Unsafe Exposure

A new study has found unsafe levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), linked to cancer and respiratory illness, near fracking sites in Carroll County, Ohio. The study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, was conducted by a research team headed by Drs. Kim Anderson of Oregon State University and Erin Haynes of the University of Cincinnati. The first author was Blair Paulik, an OSU graduate student. The article is gated, but secondary sources, including an OSU press release, give what appears to be a complete, though non-technical, description of the study.

Carroll County, 70 miles southeast of Cleveland, has 30,000 residents, lies on the Utica Shale formation, and had 421 natural gas wells at the time of the study, February 2014. (It now has 480.) The study was initiated by concerned citizens who contacted Dr. Haynes.  

Air samplers were placed on the properties of 23 volunteers who lived within 3 miles of gas wells. The monitors contained treated materials that absorbed contaminants. They were sealed in airtight bags and shipped to Dr. Anderson's lab for analysis. Volunteers were trained in proper collection and handling of the data.

PAHs are hydrocarbons (compounds of carbon and hydrogen), seven of which, i.e., benzopyrene, are classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as carcinogenic. Prenatal exposure is also associated with lower IQ and childhood asthma. Based on their data, the authors calculated that the lifetime cancer risk for those living closest (.1 miles) to the wells is 2.9 in 10,000. This is almost three times the EPA's acceptable level of 1 in 10,000. Levels of PAHs declined 30% at a distance of three miles—still well above the acceptable limits. Levels were about 10 times higher than a rural Michigan county containing no gas wells.

Researcher Blair Paulik in front of an air sampler
(© Oregon State University)

In googling the study, I found an article in Marcellus Drilling News, a pro-fracking website, calling this a “sham study.” Some of their objections were silly, i.e., that the OSU authors were “a long way from home,” and that the article “sneaks in the c-word.”  (Estimating cancer risk was the point of the study.) I found three possibly substantive criticisms: that there were too few data collection sites, that they were not randomly distributed throughout the county, and that the data were collected by “untrained volunteers.” The third objection is false, but if the samples were carelessly handled, it's likely they would have captured fewer, not more, contaminants. Since neither the gas wells nor the human population are randomly distributed within the county, I doubt the value of including data from locations that are far from either gas wells, people or both (although it certainly would have diluted the findings).

Future studies should randomly select fracking sites and collect more samples at varying distances from the wells, including some more than 3 miles away, to establish the physical boundaries of the contamination.

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Is Fracking Safe?

Fracking and Public Health, Part 1

Fracking Up Baby

Is Fracking Safe?

It May Depend on What You Mean By "Fracking"

A new study by Thomas Darrah of Duke University and four colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academcy of Sciences, suggests that there has been significant contamination of the ground water from natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania and Texas, but this contamination is not due to the process of hydraulic fracturing itself. Rather it is caused by leakage of methane, the primary ingredient in natural gas, and other chemicals near the surface due to faulty construction of the well.

The researchers took 133 water samples from drinking water wells—113 of them from along the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and 20 from the Barnett Shale in Texas. Through chemical analysis, they were able to tell whether each sample was contaminated, and if so, from where the contimation had come. I'm not knowledgeable enough in chemistry to understand the testing that was done, so I rely on the fact that this was a peer-reviewed journal.

They found eight clusters of contaminated wells—seven in Pennsylvania and one in Texas. The cluster in Texas consisted of five of the twenty samples they took. They don't say how many samples were included in the seven Pennsylvania clusters. From eyeballing their charts, it looks like about 20-25% of their samples were contaminated. However, the wells were not randomly selected. The researchers had focused on areas where contamination was suspected.

The chemical analysis indicated that four of the eight clusters were due to leakage around the cement used to seal the outside of the well, three were due corroded or poorly joined steel tubing used to drill into the ground, and the last was due to “underground mechanical well failure.”

Diagram by Howarth and Engelder (2011)

In hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, fracking fluid is forced into the shale at high pressure in order to release the natural gas contained in it. The concern is that fracking might create breaks in the undreground rock formations, through which either natural gas or fracking fluid might leak upward and contaminate drinking water. None of the contamination came from far enough below the surface to indicate that this type of contamination had occurred.

Unlike last week's study of the correlation between fracking sites and health problems, this study received generous coverage by the corporate media. The general spin seemed to be that “fracking is safe.” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a McClatchy article about the study on the front page. Two days later, they reprinted a Bloomsberg op-ed entitled “Fracking is not the threat.” The threat, it seems, is drilling company carelessness, which can be avoided through government regulations, regular inspections, and fines for poor performance.

The coverage is superficial in at least two respects. First, while there is no evidence that fracking in the narrow sense--that is, hydraulic fracturing, per se--has caused contamination, fracking in a broader sense--the fracking boom--is certainly responsible for ground water contamination. Regulation and oversight of the drilling industry will not be accomplished easily, especially in a state like Pennsylvania, where the state government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the natural gas industry.

Secondly, the absence of evidence of leakage due to fracking, per se, does not necessarily mean that there is none and the process is safe. Methane and fracking fluid from deep in the shale may simply take a longer time to reach the surface than chemicals that leak from at or near the surface. Maybe decades. The Darrah study may simply have been done too soon.

Meanwhile, there is accumulating evidence of another problem caused by natural gas drilling. A new report published in the Bulletin of the Siesmological Society of America shows a significant increase in earthquakes in the Raton Basin of Colorado and New Mexico since 2001. Fracking began there in 1999. As in previous studies, most of the earthquakes are located within 5 kilometers of waste water injection wells, rather than near sites where hydraulic fracturing has taken place. I guess that means that fracking is “safe,” but it doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the waste water.

You may also be interested in reading:

Fracking and Public Health, Part 1

Fracking and Public Health, Part 2

La Terra Trema

Living Downstream

As I write, 300,000 citizens of nine counties in West Virginia are gradually being allowed to use their tap water, although there may be legitimate questions about whether it is safe. The water is contaminated by 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM), a toxic chemical used to process coal, which was stored by Freedom Industries in antiquated containers poised on a hilltop overlooking the Elk River, just a mile upstream from the intake of Charleston's water treatment plant. This toxic chemical spill is symptomatic of a broader problem in how we deal with environmental and social problems.

© nofrackingway.us

A metaphor that is useful for describing intervention strategies is the distinction between upstream and downstream approaches, or the difference between prevention and remediation. Upstream strategies seek to prevent the problem; downstream approaches occur after the problem has occurred and try to minimize the harm that is done. Of course, some strategies are a combination of the two; there is a continuum between pure upstream and downstream approaches.

Consider the problem of waste. The downstream approach is discarding the waste—that is, we wait until it accumulates to the point of inconvenience and then either displace it (throw it “away,” as in a landfill), or attempt to dilute it by allowing it to escape into the public air, land and water. Of course, there is no such place as “away,” and dilution fails when the concentration of waste becomes too high (or when the waste is discharged a mile upstream from the water supply intake valve).

Upstream (prevention)                                                                                Downstream (remediation)

➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔ ➔

Source reduction                                 Reuse                                           Recycling                                            Discarding

Recycling and reuse are more upstream approaches, with reuse being farther upstream than recycling. The difference can be illustrated with glass bottles. The old bottles can be ground up and used to manufacture new bottles (recycling), or the old bottles can be sanitized and reused.

The upstream solution to waste is source reduction: Produce less waste in the first place. Sometimes, this involves curtailing manufacture of the product. In other cases, the product can be produced more efficiently, so as to reduce unnecessary waste. Increased efficiency is usually an easier sell, since curtailment typically involves more sacrifice. For example, it's probably easier to convince people to insulate their homes than to set back their thermostats.

The most significant example of the need for source reduction is in energy production. Consider all the harm that is done to human health and safety by our reliance on fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas. We could meet all our energy needs much more cheaply with renewables. While solar and wind power generate some pollution, it is miniscule by comparison to fossil fuels. Yet we don't do it, even though it is now obvious that human survival depends on it.

From the perspective human well-being—the greatest good for the greatest number—upstream solutions are almost always more desirable than downstream solutions. They are typically cheaper and involve less inconvenience, or in the case of health problems, suffering. It would have been cheaper and better to slightly inconvenience Freedom Industries by requiring them to keep their containers in good repair, rather than forcing 300,000 people to do without water for several days. The cleanup cost will probably ultimately be borne by the taxpayers, since our laws are written so that Freedom Industries can easily write off its costs or declare bankruptcy.

The upstream-downstream model can be applied to any social or environmental problem. For example, it would be cheaper and more humane if we could prevent depression, but at the present time, depression is treated by giving people drugs that act primarily to mask its symptoms.

Why don't we rely on upstream solutions more often? In many cases, upstream solutions are less transparent. They are farther in space and time from the problem. People smoked tobacco for centuries before it was conclusively demonstrated that smoking causes lung cancer. Yet, compared to other cancers, this is a relatively obvious relationship. Finding upstream solutions to mental health problems may be even more challenging than preventing physical illness. Because upstream solutions are less obvious, it's more difficult to convince the public that they should be implemented. It's also harder to find financial support for the research needed to investigate upstream solutions.

But knowledge of how to prevent harm and evidence of its effectiveness was not the problem in West Virginia. The name of the polluting corporation turned out to be ironically appropriate, since so many corporations identify “freedom” with the absence of government regulation and oversight. Going without water for a week doesn't engage metaphors about freedom, although it should. It's hard to think of many things that reduce your freedom more than having to queue up for water for drinking and bathing, having to close local businesses, coming down with a pollution-related illness, etc.

While upstream solutions provide the greatest public good, not all people benefit equally from their adoption, and some are harmed by them. One person's freedom may conflict with another's. Since those that benefit from prevention are usually average citizens and those that are harmed are “corporate persons” and their wealthy owners, the issue is unequal political power. MCHM is one of tens of thousands of industral chemicals never tested for its risk to human health. But the real problem is that regulatory agencies are routinely captured by the industries they are supposed to be regulating. The Freedom Industries storage plant had not been inspected since 1991. In West Virginia, politicians' reliance on coal money has produced an environment in which they not only fail to act to reduce obvious health and safety hazards, but openly defy the Environmental Protection Agency. Pennsylvania residents might want to think about the potential for air and water quality disasters here, given our leadership's subservience to the natural gas industry.

Inequality of power is combined with a political system that is little more than legalized bribery, provided that the political contribution is sufficiently upstream from the decision to avoid being obvious. And in this country, due to the feedback loop running from inequality to political power to even greater inequality, the problem is increasing exponentially.

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Fracking Up Baby

Whose Opinion Matters?

Fracking Up Baby

This study has not been peer-reviewed. It was presented at a meeting of the American Economic Association on January 4. It has also not been posted anywhere, to my knowledge. I am relying on an article written by reporter Mark Whitehouse for Bloomberg News. (I will update this post if I get further relevant information.) The credibility of the study seems to be quite high. The researchers are Janet Currie of Princeton, Katherine Meckel of Columbia, and John Deutsch and Michael Greenstone of MIT, who have previously published studies of the health effects of pollution. The study was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the MacArthur Foundation.

The authors used Pennsylvania birth records to compare the health of newborn infants living within 2.5 kilometers (slightly over 1.5 miles) of natural gas fracking sites to a control group of infants living elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Public records allowed them to pinpoint the exact latitudes and longitudes of the gas wells and the mothers' homes. Those babies whose mothers lived near a fracking site had a 9% probability of low birth weight (less than 5.5 pounds), compared to 5.6% in the control group.

Photo by AP/Keith Srakocic

Low birth weight is an important predictor of infant health and survival, and is associated later in life with inhibited growth, lower educational attainment, and chronic diseases. There is growing evidence that one of its causes is exposure to environmental toxins. The fracking group also had a 5% chance of a low Apgar score, double the control group. The Apgar score is given by the doctor, who evaluates the child's heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, reflexes and skin coloring at the time of birth. A low score indicates problems in one or more of these areas.

This is not the first study to find that fracking is associated with infant health problems. Faith Hill, a Cornell undergraduate, found that Pennsylvania children born near fracking sites had lower birth weights and lower Apgar scores compared to a control group of infants born near permitted sites prior to any drilling. However, this study could have been confounded by migration away from the site after drilling began and a reduction in property values in the vicinity. The net result is that people living near drilling sites may have lower socioeconomic status or other characteristics that could explain their children's poorer health.

The Currie study attempts to deal with this problem two ways. It corrects statistically for geographical differences in maternal health. More importantly, it looks at a subsample of mothers who gave birth both before and after drilling began. These mothers serve as their own control group, which eliminates most alternative explanations. Of course, the mothers were older after the onset of fracking, but lower birth weight is typically associated with younger maternal age.

How does fracking result in poor infant health? The authors claim that water pollution is probably not the cause, since there were no differences between mothers who used public water systems and those who obtained their water from private wells, which are more likely to be contaminated by fracking. This leaves air pollution as the most likely possibility. Pollution may be due to leakage of gases from around the well or from open frackwater waste pools, which are allowed in Pennsylvania. 

Whitehouse ends his article with the following odd bit of false balance:

The study doesn't necessarily tell us whether or not fracking is worth doing. There may be offsetting health benefits related to the added jobs fracking creates, to lower energy prices or to the reduced use of coal or other fuels as more natural gas becomes available.

Seriously? Are children to be sacrificed for lower energy prices? The comment ignores the possibility that Pennsylvania could impose stricter regulations to reduce air and water pollution near fracking sites, if its state government were not a wholly-owned subsidiary of the natural gas industry. 

Fracking is exempt from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other federal anti-pollution regulations. So far, government has largely ignored the precautionary principle when it comes to fracking. The burden of proof has been placed on opponents of fracking to demonstrate health problems after the damage is done. If the drilling companies want to claim health benefits of fracking, I hope they will show us their data.

As of this morning, none of Pennsylvania's major newspapers have reported the study.

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I Cough in Your General Direction

This Will Not Surprise You

His Master's Voice

La Terra Trema

I Cough in Your General Direction

 Some rights reserved by United Nations Photo

New international research has shown that particulate air pollution (or soot) is a significant cause of low birth weight in infants. The study is actually a meta-analysis of 14 studies done in nine countries, with a total sample of over 3 million births. A meta-analysis is an analysis of analyses, or a way of statistically combining the results of several studies to arrive at an overall estimate of the significance of an effect. The fact that the studies were done by different researchers, at different sites, using slightly different research methods is generally seen as increasing our confidence in the outcome.

Pollution at the study sites varied from 10 to 70 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The effect was small but consistent. Two ways of summarizing the results are:

• For every 10 microgram increase in pollution, average birth weight declines by 8.9 grams, or roughly one-third of an ounce.
• For every 10 microgram increase, the probability that an infant will be of low birth weight—less than 5 pounds, eight ounces—increases by 3%.

The effect was highly significant when controlling for the socioeconomic status of the mother and other confounding variables.

The two major sources of particulate pollution are industrial plants, especially power plants, and vehicle emissions. Exposure has been shown to be associated with health problems such as asthma, heart disease, stroke and diabetes. It's not clear why particulate pollution reduces birth weight, but one possibility is that it, and the diseases with which it is associated, place stress on the mother's body, which affects fetal growth. Low birth weight is a risk factor for infant mortality, and for heart, lung and behavior problems in later life.

A recent article in The Lancet attempted to quantify the major causes of premature death in the world. Air pollution was #7, contributing to 3.2 million deaths per year. (In case you're wondering, high blood pressure is #1, smoking #2, and alcohol consumption #3.) As David Pettit of the Natural Resources Defense Council notes:

Fortunately there are many actions that can be taken to address outdoor air pollution. The technology is readily available at a fraction of the investment cost compared to the health costs that the public bears.

Obviously, the availability of clean air technology is of little consequence if the corporations responsible for most of the pollution control a corrupt political system.

As if to show how obsolete our political system is, last August, the U. S. Court of Appeals struck down an Environmental Protection Agency rule intended to reduce emissions crossing state borders, partially on grounds that the rule was a violation of states' rights.

Get the Lead Out, Part 2

Part 1 of this post concerns the relationship between lead in the environment and the rate of violent crime. Please read it before continuing.

The lead hypothesis helps us to understand additional facts about violent crime. For example, the crime rate has been higher in urban areas, probably due to the greater concentration of motor vehicles in large cities. Now that lead has been removed from gasoline, the crime rates in big and small cities have converged. The lead hypothesis also sheds light on black-white differences in crime. Black children have blood lead levels that are on average 50% higher than white children, since African-Americans typically live in inner-city locations where traffic is dense and there is less pressure on slumlords to clean up the lead in their buildings.

Of course, there will be resistance to the lead hypothesis from the criminologists, who think of crime as a sociological rather than an ecological problem. The law enforcement establishment would like to claim that police procedures, such as those that follow from the broken windows hypothesis, or the fact that we are putting more people in jail for longer times are responsible for the change.

Although the amount of lead in the environment has dropped, we are far from rid of this toxic element. Lead paint can still be found around the windows of older homes. Where it is highly concentrated in the soil, it must be removed. Prevention is always superior to remediation, especially when the behavior in question causes significant human suffering. However, lead abatement is worth doing on economic grounds alone. Drum cites estimates that replacing old windows and cleaning up lead saturated soil would cost $20 billion per year for 20 years. He assumes that this would reduce crime an additional 10%, which would save $150 billion per year. He also adds $60 billion per year for the higher income children would have had their intelligence not been reduced by lead. These figures are speculative, but if correct, that's a net savings of almost $200 billion per year. To put that in perspective, President Obama's proposal to increase the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 would save the government $24 billion per year—although it would cost seniors at lot more, since they would have to buy private insurance.

As David Roberts has pointed out, the history of lead abatement is typical of how we deal with many other environmental pollutants. In this country, corporations are permitted to introduce potentially toxic substances into the environment without first proving that they are safe. In other words, we ignore the precautionary principle. Once the substance is in use, it is up to the public to prove that it is harmful in order to have it banned. The university scientists and public interest groups that might do the necessary research are typically underfunded, and the burden of proof that they must meet is extraordinarily high. Corporate polluters generate as much confusion as they can about the scientific evidence in order to forestall regulation, and exaggerate the economic costs of making necessary changes. Meanwhile, people are getting sick and dying. If the corporations are finally forced to remove the pollutant, the costs almost always turn out to be much lower than predicted, and the benefits much greater. As a final step, the corporations responsible for the pollution take out television ads congratulating themselves for making the changes that they so strongly resisted.