The results of those tests were consistent with the levels found by the EPA and DOE. Since that time, US Geological Survey has done tests on wells in Pennsylvania, same levels of radon… and what those studies find is that the amount of radon that comes into a home through the use of natural gas is about one-four-hundredth, that’s one-four-hundredth of the amount of radon in background air in those residences. Those are the facts.”
Carl Arnold, a Sierra Club activist, who was in attendance, asked how many out of the 3000 or so wells in Pennsylvania had been tested for radon. The lawyer answered, “We tested eight wells.” This didn’t go over so well, so he added, “The USGS tested eleven wells… Prior to that, EPA and DOE had tested I think in excess of 800 wells throughout Pennsylvania and the Marcellus region.”
Elaine Stukane, a journalist with The Villager newspaper, said she had spoken with people at the USGS and “they will not reveal which wells were tested.” The lawyer acknowledged that he didn’t know which wells the USGS had tested but that the wells Spectra had tested had been identified. (When we got home, we tried to verify Spectra’s claims about radon, without success – see box “Fact Checking Spectra’s Radon Claims” on page 10.)
A gentleman wanted to know whose idea it was to put the pipeline “200 feet from 50% of New York’s maritime fire fighting capability, which would be very much required should there be an incident.” Another gentleman expressed concern for older gay men with compromised immune systems who might be particularly vulnerable to radon. A woman said, “I guess it’s gotten through that we are all concerned for our lives.”
The moderator announced that they only had a limited amount of time and “We can’t possibly get all of the questions,” to which someone shouted back, “That’s not what you said before.” But just the same, after that there was little time left. One of the last questioners was a woman who said, “We didn’t ask for this. This was foisted upon us.” She wanted to know why, “There seems to be a gap between
The Lawyer
Elaine StukaneThe meeting
BUSTED!!!the first time Sandra Koponan was arrested, for running back onto the pipeline construction site after being ordered off it, “we just spent a couple of hours at the precinct and it was very painless.” the second time she was arrested, for sitting down in front of construction equipment, “these two goons ran up and pushed us around, and i started yelling and one of them struck me across the mouth and said, ‘Shut up.’ and they were telling us, ‘it doesn’t do any good to protest these things.’ and we were reminding them that’s how we got the eight hour day and women’s suffrage.”
For actress and playwright Monica Hunken, the anti-Spectra protests are personal. “My father was exposed to toxic chemicals and developed lung cancer in his workplace. He found out where the dangers were in a laboratory and where they could fix it, and the company continued to tell him to be quiet… this is something
where i’ve grown up living in the reverberations of that, in the grief of that. i’ve felt this whole sense of injustice my whole life.” even though her father’s company was not involved with fracking, she says, “i consider it the same battle.”
She was arrested at the September 6th protest but was let off. on September 12th, after locking her neck to a dredging machine, she was charged with misdemeanors, including reckless endangerment and criminal trespass. dave Publow, an activist with united for action, a grassroots group in the five boroughs, climbed atop a backhoe at the Spectra construction site and was one of the six people arrested on September 12th. “the officer in charge basically said that i had locked myself to a section of the equipment that had an electrical line running through it, which was a hazard to his fellow officers. i thought about that for a minute, so when thy climbed up there, i basically gave up the key, because it was never my intention to put people at risk… but what they’re charging me with now, they’re saying i did not cooperate. i’m charged with reckless endangerment.”
Publow says, “if you do not act on these types of things,
you are giving it away. that’s my motivation.”
Susan Walker is a disabled nurse. unlike the two other September 6th arrestees in reading, ny, she did not chain herself to the gate at inergy’s Seneca Lake gas storage facility. instead, when the sheriffs came to cut the chain and told everyone else to disperse, she refused to move and insisted on being arrested. “i knew about passive resistance,” she says, “and knew when the time would be right to go ahead and do it. it felt like the right thing. it was the thing i needed to do. the hard part is being out of jail and dealing with people i’ve never met in my life, because i’m really very shy.”
there were nightly vigils outside the jail while Susan was incarcerated. though grateful for the support, she feels, “everybody carrying signs with your name on it, it takes away from just the simplicity of the action, and it’s a very odd feeling. i think it needs to be an egoless thing.”
gary judson (left) is a retired minister (that’s Schuyler County Sheriff William e. yessman, jr. on the right). Currently in Florida on a
volunteer project, he writes, “i do not believe that the planned expansion of inergy’s ng facility will be good for our community and just as important, the expansion process poses a serious threat to Seneca Lake…as to the specific reason why i got arrested… i stood in support of an action that i believed would make a difference and would open the eyes of others.”
the next picture (above right), taken october 24, 2012 in oneonta, is of people who haven’t been arrested – yet. they are protesting the Constitution pipeline, just another of the many pipelines that are provoking community ire. anne Marie garti, a founder of Stop the Pipeline (stopthepipeline.org) warns that this proposed pipeline “would industrialize a huge swath of Central new york, from Binghamton to albany. if approved,
people’s land would be taken by eminent domain, and, if built, it would enable fracking, as the area lies above both the Marcellus and utica shale. People moved to this region to get away from industrial development and to lead sustainable lives, and they are not going to let a corporation come in and destroy their homes and dreams.” even though most people don’t know they’re there, pipelines are all over new york State and, of course, other states as well. this map shows the pipelines in the Finger Lakes, where the No Frack Almanac is published. if you don’t live in the Finger Lakes, information about pipelines in your neighborhood can be found at www.npms.phmsa.dot.gov/PublicViewer/
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demand and what this will supply. A huge gap.” It was the export question again.
Leto answered, “The twenty year forecast clearly indicates that the use of natural gas in the city will clearly utilize this supply.” But if that’s true, Leto never addressed why it should be.
It is another core issue with the anti-Spectra activists that they see the city putting on a push to convert buildings, buses and facilities to natural gas, despite what they believe are better alternatives. Even without the issue of the pipeline’s danger, activists consider this turn towards natural gas to be a tragic mistake, but one hardly needs to be an activist to see why.
Just this December, the Conservative government of Britain heard back from its own Committee on Climate Change. The government there wants to plunge ahead with fracking, just like the government here does, but the British government’s own committee couldn’t keep from reporting that household energy bills would rise six times faster if the country went with gas instead of renewables. As The Guardian noted, the findings were even based on “the government’s own research.”
No one pondered the question of whether it was worse to put NYC at risk in order to export the gas or in order to keep it all in the city (more gas use means more cancer deaths, if radon fears prove true). But then again, the meeting left a lot of ques-tions unaddressed, and soon it was over, leaving the audience obviously unsatisfied. When the crowd dispersed, we went out for a bite with Clare Dono-hue. The radon issue was particularly on her mind. “It’s not even a real study, it’s ‘preliminary data’, she said, referring to the United States Geological Survey tests that “the lawyer” had refered to.
Later on, Donohue sent us Dr. Resnikoff ’s published account of a Q&A he had with one of the USGS researchers over the phone:
In response to a request for the well logs, to examine
whether the wells reached the Marcellus shale formation, the USGS researcher said they had none.
Then, can you give us the location of the Pennsylvania wells? With the location, we could find the well logs in Pennsylvania State files.
Well, no, that would break the trust with the gas companies that allowed us access.
Okay, then how do you know you reached the Marcellus shale formation?
Because we were told so.Who selected the wells?The US Department of Energy in collaboration with the gas
companies.Did you feel comfortable publishing what are essentially
screening results?
No, but pressure from higher-ups at USGS forced our hand.
Some confirmation of Resnikoff ’s story may be found in this quote from Mark Engle, a USGS research geologist and co-author of a December 2011 USGS report on the levels of radium in brine from Marcellus gas wells. He said, “These are very, very high concentrations of radium compared to other oil and gas brines.” Since radon is a decay product of radium, it would seem to be very unlikely, if not completely beyond the laws of physics, for the brine to have a “very, very high” radium content and the gas to have a normal radon content. And that does raise questions about how the USGS came to release such contradictory data.
When we sat with her, Donohue asked the same question many an upstater has asked, “If this is a potential risk, why do an experiment on the general population?” But the more immediate question is can this experiment be stopped? The answer to that is not so clear.
THE GAS MONSTERThe gas monster’s organs may include endless intestines of pipe, fat stored in salt cavern guts, a tiny calculator of a brain located, mysteriously, right by that sphincter on Wall Street, and multitudinous fangs made from drill rigs, but in the end, it’s all one monster. So too, the movements to fight this monster’s parts are all parts of one movement. The anti-pipeline activists we met are our movement’s brigades in one of the world’s most powerful cities. It is no exaggeration to say that, if they can win the Battle for New York City, we can win this war. But
Judge for yourself. Do you think the public would react favorably if Cuomo announced, “We’re going to frack New York, and we’ll pay no attention if your children get sick, your land gets poisoned, or there’s no safe water left to drink in the entire state?” Here at No Frack Almanac, we don’t think that would go over so well. In fact, it stands to reason that no one would ever say that, even if they were planning to do it, because people intending to do it, wouldn’t say anything to make the public oppose their plans. The entire fracking scheme depends on the perception that, when fracking comes in, someone will be protecting the public’s welfare. But who exactly would that be?
Should there ever be a problem with fracking, we might get some relief through the efforts of health professionals. But since it has been decreed that there will be no comprehensive health assessment before fracking comes in, health professionals will only be able to act after toxins have already entered the environment in harmful quantities. So the health authorities can’t be our first line of defense, because our first line of defense has got to be making sure that toxins don’t get into our environment in the first place. But who will do that?
We can say for certain that it won’t be the Feds. Back in 2005, the now famous “Haliburton Loophole” largely exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act; the Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; the National Environmental Policy Act; the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (the act that established the Superfund); and other environmental laws. The Feds won’t police fracking in New York, because they don’t have enough authority left to do so.
But they do still have some authority, and perhaps like any neutered animal, what otherwise might be the EPA’s strongest urge now seems greatly diminished. According to a mid-January Associated Press expose, the EPA issued a “rare emergency order” directing Range Resources, a fracking company, to clean up “a well saturated with flammable methane” that was threatening two homes in Texas. The EPA’s own investigator, after using an isotope test on 32 area wells, concluded that the contamination could have come from Range Resources’ drilling operations. But, according to the AP, the investigator’s report was censored and the emergency order was lifted after Range Resources “threatened not to cooperate with a national study.” One of the homeowners involved said, “This has been total hell.”
In the absence of empowered, motivated federal authority, it is the much weaker New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) that will be officially tasked with protecting the public. But the mere fact that the DEC has been given this job doesn’t mean that the DEC can be counted on to do it. There are serious reasons to believe that the DEC cannot and will not do this job and that, as a result, no one will be protecting us. Some of these reasons we have printed before, most we offer here for the first time.
1 People inside the DEC have done everything they can to warn us that the DEC cannot and will not protect us is if fracking comes into New York.
In October 2010, a memo, written by DEC Commissioner, Pete Grannis, was leaked to the press. In that memo, Grannis warned that budget cuts were having “Draconian impacts” and “fundamentally compromising” the department’s ability to fulfill its responsibilities, including “oversight” of “oil and gas drilling.” “The public would be shocked to learn how thin we are in many areas,” Grannis wrote, alleging that “the risks to human health have already increased.”
Grannis was fired two days later, because the Cuomo Administration believed he had leaked
the memo himself. We don’t know whether or not that was the case, but we will point out that it makes little difference in terms of assessing the Cuomo Administration’s character. Has anyone heard of any government official anywhere ever who was fired for leaking an administration secret that the administration wanted known? Politicians, themselves, often have their aides leak information that, for one reason or another, they cannot officially release to the press. Aren’t the leakers who get in trouble always the ones who tell the public something the administration doesn’t want the public to know?
No matter who leaked the memo, Pete Grannis’s firing may be taken as a strong indication that Governor Cuomo doesn’t want the public to know that it will not be protected if fracking comes in. Certainly that would explain why whoever leaked the memo leaked it in the first place.
Confirmation of Grannis’s warning came on November 30, 2011, when Stephanie Low testified at a public hearing, representing PEF/encon, the union of the DEC’s own professional, technical and scientific staff. Ms. Low testified that budget cuts “crippled our ability to carry out all existing regulatory and statutory responsibilities,” and that they could not “honestly and adequately add any new responsibilities as labor-intensive as regulating, monitoring and inspection activities” related to fracking. “DEC would also be hard pressed,” Ms. Low added, “to provide adequate emergency remedial response in cleanup assistance for a major accident of any kind.”
More confirmation can be found in the DEC’s already well-established record of failure, when it comes to monitoring the oil and gas industry. By the DEC’s own estimate, it has lost track of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells (independent estimates place the number much higher than what the DEC acknowledges). These wells are dangerous, because, if fracking comes in, they can provide a vector through which frack fluid can come up into the water table and methane can escape into the atmosphere. This has already happened elsewhere.
Why isn’t the DEC sealing these abandoned wells? For one thing, at a cost of thousands of dollars per well, plugging them all could quite possibly cost more than the DEC’s entire annual budget. But of course, the DEC can’t plug the many thousands of lost wells anyway, because the DEC can’t find them.
Unfortunately, the DEC also isn’t doing so well with the active wells it can find. According to an “Enforcement Report” issued last July by Earthworks Oil and Gas Accountability Project, “75% of active oil and gas wells in New York were not inspected in 2010.”
2 The DEC isn’t straight with the public. If fracking comes into New York, the least we
would want would be a regulatory agency that tells us the straight story, but that would have to be some other agency than the DEC. There are plenty of reasons to believe the DEC isn’t honest and open with the public. We’ve experienced several of them ourselves.
When we interviewed DEC spokesperson Emily Desantis on December 17, 2011, we pressed her on the question of whether or not there was internal dissent at the DEC, something already known to exist by that time. After first trying to evade the question, she finally gave a straightforward statement. “I’m not going to person ally say what people’s personal views are. I speak for the position of the department, and that’s all I can speak to.” [emphasis added]
Exactly as she describes, Desantis’s job is to give the department’s official story, not to tell the public what’s really going on. And the department, itself, obviously has no qualms about refusing to acknowledge even a well-established reality. Who, then, if fracking comes into New York, could we count on to tell us the straight truth about spills, contamination or anything?
We’re hardly the only members of the public that
the DEC has stonewalled or misled. When it comes to sharing information, the DEC seems to favor the industry it supposedly regulates over the people it supposedly serves.
In June of 2012, the Environmental Working Group revealed that Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) documents showed that the DEC had given advance notice about proposed drilling regulations to the gas companies, before releasing them to the general public. In particular, the DEC asked the gas companies if, perhaps, complying with the proposed regulations would be too expensive for them.
The Albany Times Union reported that, according to the DEC, “the advance sharing of information… was done to comply with the state Administrative Procedures Act, which [Desantis] said required DEC to ‘assess the impacts of the regulatory action on the regulated entity.’” But the Times-Union also reported that several legal experts it had consulted couldn’t find anything in the law requiring the DEC to show proposed regulations to the gas companies at all, much less before anyone else.
Further light is shed on the DEC’s information policy by one of the unpublicized but nonetheless interesting tidbits included in those FOIL records of private correspondence between the DEC and the gas industry. On January 10, 2012, James McAleer, of Energy and Environmental Analysts, Inc, wrote a letter to DEC Commissioner Joe Martens saying that he worked with Robert Catell, “a member of the Governor’s High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel,” who had received an e-mail from Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting in Ithaca.
The Hang e-mail said that the Draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement meant to govern fracking had “profound inadequacies,” that more than 21,000 people had already signed onto the call to have it withdrawn until concerns could be addressed, and that “New York’s de facto moratorium on horizontal hydrofracturing in Marcellus Shale must not be lifted.” But McAleer didn’t write to Martens about any of the substantive issues Hang raised. Instead, he wrote, “After contacting other members of the panel, we agreed… that it is inappropriate for this group to approach us with this document.”
By contrast, the DEC freely met with and corresponded with industry representatives who did much more than comment on proposed regulations. For example, in a July 7, 2011 e-mail to Steven Russo, the deputy commissioner and general counsel of the DEC, gas industry attorney Thomas West wrote, “Steve, one thing I did not mention to you the other day relates to a possible candidate to represent the municipal sector on the committee. Joe Sluzar is the Broome County attorney… Joe would provide real balance on the municipal sector.” To this Russo writes back not with a reprimand but with the comment, “He may be playing a different role… stay tuned.” Sluzar now lists himself on linkedin.com as a “Regional Attorney at NYS Department of Environmental Conservation.”
In other words, the gas industry was allowed to make suggestions about who should work for the government agency that regulates it, but opponents of fracking were rebuffed when they merely tried to contact a DEC advisory panel with their concerns. And this was all only revealed through FOIL requests. None of this was made public by the DEC.
In some respects, the protection from public scrutiny which New York’s DEC gives the oil and gas industry is, astonishingly, even greater than what the industry gets in oil states like Texas and Oklahoma. According to the Earthworks Enforcement Report, “Unlike other state oil and gas agencies, New York’s DEC does not keep oil and gas violations in a publicly accessible electronic database, nor does it publish statistics on violations in the DMR [Division of Mineral Resources] annual report or on its website.”
The DEC also shields the oil and gas industry by
Will Beor Four Reasons
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keeping secrets for it. When we FOILed the DEC for all correspondence between Inergy and the DEC regarding Inergy’s planned gas storage operation in Reading, NY. We received back copies of letters, writ-ten in November and December of last year, between Eric Rodriguez, who signs himself as Mineral Re-sources Specialist 1, Bureau of Oil and Gas Permitting and Management and Kevin M. Bernstein, a lawyer representing Arlington Storage Company, the Inergy subsidiary handling parts of the gas storage plan.
The first letter informs Bernstein of our FOIL request and asks him how he wants to respond to their determination that two “Core Analysis” reports aren’t covered by “Previous confidentiality determinations for records related to this project and listed in the Department’s August 13, 2012 letter…” The point here is that the DEC has such a history of making confidentiality determinations for Inergy that they had to be summarized in a letter listing them all.
Bernstein’s response, written two weeks later, said that yes, Arlington wanted those core analyses kept confidential because, among other things, “the Core Analysis Reports constitute trade secret or confidential commercial information…” The DEC wrote back to Bernstein a little less than two weeks after that, saying that the DEC had concluded that the two documents were not confidential because, among other things, they “did not meet the definition of a trade secret.”
We made a FOIL request for that August 13th letter too, and we got it. It runs on for twelve pages and has a long list of determinations as to whether or not documents are “Releasable” or “Confidential.” The interesting thing about this list is that the releasable documents look like they’re of lesser importance. For instance, a document labeled “GTS Consulting Supplemental Traffic Assessment” was ruled releasable as was “Letter from Dominick Smith, Watkins Glen Fire Chief.” But time after time, for well after well, “Drilling logs and inspection reports” were ruled confidential.
We also did receive those two core analysis documents that had been the subject of the exchange between the DEC and Arlington, but to our surprise, they were accompanied by a cover letter which read that they’d been redacted because of the “Department’s determination to afford confidential status to the Reports…” Something must have happened, maybe Arlington appealed, but they weren’t kidding about redactions. Both reports had a cover page, followed by five pages with headings at the top. The Headings were “Core Inventory,” “Tube Inventory,” “Gamma Data,” “Graph,” and “Core Analysis.” Beneath those headings, the pages were completely blank.
We don’t know exactly what hit us with the well reports, but we do know exactly what it means. It means that, if fracking comes in, New Yorkers will have as much chance of getting critical information from the DEC as a Girl Scout troop has of getting a crack dealer’s transaction records. And by the way, we give those girls a lot of credit.
3 The DEC is likely to be compromised by the same forces that have compromised other regulatory agencies.
If oil and gas regulatory agencies elsewhere have been compromised, were they compromised because of some singular quirk, such that the same thing would be unlikely to happen in New York, or were they compromised, because they were under pressure from the most powerful industry on earth, such that the same thing would probably happen in New York too?
We think the best way to answer this question is with another question: Can anyone name an oil and gas regulatory agency anywhere ever that was not corrupted by the oil and gas industry? We don’t know of one. We do know of some bad examples, though, like the way, as we reported in our last issue, Ohio’s
Department of Natural Resources has gas industry talking points right on its website, or the way that, before the Deepwater Horizon rig blew out, the U.S. Minerals Management Service had allowed BP to file a safety plan citing a dead man as one of its experts and outlining procedures for protecting seals and walruses in the Gulf of Mexico.
In Pennsylvania, there have long been anecdotal reports that the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was not properly responding to citizen’s complaints, and we’ve printed some of them ourselves. In our third issue, for example, we presented the stories of Gerri Kane and Matthew and Tammy Manning. Gerri said that, after fracking commenced nearby, she complained to the DEP about a black, greasy substance that started appearing on the outside of her house, and that she was told by the DEP that it was coming from her neighbor’s wood stove -- even though this was in the middle of summer. The Mannings said the DEP had informed them that the pressure causing their water well to overflow was coming from naturally occurring methane – even though the DEP had never performed the isotope test needed to determine the true source of the contamination.
Since then, evidence that’s much harder to ignore has come forward in the sworn testimony of two high-ranking DEP officials. Here are excerpts from a November 1, 2012 press release from the office of Pennsylvania state representative Jesse White, concerning one of these sworn statements:
“State Rep. Jesse White, D-Allegheny/Beaver/Washington, today called for state and federal law enforcement agencies to investigate the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection for alleged misconduct and fraud revealed by sworn testimony given by a high-ranking DEP official.
“White said he received a letter and corresponding documents highlighting the sworn testimony of DEP Bureau of Laboratories Technical Director Tara Upadhyay, who was deposed in a lawsuit alleging nearby natural gas drilling operations had contaminated drinking water supplies in Washington County, causing serious health issues. In the deposition, Upadhyay said that the DEP was clearly aware of water impacts from Marcellus Shale drilling, but no notices of violation were filed – a violation of the state’s Oil & Gas Act… the deposition revealed that the DEP developed a specialized computer-code system to manipulate the test results…The code in question… specifically screens out results for substances known to be hazardous and associated with Marcellus Shale drilling.”
4 The DEC has an incentive not to find problems with fracking. New York’s DEC was established not just to police the extraction industries, but also to facilitate them. In fact, the DEC, itself, leases land to the oil and gas companies. According to the DEC’s website, in 2011, the agency “administered 78 leases on 44,450 acres of state land” in 10 counties.
According to the DEC, the revenue from these leases is supposed to go to the “General Fund for State Reforestation and Multiple Use Areas,” the “Conservation Fund for Wildlife Management areas,” and “Through DEC exchange account to the appropriate other state agency.” The first two of these are administered by the DEC, itself, meaning that the DEC, in part, funds itself by leasing state land to oil and gas companies. If the DEC should ever find that these leases lead to such disastrous consequences that operations should be suspended, the DEC would lose a percentage of its budget and probably have to lay off even more of its already skeletal staff. Perhaps that’s why the one figure the DEC doesn’t give on its website is a grand total for just exactly how much money is involved with these leases.
Trying to shed a little light on this financial ques-tion, we searched through the county clerk’s records of Chemung, Schuyler, Steuben and Tompkins Counties.
We found that, in 2008, the DEC had leased 11,409.85 acres of state land in those counties or a little more than a quarter of the acreage that the DEC says it had under lease in 2011. The leases were written so that there was a guaranteed first-year payout to be fol-lowed by subsequent royalties. Some of the leases started in 2008, but some of them started earlier and ran through 2008, so not all of the first-year payments were made in 2008 and we have no way of knowing what subsequent royalty payments were made.
These many caveats notwithstanding, we can still get some idea of the financial scope of the DEC’s leasing program by just adding up the first-year payments of the leases extant in 2008, regardless of when the leases originated. That total comes to a smidge over $3,689,327 or approximately $323 per acre. Since this represents just around one-quarter of the state’s leased land, if we multiply this figure by four, we can guesstimate that the state took in around $14.5 million dollars on its leases.
The DEC hasn’t auctioned off leases since 2006, and that $323 average price per acre is considerably less than it would be today, when the fracking frenzy has driven up some lease prices to well above $5000 an acre. At just $5000 per acre, that same 44,450 acres that the state had under lease in 2008 would bring in $222,250,000, which is a very significant sum, indeed, when one considers that it is more than half the entire 2012-2013 DEC budget of $434,846,000. But even this underestimates the potential impact both to state lands and the DEC’s revenue stream.
According to the DEC, in 2006, New York had 600,000 acres of State Reforestation land, 200,000 acres of Wildlife Management area, and 100,000 acres of Multiple Use land that were legally open to oil and gas drilling (though, at the time, a total of only 220 acres had been “disturbed,” as the DEC itself puts it). So those 44,450 leased acres represent only about 5% of the state land eligible to be leased. We don’t know what percentage of those acres are over shale, but if all of them were leased at $5000 an acre, the total initial payment would come to something over four billion dollars.
Like many landowners, the Cuomo Administration may well be seeing dollar signs – and little else – when it contemplates drilling all those undisturbed areas.
Maybe there’s a reason why the state will never be able to lease much more of its land or get top dollar for its leases. Maybe New York will one day discover, just like countless others, that the dollars are fewer and shorter-lived than industry hype suggests. But surely, if New York State is opened up to fracking and a new DEC auction is held, a flood of money into DEC coffers could make the agency highly dependent on oil and gas revenues, especially if, as has been proposed, the cost of expanded oversight will be paid for directly out of leasing revenues.
If fracking operations were then found to be say, destroying New York’s watershed or killing our children, the DEC would not only have to go up against the gas industry’s powerful patrons but also financially commit departmental suicide in order to shut the drillers down. How likely is that?
Finally, we must note that the evisceration of Federal authority over fracking didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the oil and gas companies wanted it that way, and the politicians went along with them. We believe the industry wanted it that way because fracking can’t be made safe, so stripping away the public’s protection is the only way for fracking to move forward.
One doesn’t have to believe what we believe, though, to agree that the idea of bringing fracking anyplace without protecting the public is unconscio-nable. Yet people all over our country and around the world feel that’s exactly what’s happened. And this would appear to be the plan for New York as well. NF
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“’The newspapers keep minimizing the damage here, but it’s here,’ said Leighton, pointing out bubbling gas puddles on his property. ‘And people think we’re radicals, but we’re not. We’re just upset about the condition of our property, and we want things fixed.’” – from an August 28, 2012 NPR report on the methane contamination of Mike and Nancy Leighton’s water well in Leroy Township, PA.
“[A]nalysis indicates that ownership of the land in the Pennsylvania counties with the most Marcellus drilling activity is concentrated in a relatively small share of residents, and in owners from outside the county. The majority of residents of these counties together own little of the total land area, and so have relatively little ‘voice’ in the critical leasing decisions which affect whether and how Marcellus shale drilling will occur in their county. Half of the resident landowners in the counties together only control 1.1 percent of the land area, and renters have no ‘voice’ at all. Rather it is the top 10 percent of resident landowners, plus outside landowners (both public and private), who are able to make the major leasing decisions that affect the rest of the community. In some counties, such as Sullivan, Tioga, and Lycoming, non-residents have more voice about what occurs than do county residents, because more than half of the land is owned by those outside the county.” – “Marcellus Shale: Land Ownership, Local Voice, and the Distribution of Lease and Royalty Dollars,” Timothy W. Kelsey, Alex Metcalf, and Rodrigo Salcedo, July 18, 2012, Penn State Center for Community and Economic development,
“Property owners near shale gas wells are liable to suffer a major loss in value because of worries over water contamination, according to economists from Duke University and the nonprofit research organization Resources for the Future. Their study found Pennsylvania homeowners who use local groundwater for drinking lost up to 24 percent of their property value if they are within a mile and a quarter of a shale gas well.” – November 8, 2012 McClatchy Newspapers report, published in Timesonline.com, the website of the Beaver County [PA] Times. “The city administration [of Williamsport, PA] was informed Wednesday it is expected to receive a little more than half of the amount of money from Marcellus Shale gas drilling impact fees than it had anticipated and planned to include in the 2013 budget.
“The Public Utility Commission reports that Williamsport will receive $259,597. Originally, Mayor Gabriel J. Campana expected the city to receive $538,000…
“’That’s an additional blow to the taxpayers,’ Campana said. City taxpayers may have to anticipate an increase in real estate taxes,’ he said…
“Asked from where the city received the original higher estimate, Campana said it was from a report done by Delta Development Group… It also was what the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry interest group, estimated the city would receive by the end of the year, Campana said. – Williamsport Sun-Gazette, October 18, 2012.
“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the low point of direct industry employment in the oil and gas extraction sector which includes all workers in oil and gas and not merely those employed by shale extraction, occurred in 2003 with approximately 118,000 jobs. Between 2003 and 2011, job growth in the sector amounted to about 56% to reach 186,000 jobs by yearend 2011. But this merely constitutes a net gain of 67,900 jobs over nearly a decade.” – Deborah Rogers, Energy Policy Forum
A few chosen words...
• IT’S JUST LIKE ENDING APARTHEID, RIGHT?: On September 6th, the moratorium on drilling in South Africa’s Karoo region was ended.
• THAT’S WHY WE CALL THEM “FREEDOM” FRIES: Saying that fracking causes “irreversible pollution,” Industry Minis-ter Arnaud Montebourg announced that France’s fracking ban would stay in place until “clean technologies” are invented to replace it.
• DON’T HITLER AND STALIN COUNT AS PRECEDENTS? Polish environmental groups campaigning against fracking complained of an “unprecedented attack” on civil society after being moni-tored and visited by secret police.
• TWO THIRDS OF A LOAF IS BETTER THAN NONE: As much as a third of England won’t be opened up to fracking.
IT’S A WACKY-FRACKY WORLD!
if you want to learn more, you might want to watch the documentary, “Gasland” or visit any of these web sites:
“My thesis is that the importance of shale gas has been grossly overstated; the U.S. has nowhere close to a 100-year supply. This myth has been perpetuated by self-interested industry, media and politicians… In the book, I take a very hard look at the facts. And I conclude that the U.S. has between a five- to seven-year supply of shale gas.” - November 8, 2012 interview with Bill Powers, editor of Powers Energy Investor and author of the forthcoming book, “Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Exploding the Natural Gas Supply Myth”
“The next time you are tempted to believe the oil and gas industry propaganda, stop by my farm for a dose of reality.” – John Peters, a small farmer who says his land was ruined by drilling.
”Oil and gas have contaminated groundwater in 17 percent of the 2,078 spills and slow releases that companies reported to state regulators over the past five years, state data show… Most of the spills are happening less than 30 feet underground.” Denver Post, December 9, 2012. “Leaked fracking fluid has contaminated groundwater after a “serious” incident at a well site near Grande Prairie in September 2011, according to an investigation by the Energy Resources Conservation Board which regulates the energy industry…Alberta Environment tested the contaminated water this fall and found chemicals from fracking fluid, including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and chloride.” – Edmonton Journal, December 21, 2012
“In Louisiana, seventeen cows died after an hour’s exposure to spilled fracking fluid. (Most likely cause of death: respiratory failure.) In north central Pennsylvania, 140 cattle were exposed to fracking wastewater when an impoundment was breached. Approximately seventy cows died; the remainder produced eleven calves, of which only three survived. In western Pennsylvania, an overflowing waste pit sent fracking chemicals into a pond and a pasture where pregnant cows grazed: half their calves were born dead.” – From “Fracking Our Food Supply,” The Nation , December 17th, 2012.
“The [natural gas] boom happened ‘away from the greedy grasp of Washington,’ the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank, wrote in an essay this year. If bureaucrats ‘had known this was going on,’ the essay went on, ‘surely Washington would have done something to slow it down, tax it more, or stop it altogether.’ But those who helped pioneer the technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, recall a different path.
“Over three decades, from the shale fields of Texas and Wyoming to the Marcellus in the Northeast, the federal government contributed more than $100 million in research to develop fracking, and billions more in tax breaks. Now, those industry pioneers say their own effort shows that the government should back research into future sources of energy — for decades, if need be — to promote breakthroughs.” – AP story in the Wall Street Journal, September 23, 2012.
AMAZING FACT The NYS DEC has officially acknowledged that “the denial of permits” for fracking would “fully protect the environment.”
Winter/spring 2013 | the no Frack Almanac | 9
As we went to press with our last issue, the news had just reached us about a slurry-filled sinkhole that mysteriously started growing right near a salt-cavern gas storage facility operated by texas brine in bayou Corne, louisiana. As we go to press with this issue, the sinkhole is still there and still growing.
the 150 families that were forced to leave are still under a mandatory evacuation order. Questions remain about the ongoing possibility of a catastrophic event. And at least from the point of view of the louisiana Department of natural resources (lDnr), there is no longer any doubt that the finger of blame points at texas brine. but texas brine has taken the lDnr’s office of Conservation to court, seeking an injunction against some of the remediation measures it has been ordered to make. so it doesn’t look like there is going to be a resolution to this crisis anytime soon.
in our last issue, we focused on Carroll County, ohio, and noted that, as fracking got under way there, Carroll County hadn’t yet experienced the kinds of water problems that have plagued pennsylvania and had allegedly begun elsewhere in ohio too.
since then, we got a call from Al Kemmerer, our Carroll County correspondent, who said we should talk to Deana squires, who lives in Columbiana County, 18 miles from the Carroll County line. she told us this tale:
“A big white truck [came] and all of a sudden the whole ground shook. And we’ve lived in California and it felt like an earthquake, and i said, ‘What in the world is that?’ cause we’re retired and we come out here for quiet. And everything was fine after they left, and i said. ‘oh my gosh, i hope they never come back.’ Five days later, soaped from my head to my toe… no water… my well was dry. my husband put a pump on it… He thought it was the pump, so he bought a new one, and then we called our driller and he came out and said your well is caving in at the bottom from whatever…i just went ahead and drilled [a new well]. it was an extra three thousand dollars out of my private savings that we had plans for. but you have to have water.”
A neighbor also lost her water, but as is so often the case, the cause isn’t completely clear, because right after the seismic testing (by Chesapeake), there was also an issue with excessive draining of a local pond being used to provide water for the drillers. squires says, “i don’t mind them drilling at all, and i don’t mind people making money from it at all. i mind it that i’m not part of any of it, and i’m the one that has to pay…i am very upset and i told my husband, if this happens again, i don’t know what we’ll do.”
updates....
We just couldn’t completely ignore this smackdown of Prof. Robert Howarth from ANGA (America’s Natural Gas Alliance). They’re all over him for having the temerity to suggest that, because of methane releases during extraction and transport, fracking may be a bigger greenhouse gas emitter than even coal, and certainly not the “cleaner” fuel that the industry claims. We’d love to give you a line-by-line breakdown of what’s wrong with ANGA’s argument, but we don’t have the space, and we’re too lazy. We couldn’t let it pass, though, without commenting on two little snippets.
One accusatory sentence runs this way: “Howarth continues to press his beliefs despite the continued absence of any new data or viable information.”
Leaving aside the obvious, that even if it’s true there is no new data, the old data might already have been enough to justify Howarth’s conclusions, the important point is that, according to ANGA, Howarth is no phony. He’s pressing “his beliefs.”
The other accusatory sentence goes like this: “In fact, he was forced to retract the previous abstract for this paper because he didn’t know that methane is also emitted during coal production (‘I blew it’ was his quote).” If failing to know about methane emissions from coal mines is the biggest thing they’ve got on him – just one part of a complex calculation - they don’t have much (ANGA notes it was only the abstract or summary of the paper that was withdrawn, not the paper itself). But the real takeaway is that, according to ANGA, Howarth is a man who honestly admits his mistakes, even while knowing, we might add, how the industry will make use of any admission.
Putting two and two together, we see that Howarth is a man who admits his mistakes but persists in stating his sincere belief that fracked gas is not clean energy. This is what’s wrong with Howarth, that he’s an honest man who sticks to his guns when he believes he’s right. Don’t take our word for it. This is coming straight from America’s Natural Gas Alliance.
Oh, and one other thing. In January there was new data. Two researchers, holding appointments from both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado announced findings that methane release levels from fracking operations in Colorado and Utah were higher than Howarth predicted. NF
The emperor’s Clothes“In a finding that could help create a new industry
of natural gas exports in the United States, a government study released on Wednesday concluded that the national economic benefits of significant natural gas exports far outweighed the potential for higher energy prices for consumers and industrial users of the fuel.” - NY Times, December 5, 2012.
“Unrestricted natural gas exports could have “disastrous” effects on the U.S. economy, energy industry leaders argued Thursday, warning that shipping large amounts of the nation’s newly-abundant resource would result in crippling price hikes for American consumers and manufacturers.” - U.S. News and World Report, January 10, 2013
“• There is no guarantee that all or even most of the profit from gas sold would remain in America. Companies instead could use transfer pricing, in which a foreign subsidiary buys the gas at lower domestic prices and sells it abroad for higher prices, keeping the profit in an offshore financial haven with little or no tax. “• In an attempt to garner more profit, companies could seek to tie the cost of natural gas to petroleum, an international price determined by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, not free market forces…
“Instead of worrying about how to keep energy prices down to save consumers money, debate has shifted to how to keep prices up to preserve the drilling industry and benefit mineral rights owners. But a recent study commissioned by the Department of Energy that supported unlimited gas exports didn‘t consider some of the concerns the Trib raised above and made some assumptions that experts dispute.” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, December 15, 2012.
“Conversion Gas Imports, LLC (CGI) of Houston, Texas, recently reported its findings on the “Bishop Process” to the Department of Energy – a novel method of unloading and regasifying liquid natural gas (LNG) directly from ocean tankers for storage in underground salt caverns… The action follows Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham’s meeting in June with the National Petroleum Council…” DOE press release issued July 22, 2003
“State utility regulators are indicating that they are open to considering the use of liquefied natural gas storage facilities in remote parts of the state to allow more New Yorkers to benefit from cheap natural gas prices. State regulations currently limit construction because of past safety concerns over explosions.” – Albany Times-Union, December 4, 2012
“The EPA had planned to do both computer simulations of water contamination and actual field tests at drilling sites. But the agency hasn’t found a drilling company to partner with to test groundwater around a drilling site.” – AP report, January 6, 2013
“University of Texas research that determined hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is safe was tainted by a conflict of interest involving the study’s lead investigator, an independent panel has concluded… The lead investigator, professor Charles Groat, has left the university and the study he oversaw has been withdrawn…
“Groat had been on the board of Plains Exploration & Production Co. (PXP) since 2007, a relationship he didn’t disclose in the report, or when he presented the Texas findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As a board member, Groat received 10,000 shares of restricted stock a year, according to company reports. He also received an annual fee, which was $58,500 in 2011.” – From a December 7, 2012 Bloomberg report.
“The ignorant mob have won.” Comment by the industry publication Marcellus Drilling News on the decision by University of Buffalo president Satish Tripathi to close down the university’s Shale Resources and Society Institute amid charges of improper ties to the gas industry.
It’s really unfortunate that fracking is so poorly understood. – Brad Gill, executive director Independent Oil and Gas Association
“Mossbacks naturally left in the lurch by the progress of this rapidly developing trade” - how Standard Oil characterized its critics to a Congressional inquiry, some time before Congress broke up the company. NF
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10 | the no Frack Almanac | Winter/spring 2013
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after hearing from Spectra’s lawyer that the ePa and doe had tested “in excess of 800 wells throughout Pennsylvania and the Marcellus region” and that the tests showed, “the amount of radon that comes into a home through the use of natural gas is about one-four-hundredth, that’s one four-hundredth, the amount of radon in background air in those residences,” we wanted to see the evidence.
We contacted the ePa’s region 3 HQ, which has Pennsylvania in its jurisdiction, and asked them about the radon testing they had done. We got back this response from press officer roy Seneca: “i checked with our staff and nobody here is aware of any ePa efforts to measure radon at compressor stations or at well heads. Perhaps the Spectra attorney was referring to a different agency.”
We queried Mary Lee Hanley, Spectra’s director of Stakeholder outreach, about this discrepancy. She wrote back, “We are not aware of ePa doing any testing at this time nor did we say they were. the references at december 4th meeting were to prior studies conducted by the ePa and doe.” But we couldn’t understand why, if prior ePa studies had dismissed radon concerns, the ePa,
itself, in january 2012, had written to the deC and filed this comment about fracking: “potential health and safety issues… related to exposure to external radiation and the inhalation of radon and its decay products… need to be addressed.”
We wrote to Hanley again to ask where we might find the documentation to support Spectra’s claims. She wrote back, “among other places, the doe and ePa studies are referenced in footnote 78 in the october 18, 2012 FerC order denying requests for rehearing.”
When we looked up footnote 78, we found that it referenced two documents. the first was a 1980 study by Carl V. gogolak entitled “review of 222rn [radon] in natural gas Produced From unconventional Sources.” gogolak cited many papers, but the titles of only three of them referred to states over the Marcellus, none of those mentioned radon, and the most recent was from 1978, well before the age of fracking.
gogolak, himself, noted, “Models have been developed that relate to the concentration of 222rn in natural gas… However, these models assume homogeneity in the reservoir and require a knowledge of reservoir parameters which are often not
available.” as we understand it, that means that if you want to know how much radon there is in a formation, you can’t just look at the existing literature and make projections from existing models, you have to make measurements. So gogolak did make measurements. He studied gas samples from six wells in Kentucky and two in West Virginia, and those two are the only wells he studied in the Marcellus.
the second document referenced in footnote 78 is a 1973 ePa study entitled “assessment of Potential radiological Health effects from radon in natural gas.” the authors of that paper measured radon in production wells in Colorado, new Mexico, texas, Kansas, oklahoma, Colorado, California, Louisiana, and Wyoming. none of those is over the Marcellus.
So we couldn’t find those radon tests that Spectra’s lawyer claimed had been made on “in excess of 800 wells, throughout Pennsylvania and the Marcellus region.” and we are grateful to the illustrious dr. resnikoff, himself, for pointing out to us that there was a bit of misdirection in the lawyer’s use of the word “home” too. “a single family home,” dr. resnikoff wrote us, “is way different than an apartment in nyC, because radon
in a single family home is from the earth, but apartments, which are generally above street level, have much less natural radon concentrations.”
When Spectra’s lawyer said, “the amount of radon that comes into a home through the use of natural gas is about one-four-hundredth, that’s one-four-hundredth of the amount of radon in background air in those residence,” it would appear he was talking about a ratio between background radon in the kinds of homes people don’t have in new york City versus the amount of radon that comes in with the kind of gas people won’t have in new york City.
We must make one further note. the two studies cited above are not only the two pieces of evidence cited in Footnote 78 of FerC’s denial of rehearing. they are also two of the three studies reviewed by FerC in its Final environmental impact Statement for the Spectra pipeline project. the third study was one done in Britain in 2001. So as far as we can tell, those two West Virginia wells gogolak looked at in 1980 represent all the Marcellus radon measurements made in the studies FerC looked at when it sided with Spectra.
fAct checking spectra’s radon claims 444
despite making a heroic effort, they’re not doing all that well right now.
Clare Donohue estimated that the NYC anti-pipeline movement’s biggest rally had included maybe 300 people. By contrast, The No Frack Almanac is published in Hector, NY, a town so small that it doesn’t have a stoplight, and the vast majority of people even in Central New York have never heard of it. But just the same, Hector had a meeting about fracking that drew nearly 200 people and had to be held in another town, because Hector didn’t have a hall big enough to hold it. It’s surely not a good sign that NYC’s biggest rally drew only 100 people more than the biggest meeting in Hector.
Early in the day, when we spoke with Erik McGregor, he told us “Every time we march, I have people that approach me and ask what is fracking?” He meant it as an example of successful outreach, but it’s also another example of how far the city is behind upstate. Fracktivists upstate are rarely getting the “What is fracking?” question, because most upstaters already know what it is.
When we sat with Clare Donohue, she too felt the anti-pipeline movement wasn’t having the desired effect (of course, upstate fracktivists are prone to these feelings too). “A petition was sent to Christine Quinn, head of the city counsel, asking her just to hold hearings about radon, just to get input from people and scientists about the radon issue, and she has refused to move forward on it. They have on the petition all the community boards in the city, all the block associations in the city, doctors. She’s buried it.”
Just the same, the outlook is far from bleak. The anti-pipeline movement has got a growing nucleus of passionate, well-informed activists, and it is coming of age in synergy with a bunch of other vigorous new NYC movements, including, of course, Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots. And there was also something hopeful in what Erik McGregor said about what happens when people ask him the “What is fracking?” question. He said that once people ask the question, it only takes “a couple of minutes” to win them over. This was said
to us by two other activists too, and it makes perfect sense.
People in the city aren’t blinded by the hope of leasing their land or bringing jobs to their communities. At best, Marcellus gas will pour into the city, and in return, the city will get so little that people who know the risks laugh at the supposed benefits. There’s no upside there to offset the darker possibilities, so there’s no reason for New Yorkers to take the risks at all. The struggle in the city isn’t to win people over. It’s to get their attention. That’s been difficult, but no one ever said that any part of the Battle for New York, upstate or downstate, would be easy.
New York City is where people hit the streets with dreams of making it big, and New York City is where some of their big dreams do indeed come true. So here at No Frack Almanac, we like to think of the anti-pipeline movement as being a star-in-the-making, just waiting for its big break. We’ve seen their smarts, their grit and their determination. We believe in our Big Apple brigades. NF
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FRACK Winter/spring 2013 | the no Frack Almanac | 11
1 bY RIvERRising from Otsego Lake near Cooperstown, the North Branch of the Susquehanna River flows south into Pennsylvania, before looping around and coming back north into New York again. Then it passes through Binghamton, Johnson City, Endicott, Vestal, Owego and Waverly, before flowing back into Pennsylvania. The problem is that, before coming back up into New York, it passes through a Pennsylvania landscape dotted with scores of frack wells, waste impoundment ponds, and pipelines. Any pollution in this region – and several spills have been known to occur – will, potentially, enter the Susquehanna, the source of drinking water for 120,000 New Yorkers (a similar situation pertains in Corning, which gets its water from the northward flowing Tioga river).
In November, Binghamton’s water was tested. The Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin trumpeted, “Nothing indicates natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania has affected the city’s water supply.” Five “chemical compounds associated with hydrofracking,” the paper reported, were either “not present” or “detectable, but at levels below the national average for public water supplies.”
Apparently taking the position that the public interest requires no water testing, John Krohn, a spokesman for the industry group Energy in Depth, practically sneered, “It seems that [Binghamton Mayor] Matt Ryan does a wonderful job of wasting the Binghamton taxpayers’ money.” But at the end of the day, is that the end of the story?
“You’ll never find what you aren’t looking for,” says Bill Huston from Shaleshock, who was the first to research this story. He points out that four of the five substances tested for were gasses, not likely to be present after 15 miles of river agitation. “The PA DEP tests for 24 heavy metals,” he says, while “Binghamton tested for one.”
Huston also contends that testing is a straw man. “The main point is not to prove Binghamton’s water is contaminated. But to say that fracking inside Binghamton’s watershed is a bad idea. ‘Safety’ isn’t the absence of harm but the absence of threat.” If you look at it that way, Binghamton and all those other towns can no longer be considered safe.
2 bY WASTEThree landfills in New York State currently accept “drill cuttings” (solid drilling waste) and fluids from fracking operations in Pennsylvania. Despite concerns about chemicals and radioactivity – Radium 226, one of the substances found in the Marcellus, has a half-life of 1600 years – the DEC has concluded that this waste is safe, but opponents are not so sure, especially because, no matter what the theory, in practice, it doesn’t look like anyone’s actually paying much attention to what goes into the landfills. NF
TO sOme exTeNT, the controversy over fracking has created the misimpression that the danger to New York from fracking is only something that’s in the future. In actuality, the risks from fracking, as well as some of the poisons, are already entering New York state. We present here two sources of concern.
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down! 12 | the no Frack Almanac | Winter/spring 2013
fighting BAckby Maura Stephens
In winter 2011, I was already several years into heavy research on fracking. I wanted to know how it might affect my family, our community, and the beloved New York State into which we’d been born and/or had chosen to make our home.
As a professional journalist with decades of experience, I was investigating fracking from all angles: economic, legal, environmental, social, health, cultural, community, family, and personal. I’d traveled around Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, and talked to folks in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and the Dakotas, where fracking in one form or another had been taking place even longer.
During sleuthing, I came to the irrevocable understanding that this new unconventional process of gas extraction from geologic formations whence never before gas would have been removable was just about the worst public health crisis facing our state, our nation, and the entire world.
I’d earlier come to recognize that there is no use trying to work within the regulatory system.
Because it is broken. Or corrupt. Or co-opted. Or impotent.
Or all of the above.Think about that. Who is looking out for you?There’s no way under current law to enforce
regulations or hold criminal corporations
accountable for the harms they perpetrate upon us.Because corporations have perverted,
appropriated, or neutralized state and federal environmental protection offices — as well as all branches of our federal government.
We cannot continue to allow the corrupt/broken DEC or EPA or governor’s office or White House to tell us how they’ll poison us (a tad more slowly, from a few hundred feet farther, a county at a time, for the sake of “patriotism”...) — as if water and air pollution follow political boundaries, as if beef from fracked Pennsylvania will be safely inspected before it’s ground into your kid’s hamburger, as if Maryland corn that arrives a month earlier than New York’s will be less toxic despite the fact that the water feeding it flowed through Pennsylvania.
The good news after all this gloom and doom is quite exciting.
More than 140 villages and towns in NYS have passed bans or moratoria on fracking. The Coalition to Protect New York, of which I am a cofounder, exists to (1) educate the public about all aspects of fracking, via door-to-door outreach and public forums; (2) help municipalities pass moratoria, bans, and other local laws; (3) work thence to make fracking a crime within municipalities and eventually in the NYS Penal Code; and (4) foster creative peaceful resistance.
Number (3) has been the most challenging. But on January 13, the first hurdle toward that was leapt. The Town Board of Woodstock, in Ulster
County, passed the first-ever resolution supporting Public Law #1*, which makes fracking and related activities a crime in the NYS Penal Code.
This bill bypasses the usual nonsense that gives so much leeway to corporations that they’re essentially immune from all accountability.
I offer applause to SPAN (Sovereign People’s Action Network,) and Frackbusters (of which I am also a cofounder), and to the visionary Woodstock Town Board. To the 120+ municipalities that have already passed moratoria or bans: Take this next step.
We all know fracking is a crime against people and the planet. Make fracking a crime in the law of New York State.
The folks at SPAN (http://www.sovereignpeople.net/), and Frackbusters, (www.frackbustersny.org), are willing and eager to help others do a similar resolution in their NYS town. Take them up on the offer!
Criminalizing Fracking is the most effective action we can take. NF* Full disclosure: I am a co-writer, along with several other SPAN and Frackbusters members, of NYS Public Law #1.
________
Maura Stephens is a journalist and cofounder of Coalition to Protect New York and other antifracking groups. She lives in Tioga County.
it’s A crime
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1From Bloomberg Business Week, August 20, 2012:A Jackson County Circuit Court jury decided that Inergy, L.P. and its subsidiary Inergy Midstream LLC owed a former employee $1 million in actual damages in a case that claimed fraudulent misrepresentation… The lawsuit was brought by Robert Wallace, a petroleum and gas storage reservoir engineer who worked for Inergy in 2009 in connection with underground natural gas storage facilities. Wallace agreed to become an Inergy employee after first working as an independent consultant. The jury accepted evidence presented by Wallace’s attorney, Dennis Egan, that Inergy management had agreed in email correspondence to give Wallace a value-added bonus if he discovered new gas and additional storage capacity at a site in New York called Thomas Corners. The company denied it had agreed to the value-added bonus and denied that Wallace had discovered significant new gas or storage capacity… Wallace left Inergy in November 2009 after the company sent a letter of denial regarding the bonus. [emphasis added]
2From a January 7, 2013 article by DC Bureau journalist, Peter Manitus, based on a previously unreleased freedom of information document obtained from the EPA:A Kansas City energy company is urging New York and federal regulators to
3 More Reasons Not To Trust InergyInergy says we should trust it to safely store millions of cubic feet of explosive gas in the Finger Lakes, but is this a company we should trust with our lives? We present here three pieces of evidence that we feel may be pertinent to this question.
disregard explicit warnings about the structural integrity of two salt caverns that it plans to use to store millions of barrels of highly-pressurized liquid propane and butane.
One cavern was plugged and abandoned 10 years ago after a consulting engineer from Louisiana concluded that its roof had collapsed in a minor earthquake. He deemed the rubble-filled cavity “unusable” for storage. It is now scheduled to hold 600,000 barrels of liquid butane.
The other cavern sits directly below a rock formation weakened by faults and characterized by “rock movement” and “intermittent collapse,” according to a 40-year-old academic study that cautioned that the cavern might be plagued by “difficulties in production arising from the geological environment.” That cavern is scheduled to hold 1.5 million barrels of liquid propane.
Both warnings were overstated, according to Inergy LLP…
3This photo, from early September, is of Pennsylvania’s Loyalsock Creek after a spill caused by a construction problem on Inergy’s Marc1 pipeline. NF
