Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

What is the greenest way to dispose of pet waste? Scoop and flush, or bag and throw in the trash?

Jenifer M.
Vienna

A. Dearest Jenifer,

Flush or toss?The greenest way to dispose of pet waste is to dispose of your pet, I suppose. No pet, no waste! But barring that revolutionary scheme, a few other options present themselves.

You have not said what kind of pet you have, but judging by your reference to scooping, I am going to assume it is a cat. The time-tested advice for felines is to bag and throw away the soiled litter, including poo. If you are on a municipal sewer line, you may be able to flush the feces, but you should check with your town; if you have a septic tank, it's not advised. By the way, when you choose kitty litter, don't buy a brand that contains clay -- you might want to consult our product tester for the best non-clay options.

If you are scooping the waste of a dog or other animal, the same truth applies: bagging is best. It's gross to think about all that pet waste rotting in landfills, but it's a teeny bit less gross than imagining it seeping into our waterways or contaminating our gardens with its pathogens. (Some people compost pet waste, but it must be done very, very carefully -- here are some tips.)

Of course, we hear occasionally about efforts to turn pet poop into power -- I fur-vently hope "they" keep working on this idea, and I'm also very glad that is not my line of work.

Ferretly,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I hear a lot about clean coal technology. Is it true that we can use coal in a "clean" way? I don't believe it. Can you please explain this?

Anand
Manhattan

A. Dearest Anand,

You know the expression "go with your gut"? Methinks you should. You don't believe coal can be used in a clean way, and you are right.

It is accurate, however, to say that coal can be used in a cleaner way than it traditionally has. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and others point out that, since coal is abundant, relatively cheap, and unlikely to disappear from our energy mix any time soon, we should find cleaner ways of feeding our addiction. These include turning coal into a gas before burning it, and capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions. Here's a fun and colorful clean-coal overview from the BBC.

Will these "cleaner" methods prevent coal from harming our health and polluting our air and water? Will they stop coal companies from blowing the tops off of mountains? Will they keep miners from being trapped and killed underground? Not likely. There's a reason my fellow Grist writer David Roberts calls coal the "enemy of the human race." It is an outmoded, dangerous source of power. We should all lobby our utilities and our representatives to give us better, safer, healthier options.

I wrote a bit more about the clean-coal conundrum last year; you can find my answer here. I also recommend you swing on over to the Department of Energy to get a sense of their plans, and visit iLoveMountains.org for a real, human understanding of where coal actually comes from.

Sequesterly,
Umbra

Q. Hi Umbra,

I am a college student and I'm really involved in and passionate about making my university more sustainable. One of the issues that I am trying to address is our current disposal of mattresses. Every year, my university "disposes" of 1,200 mattresses by incinerating them for energy (people think this is awesome and sustainable -- I wish I was kidding). So, I have been spending endless nights researching a safer alternative for this herd of mattresses. I can't recycle them because it's too damn expensive (about $20,000/yr). I can't donate them because they are ripped and flat -- who wants a holey pancake mattress? I can't Freecycle them because bedbugs are a huge issue in my area and I don't think I can find 1,200 people who want college student mattresses (think about what you did on your mattress back in the day...). So I am asking, I am BEGGING, you for help!

Mattress Maiden
Boston, Mass.

A. Dearest MM,

What I did on my mattress back in the day ... let's see, I slept on it. I read a lot of Aldo Leopold. I sorted my collection of fallen leaves by size and hue. What do you do on your mattress?

Never mind. The real question is, why is it so hard to dispose of mattresses in this country? I'm afraid, dear MM, you have outlined exactly the problem: Mattresses can rarely be donated, especially as bedbug concerns (real or imagined) increase. They take up too much space in landfills, so much in fact that some municipalities will no longer accept them. And though recycling programs are cropping up, they are few, far between, and can be fiscally frustrating.

Still, I think recycling is the best bet. Interestingly, Massachusetts is home to one of the nation's few mattress recyclers, and another outfit is venturing into New England soon. It's amazing what happens to your mattress: the wood is chipped for energy, the steel springs recycled, the cotton and foam used for insulation or other textile needs. I'm not sure which of the many fine Beantown schools you attend, but I see that Tufts and MIT both recycle mattresses. Those schools are dealing with a much smaller quantity than you mention, but you might contact them to find out how they've sprung over any obstacles. (You might also see if your school is retiring too many mattresses too soon.)

Another possible resource: Some schools rely on the help of the Institutional Recycling Network -- you might contact them as well, if you haven't already.

Above all else, it seems to me that the burning of these mattresses is a misguided plan. For one thing, mattresses are treated with chemicals to make them resistant to fire -- so once they are coaxed to go up in smoke, they likely release all sorts of nasty fumes. That's way more squirm-inducing than thinking about the damages that might have resulted from certain collegiate activities.

Stain removerly,
Umbra

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Ask Umbra’s video advice on composting

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency still does not know the exact number of coal ash dumps at the nation's power plants, but it's moving ahead with plans to regulate them.

Those are among the findings of a report [PDF] released last week by the Government Accountability Office on the status of EPA's efforts to improve oversight of coal combustion waste. The GAO is an independent, nonpartisan watchdog agency that serves Congress.

The report was prepared in response to a request from U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Their request came following the December 2008 coal ash spill disaster from a surface impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston plant in eastern Tennessee.

That spill covered more than 300 acres with toxic waste, destroyed three homes and damaged 23 others, damaged nearby roads and rail lines, and sent toxic pollution into the nearby Emory River. TVA has estimated it could cost as much as $1.2 billion to clean up the mess and take up to three years.

As of mid-September, the EPA had identified over 580 coal ash waste surface impoundments nationwide, GAO reports. A surface impoundment is a depression, excavation, or diked area where the liquid coal waste is stored. Sometimes the solids in the waste are left to accumulate in the impoundment, while in other cases they are dredged periodically and taken to another disposal unit, such as a landfill.

Coal ash is also disposed of through minefilling, where it's dumped into abandoned mines. And a significant amount of the coal combustion waste produced at power plants goes to manufacture products such as cement and wallboard or structural fill for roads and other development, an application known under the law as "beneficial use."

Of the 131 million tons of coal combustion waste generated by U.S. utilities in 2007, 38 percent went toward so-called beneficial uses, 36 percent into landfills, 21 percent into surface impoundments, and 5 percent into mines, according to the GAO. Between 2000 and 2006 alone, power companies reported dumping into surface impoundments and landfills coal ash waste containing more than 124 million pounds of six toxic pollutants: arsenic, chromium, lead, nickel, selenium, and thallium.

Among the risks associated with surface impoundments are collapses such as the one at the Kingston plant; the leaching of coal ash contaminants such as arsenic, chromium, and lead into surface or groundwater supplies; and the discharge of wastewater containing coal ash contamination into rivers and other surface water supplies.

Following the Kingston disaster, the EPA sent out information requests to 162 electric generation facilities and 61 corporate offices in an efforts to gather information on coal waste surface impoundments. It's created a database with information on 584 surface impoundments or similar facilities in 35 states -- but the EPA says this number is likely to change as it conducts site visits.

Over the past 10 years, 26 facilities have reported spills or other unpermitted releases from a total of 35 surface impoundments. EPA has also identified 49 impoundments that have a high hazard potential rating, meaning that a failure would probably kill people.

The EPA is further assessing these potentially dangerous units. It's also considering whether to regulate the structural integrity of coal ash waste surface impoundments through wastewater discharge permits -- a move that came one day after three environmental groups announced they planned to sue the agency for failing to properly regulate such discharges.

The EPA recently completed a study of toxins in wastewater discharges from coal ash impoundments [PDF]. It concluded that current guidelines should be revised because of the significant toxic releases from impoundments and the likelihood that these will increase significantly over the next few years as new air pollution controls are installed.

The GAO report looked at federal oversight issues that still need to be resolved as EPA develops proposed regulations for coal ash waste disposal. It noted that while the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 is the key federal law regulating hazardous waste, a 1980 amendment to the law sponsored by now-deceased Congressman Tom Bevill (D-Ala.) exempted coal combustion waste from RCRA.

EPA is considering several options for regulating the material:

* Regulating the waste as hazardous under RCRA Subtitle C. While supported by environmental groups, this approach is opposed by the industry because of the potential cost and complexity.

* Regulating the waste as non-hazardous solid waste under RCRA Subtitle D. This approach is supported by industry but opposed by environmental groups because EPA could not routinely inspect disposal sites or require permits and because the opportunity for public involvement in permits would be limited.

* A hybrid approach in which the material would be regulated as ordinary solid waste under certain conditions or a hazardous waste under others, such as designating wet disposal in surface impoundments as hazardous and dry waste in landfills as non-hazardous.

Lisa Evans, a coal ash expert with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, told the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette's Coal Tattoo Blog that she had concerns about the hybrid regulatory approach, noting that dry disposal of coal ash waste also presents significant risks to health and the environment:

... [I]t would be a big mistake for EPA to leave landfilling entirely to the states. Current state laws are inadequate, and they will likely remain inadequate without EPA's hazardous designation.

EPA plans to issue its proposed rule on coal ash disposal next month.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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More green on the streets will mean less brown in the rivers.Tony the Misfit via flickrPhiladelphia has a poo problem. Old, failing pipes plus a swelling population plus lots of rain equals—well, yuck. So the city has pondered its options, and now it’s poised to make a major splash in the world of sewage management.

In a move described by an official from the state environmental council as “the most significant investment in transforming the city that we’ll see in our lifetimes,” Philly is proposing a $1.6 billion plan to radically alter the way it handles stormwater—not only the practicalities, but the philosophy behind them.

The new system, which must be approved by the EPA, would use green roofs, rain gardens and barrels, porous pavement, and other tools to “deal with rainwater where it lands” instead of building tunnels and plants to divert and treat it, said Howard Neukrug, founding director of the city’s Office of Watersheds. The primary goal: to keep aging sewage pipes from sending waste into the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, smaller waterways, and occasionally even homes. But a nice side benefit? A greener, cleaner cityscape.

Voicing an idea so practical it hurts, yet ignored the whole world ‘round, Neukrug said, “Instead of figuring out how to manage this pollution, maybe we should be looking at how to prevent it in the first place.”

Howard Neukrug: Greening Philadelphia, one storm drain at a time.Neukrug has apparently been nipping at the heels of greener stormwater management for a decade, since three Department of Water programs merged in 1999 to create his Office of Watersheds, which serves two million residents. Over the years, he has gained attention for his progressive approach, testifying before Congress and starring in a wave of coverage on the city’s techniques three years ago. The City of Brotherly Love’s watery ways have even been hailed by the Sierra Club.

So it’s clear that the recently unveiled plan did not spring full-grown from Rocky’s head. In fact, it’s reportedly been in the works for twelve years. Still, now that the 3,369-page plan exists and has landed with a thud on EPA’s desk, the press and observers are all atwitter, and several neighborhoods are eager to get greened up. “This is the most significant use of green infrastructure I’ve seen in the country, the largest scale I’ve seen,” EPA regional water-protection direct Jon Capacasa told the Philadelphia Inquirer, while NRDC water-expert Nancy Stoner called the potential scaling-up of these proven techniques “really exciting.”

Ken Kirk, who heads the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, praised the plan to the Inquirer as well: “[At] the end of the day, they will be using a lot less energy, they will be using the water resources more efficiently, they will be capturing and recharging groundwater under the city, they’ll have less pollution of the rivers ... That is the way we need to go.”

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday that it plans to revise the existing standards for wastewater discharges from coal-fired power plants.

The news came one day after three environmental groups announced they intend to sue the agency for failing to properly regulate such discharges. Many of these releases come from coal ash ponds like the one that failed catastrophically last year at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston plant in eastern Tennessee, an incident that released more than a billion gallons of toxic sludge into a nearby community and river.

According to the EPA's announcement:

Air pollution controls installed to remove pollution from smokestacks have made great strides in cleaning the air people breathe, saving lives and reducing respiratory and other illnesses. However, some of the equipment used to clean air emissions does so by “scrubbing” the boiler exhaust with water, and when the water is not properly managed it sends the pollution to rivers and other waterbodies. Treatment technologies are available to remove these pollutants before they are discharged to waterways, but these systems have been installed at only a fraction of the power plants.

Earlier this year, EPA completed a study of power plant waste discharges, concluding that  current regulations -- which date back to 1982 -- are not adequate to the task of protecting the environment from contamination. Once the new rule is finalized, EPA and the states would incorporate the new standards into plants' wastewater discharge permits.

On Monday, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Integrity Project announced that they intended to sue EPA over its failure to set limits on toxic discharges from coal plants, which annually release millions of pounds of dangerous pollutants including arsenic, lead and mercury. The groups noted that existing rules do not set any limits on discharges of these metals, which can contaminate local waterways and leach into drinking water supplies, already threatened nationwide by toxic dumping.

A study released last month by the U.S. Geological Survey found mercury contamination in every fish it tested from nearly 300 streams across the country, with levels in 27% of the fish high enough to exceed EPA safety limits. The contamination is due largely to pollution from coal-fired power plants.

Jennifer Peterson, an attorney with EIP, said her organization welcomed EPA's promised regulatory action. However, the groups still plan to go ahead with their lawsuit to ensure there's a firm date by which rules are in place.

"EPA's plan to finally limit toxic discharges from power plants is great news," Peterson said. "It is also good to hear EPA acknowledge that these toxic pollutants 'can contaminate drinking water sources, cause fish and other wildlife to die and create other detrimental environmental effects.' But these rules are nearly 30 years overdue, and we need a deadline for regulation. That is what our lawsuit is about."

Last month EPA revealed that there are almost twice as many coal ash ponds nationwide as was previously thought. Those ponds -- some of which would present a deadly hazard to nearby communities were they to fail -- are concentrated in Appalachia, the Southeast, Midwest and Intermountain West.

At the same time, some power companies are still withholding information about their coal ash dumps, claiming it's confidential business information. They include North Carolina-based Duke Energy and Progress Energy as well as the Southern Co.'s Alabama Power and Georgia Power.

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Many readers of the New York Times probably dropped their jaws in amazement at the lead story on Sunday: Seven-year-old Ryan Massey, of Prenter, West Virginia, smiled back with capped teeth, the enamel devoured by toxic tap water. His brother sported scabs and rashes, courtesy of the heavy metals--including lead, nickel--in their bath water.

If you think every American child should have the right to a glass of clean drinking water and a safe shower, then check out the accompanying slide show and video.

Thanks to Times reporter Charles Duhigg, the rest of the United States got a glimpse of daily life in the Saudi Arabia of coal--in the coalfields of Appalachia, where coal companies are "pumping into the ground illegal concentrations of chemicals--the same pollutants that flowed from residents' taps." And the coda: "But state regulators never fined or punished those companies for breaking those pollution laws."

As part of the Times' gripping "Toxic Waters," series, Duhigg's portrait of the Clean Water Act violations in West Virginia--and the indifference of state agencies--blew the cover on one of the worst kept secrets in Appalachia: Coal slurry injected into abandoned mines and dumped into waterways has contaminated the watersheds of American citizens and their drinking water...and no government agency did anything about it for years until the community finally fought back.

"How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?" said Ryan's mother, Jennifer Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state's largest banks.

According to Duhigg's research in Prenter, "Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system."

That's just the beginning. As the Aurora Lights "Journey Up Coal River" has noted: "Unsurprisingly, the health problems in this community are also massive: from kidney and liver failure to Parkinson's-like neurological problems, common respiratory illnesses that last for years despite treatment, and many different cancers. On a single 300-yard stretch of road, five people were diagnosed with brain tumors and nearly every family has someone in and out of the hospital."

Last month, West Virginia Governor and coal peddler Joe Manchin made a much ballyhooed visit to Prenter, in the midst of legal battles, to announce a new water system for next year. In the meantime, as the Appalachian Voices pointed out, the real headline should have noted: "WV Town to go 8 More Months without Clean Drinking Water."

Mathew Louis-Rosenberg was not suprised by the NY Times article. The young activist took time from a busy day of lobbying in Charleston, West Virginia, to discuss his work on the Prenter Water Fund, and the impact of the Times investigative piece on the widely denounced West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.

Biggers: When did you first go to Prenter, WV and why?

Louis-Rosenberg: I first went to Prenter in July, 2008. I was taken there by a man named Bobby Mitchell, a Charleston native who had already been organizing in Prenter for the better part of a year. I had been up to Larry Gibson's Mountain Keepers celebration and helped build an addition on to his house. After 3 visits up there, I decided to move to WV. Bobby was up there and I had met him the fall before at the Highlander Center's 75th Anniversary Celebration. He was just thrilled to have somebody to talk the science behind all this (my background is in math, science, and education) and I jumped on board organizing with Prenter.

Biggers: Why and how did the Prenter Water Fund get established?

Louis-Rosenberg: The idea for the Prenter Water Fund first got hatched in a living room in July, 2008. After months and months of trying every avenue anybody could think of to get emergency water for Prenter (we had asked the DEP, the governor, the county commission, all the local elected officials, the public utility and state emergency services) and being told everywhere we turned that there wasn't any money for emergency water, people were really really frustrated. Drawing on my experiences as a post-Katrina volunteer, I was convinced that we could raise the money and set up an emergency water distribution ourselves. Everyone was totally excited about the idea, and we had a meeting with community leaders in Prenter like Maria Lambert and Patty Sebok. Out of that meeting was launched the Prenter Water Fund, umbrella'ed under Coal River Mountain Watch. The next month we got a $10,000 emergency grant from the Paul and Vivian Olum Foundation and we were off to the races. The first water delivery was the day before Christmas and we have missed one yet.

Biggers: Do you think your work, along with other residents and advocates, helped to get the story out to a national audience?

Louis-Rosenberg: Absolutely. The one thing that I was disappointed about in the article was the lack of any mention of the tireless work of community leaders in Prenter and their allies to bring this story to light and win the many victories we have won on this issue. Nobody but nobody had heard of Prenter, WV until organizing began there in 2007. Now we are a household name around the State Capitol in Charleston. Many of the leaders and organizers in Prenter spent many hours on the phone with NY Times reporter telling their stories, providing information and connected him with other residents.

Biggers: Do you feel the New York Times article captured the enormity of the problem in Prenter?

Louis-Rosenberg: I think the article (despite a couple of small inaccuracies) did a great job bringing home just how desperate a situation Prenter is in. He perhaps could have stressed just how much of a life and death issue this really is (the cancer and death rates are astronomical).

Biggers: What impact do you think the Times piece will have on the WVDEP in addressing the water issue?

Louis-Rosenberg: I think the article has the potential to be a great weapon for us here in Charleston. I spent all day lobbying in the Capital today to line up sponsors for a bill to ban coal slurry. We took around copies of the NY Times article and boy did people's ears perk up when they found out about it. The DEP is such a completely failed agency NO! that's not strong enough. The DEP is so completely the lapdog of the coal industry that I don't expect this to change their ways. But now when we go to the legislature asking them to ban slurry, when we go to the EPA asking them to take over the DEP, we can say, "Look. The cat's out of the bag. Everyone knows what's going on here and you can step up and do something about it or be the people who fiddled while the coal companies poisoned the waters of this state and murdered communities like Prenter."

For more information, visit the Prenter Water Fund.

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This story was written by Danielle Ivory.

There is some evidence that Congress -- and the Environmental Protection Agency -- are rethinking their policies on a commonly used weed-killer after disclosures that the EPA failed to notify the public about high levels of the herbicide in drinking water.

As the Investigative Fund revealed last week, the herbicide atrazine has been found at levels above the federal safety limit in drinking water in at least four states. The chemical has been studied for its potential link to breast cancer, prostate cancer, and birth defects, and the EPA considers it to be a potential endocrine disruptor. It is banned in the European Union.

The Natural Resources Defense Council published a report on atrazine levels last week, and the New York Times weighed in with an article on growing questions about the herbicide's health effects.

The Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee has asked the EPA for a comprehensive briefing next week on the agency's failure to publicize results of tests that showed high levels of atrazine. The committee also is asking the EPA to develop a specific plan for reporting this data to the public in the future.

A senior committee staffer confirmed Friday that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and her staff plan to meet with "key players" at the EPA next week to discuss their data on atrazine.

"This is a top priority for us," the staff member said. "We're not going to shy away from this. People have a right to know what is in their drinking water, particularly when the EPA's data suggests that there could be a health concern."

For five years, the EPA has been collecting weekly tests of drinking water in about 150 watersheds, primarily in the Midwest, where farmers spray the herbicide on cornfields and other crops. The agency, however, never acted on the results. Nor had it ever published the data -- until tonight. EPA officials say they have now decided to make the test results available on their Web site.

The Investigative Fund obtained the data this summer through a public records request and published it last week.

In a statement to the I-Fund on Friday night, the EPA said the change in policy is important "because now people can get the data much easier" without going through the "burdensome" process of requesting public records.

The statement from the EPA said: "EPA is taking a hard look at atrazine, including many of the issues you raise. Atrazine is very controversial ... Administrator Jackson has made a commitment to strengthen the Agency's chemical management programs, which she identified as one of her top priorities upon her arrival at the Agency. This includes atrazine. We really want to emphasize that this new team is actively rethinking how to address atrazine."

It’s not only the Senate and EPA that plan to take a look at policy on atrazine. In the House, one congressman is planning to reintroduce legislation to ban the herbicide atrazine in the fall.

Last August, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) introduced a bill (H.R.3399), prohibiting the use, production, sale, importation, or exportation of any pesticide containing atrazine. It died in the health subcommittee last September.

Minh Ta, legislative director for Ellison, said the congressman is concentrating on the financial crisis and health care, but would reintroduce the bill in the fall. "It’s an issue that the Congressman has been concerned about," Ta said. "These articles in the Huffington Post reinforce the need to act quickly."

But Richard Wiles, executive director at the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group, said that it will be difficult to garner broad congressional support for tighter atrazine regulation, let alone a ban. "This is the big kahuna," Wiles said. "Atrazine is one of those pollutants with a fortress of defenders — more so than most other chemicals."

Wiles said that any attempt to restrict atrazine use would likely be blocked by the House Agriculture Committee, who tend to favor the "pro-pesticide farm lobby and pesticide makers." The committee is chaired by Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.)

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Peterson was the top congressional recipient of campaign contributions from the agricultural services industry (which includes Syngenta Corp) in the 2008 and 2006 election cycles. Peterson's office did not respond to a request for comment.

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This story was written by Danielle Ivory.

Lawyers representing the maker of the herbicide atrazine are asking that documents related to the company's lobbying and trade association activities be excluded from a class action lawsuit being filed by some Illinois water utilities.

As the Investigative Fund reported last week, many utilities say they cannot afford expensive carbon filters that would remove atrazine from public drinking water. They are going to court to try to force the Swiss chemical company Syngenta to pay for installing such filtering systems.

In an interview today, the lawyer for Syngenta Crop Protection Inc., Kurt Reeg, said the water districts had requested documents outside of the scope of the lawsuit.

"They're asking what efforts have been made to lobby congress and the EPA with respect to herbicide legislation," Reeg said. "They want to know about all of Syngenta's trade association activities. It's totally out of the realm of this case."

The lawyer for the water utilities, Stephen Tillery, disagreed. "Their main argument is that the EPA has established that atrazine is safe. What the lobbying records will show is that Syngenta and its trade associations were inside the room when the EPA made that decision. They had special access. Environmental groups didn't have that kind of access. The public didn't even have that kind of access."

During yesterday's proceeding in Illinois Circuit Court, Judge Barbara Crowder postponed until Sept. 18 a ruling on a motion from six new Illinois communities to add themselves to the lawsuit. The cities are Carlinville, Fairfield, Flora, Greenville, Hillsboro, and Mattoon.

According to EPA records obtained by the Investigative Fund, weekly tests of the city of Flora's drinking water in 2008 found levels of atrazine above federal safety limits, but the public was never notified.

Atrazine has been studied for its potential link to breast cancer, prostate cancer, and birth defects, and the EPA considers it to be a potential endocrine disruptor. It is banned in the European Union.

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Time to Speak Out Against the Biggest Polluters

Louis Meeks' well water contains methane gas, hydrocarbons, lead and copper, according to the EPA's test results. When he drilled a new water well, it also showed contaminants. The drilling company Encana is supplying Meeks with drinking water.Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublicaThis story was written by ProPublica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten.

Federal environment officials investigating drinking water contamination near the ranching town of Pavillion, Wyo., have found that at least three water wells contain a chemical used in the natural gas drilling process of hydraulic fracturing. Scientists also found traces of other contaminants, including oil, gas or metals, in 11 of 39 wells tested there since March.

The study, which is being conducted under the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program, is the first time the EPA has undertaken its own water analysis in response to complaints of contamination in drilling areas, and it could be pivotal in the national debate over the role of natural gas in America's energy policy.

Abundant gas reserves are being aggressively developed in 31 states, including New York and Pennsylvania. Congress is mulling a bill that aims to protect those water resources from hydraulic fracturing, the process in which fluids and sand are injected under high pressure to break up rock and release gas. But the industry says environmental regulation is unnecessary because it is impossible for fracturing fluids to reach underground water supplies and no such case has ever been proven.

Scientists in Wyoming will continue testing this fall to determine the level of chemicals in the water and exactly where they came from. If they find that the contamination did result from drilling, the placid plains arching up to the Wind River Range would become the first site where fracturing fluids have been scientifically linked to groundwater contamination.

In interviews with ProPublica and at a public meeting this month in Pavillion's community hall officials spoke cautiously about their preliminary findings. They were careful to say they're investigating a broad array of sources for the contamination, including agricultural activity. They said the contaminant causing the most concern -- a compound called 2-butoxyethanol, known as 2-BE  -- can be found in some common household cleaners, not just in fracturing fluids.

But those same EPA officials also said they had found no pesticides -- a signature of agricultural contamination -- and no indication that any industry or activity besides drilling could be to blame. Other than farming, there is no industry in the immediate area.

In Pavillion, a town of about 160 people in the heart of the Wind River Indian Reservation, the gas wells are crowded close together in an ecologically vivid area packed with large wetlands and home to 10 threatened or endangered species. Beneath the ground, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, the earth is a complex system of folded crusts containing at least 30 water-bearing aquifer layers.

EPA officials told residents that some of the substances found in their water may have been poured down a sink drain. But according to EPA investigation documents, most of the water wells were flushed three times before they were tested in order to rid them of anything that wasn't flowing through the aquifer itself. That means the contaminants found in Pavillion would have had to work their way from a sink not only into the well but deep into the aquifer at significant concentrations in order to be detected. An independent drinking water expert with decades of experience in central Wyoming, Doyle Ward, dismissed such an explanations as "less than a one in a million" chance.

Some of the EPA's most cautious scientists are beginning to agree.

"It starts to finger point stronger and stronger to the source being somehow related to the gas development, including, but not necessarily conclusively, hydraulic fracturing itself," said Nathan Wiser, an EPA scientist and hydraulic fracturing expert who oversees enforcement for the underground injection control program under the Safe Drinking Water Act in the Rocky Mountain region. The investigation "could certainly have a focusing effect on a lot of folks in the Pavillion area as a nexus between hydraulic fracturing and water contamination."

Tanks hold natural gas condensate and mark the spot of producing gas wells in the Pavillion field, in Fremont County, Wyo., in the heart of the Wind River Indian Reservation. The Environmental Protection Agency has found chemicals that are used in gas drilling in water wells near this site.Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublicaThe Superfund investigation follows a series of complaints by residents in the Pavillion area, some stemming back 15 years, that their water wells turned sour and reeked of fuel vapors shortly after drilling took place nearby. Several of those residents shared their stories with ProPublica, while other information was found through court and local records. Several years ago a one resident's animals went blind and died after drinking from a well. In two current cases, a resident's well water shows small pooling oil slicks on the surface, and a woman is coping with a mysterious nervous system disorder: Her family blames arsenic and metals found in her water. In two of those cases the Canadian drilling company Encana, which bought most of the area's wells after they were drilled and assumed liability for them, is either supplying fresh drinking water to the residents or has purchased the land. In the third case a drilling company bought by Encana, Tom Brown Inc, had previously reached an out-of-court settlement to provide water filtering.

Though the drilling companies have repeatedly compensated residents with the worst cases of contamination, they have not acknowledged any fault in causing the pollution. An Encana spokesman, Doug Hock, told ProPublica the company wants "to better understand the science and the source of the compounds" found in the water near Pavillion before he would speculate on whether the company was responsible. 

Precise details about the nature and cause of the contamination, as well as the extent of the plume running in the aquifer beneath this region 150 miles east of Jackson Hole, have been difficult for scientists to collect. That's in part because the identity of the chemicals used by the gas industry for drilling and fracturing are protected as trade secrets, and because the EPA, based on an exemption passed under the 2005 Energy Policy Act, does not have authority to investigate the fracturing process under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Using the Superfund program gave the agency extra authority to investigate the Pavillion reports, including the right to subpoena the secret information if it needs to. It also unlocked funding to pay for the research.

EPA officials have repeatedly said that disclosure of the fluids used in fracking -- something that would be required if the bill being debated in Congress were passed -- would enable them to investigate contamination incidents faster, more conclusively and for less money. The current study, which is expected to end next spring, has already cost $130,000.

About 65 people, many in jeans, boots and 10-gallon hats, filled Pavillion's community hall on Aug. 11 to hear the EPA's findings. They were told that a range of contaminants, including arsenic, copper, vanadium and methane gas were found in the water. Many of these substances are found in various fluids used at drilling sites.

Of particular concern were compounds called adamantanes, a natural hydrocarbon found in gas that can be used to fingerprint its origin, and 2-BE, listed as a common fracturing fluid in the EPA's 2004 research report on hydraulic fracturing. That compound, which EPA scientists in Wyoming said they identified with 97 percent certainty, was suspected by some environmental groups in a 2004 drilling-related contamination case in Colorado, also involving Encana. 

EPA investigators explained that because they had no idea what to test for, they were relegated to an exhaustive process of scanning water samples for spikes in unidentified compounds and then running those compounds like fingerprints through a criminal database for matches against a vast library of unregulated and understudied substances. That is how they found the adamantanes and 2-BE.

An Encana representative told the crowd the company was as concerned as they were about the contamination and pledged to help the EPA in its investigation.

Some people seemed confounded by what they were hearing.

"How in god's name can the oil industry dump sh*t in our drinking water and not tell us what it is?" shouted Alan Hofer, who lives near the center of the sites being investigated by the EPA.

"If they'd tell us what they were using then you could go out and test for things and it would make it a lot easier right?" asked Jim Van Dorn, who represents Wyoming Rural Water, a non-profit that advises utilities and private well owners on water management.

"Exactly," said Luke Chavez, the EPA's chief Superfund investigator on the project. "That's our idea too."

Now that the EPA has found a chemical used in fracturing fluids in Pavillion's drinking water, Chavez said the next step in the research is to ask Encana for a list of the chemicals it uses and then do more sampling using that list. (An Encana spokesman told ProPublica the company will supply any information that the EPA requires.) The EPA is also working with area health departments, a toxicologist and a representative from the Centers for Disease Control's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to assess health risks, he said. 

Depending on what they find, the investigation in Wyoming could have broad implications. Before hydraulic fracturing was exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act in 2005, the EPA assessed the process and concluded it did not pose a threat to drinking water. That study, however, did not involve field research or water testing and has been criticized as incomplete. This spring, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson called some of the contamination reports "startling" and told members of Congress that it is time to take another look. The Pavillion investigation, according to Chavez, is just that.

"If there is a problem, maybe we don't have the tools, or the laws, to deal with it," Chavez said. "That's one of the things that could come out of this process."

Reprint courtesy ProPublica.org.

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This story was written by Danielle Ivory.

One of the nation's most widely used herbicides has been found to exceed federal safety limits in drinking water in four states, but water customers have not been told and the Environmental Protection Agency has not published the results.

Records that tracked the amount of the weed-killer atrazine in about 150 watersheds from 2003 through 2008 were obtained by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund under the Freedom of Information Act. An analysis found that yearly average levels of atrazine in drinking water violated the federal standard at least ten times in communities in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas, all states where farmers rely heavily on the herbicide.

In addition, more than 40 water systems in those states showed spikes in atrazine levels that normally would have triggered automatic notification of customers. In none of those cases were residents alerted.

In interviews, EPA officials did not dispute the data but said they do not consider atrazine a health hazard and said they did not believe the agency or state authorities had failed to properly inform the public. "We have concluded that atrazine does not cause adverse effects to humans or the environment," said Steve Bradbury, deputy office director of the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs.

Officials at Syngenta, the Swiss company that manufactures atrazine, declined requests for interviews about the testing results. In a statement on its Web site, the company says that atrazine "poses no threat to the safety of our drinking water supplies. In 2008, none of the 122 Community Water Systems monitored in 10 states exceeded the federal standards set for atrazine in drinking water or raw water."

Atrazine has become an issue of concern for environmentalists and consumer groups as the use of the herbicide has soared in the United States over the past few decades. Some scientists who have studied atrazine said the information about its higher levels in drinking water should be made public.

For more background on the story of atrazine, watch our video: How Safe Is Atrazine?

"This is an issue of the EPA not being forthright about what they know," said Robert Denver, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of Michigan who has served on two of the EPA's scientific advisory panels on atrazine.

"It is the responsibility of the EPA and Syngenta to inform the public of accurate levels of atrazine in their drinking water," said Jason Rohr, a specialist in ecotoxicology at the University of South Florida who studies the effects of atrazine in animals, and who served on the EPA's atrazine panel this past spring.

Atrazine is sprayed on cornfields and other major crops during the summer months and can run off into rivers and streams that supply drinking water. It is also commonly used on golf courses.

Studies of atrazine's potential links to prostate and breast cancer have been inconclusive. Based on the recommendations of its scientific advisory panels in 2000 and 2003, the EPA has listed atrazine as "not likely" to be a carcinogen but does officially consider it to be a potential hormone disruptor – a risk factor explored by researchers testing animals.

In recent years atrazine has been the subject of intensive debate among scientists about its effects on the reproductive systems of frogs and other vertebrate animals. In some studies, male frogs that were exposed to high levels of atrazine have been documented to grow eggs.

In 2004, the European Union banned atrazine because it was consistently showing up in drinking water and health officials, aware of ongoing studies, said they could not find sufficient evidence the chemical was safe.

State regulators in the U.S. test their local water systems for atrazine a maximum of four times a year, under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. In 2003, the EPA again approved atrazine for use in the United States but it made some demands of Syngenta for the re-registration.

The EPA and Syngenta negotiated a deal for more extensive monitoring of about 150 vulnerable watersheds. Under that arrangement, the company pays for weekly monitoring and sends the results to the EPA, as well as to the local water companies and most state regulators.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy organization, is expected to release a report on Monday that fully analyzes a smaller set of Syngenta's weekly testing results -- from 2003 through 2006 -- and reaches conclusions similar to the Investigative Fund's analysis of all five years of data. The group supplied an advance copy of its report to The New York Times, which today published an article about the tests and other safety questions about atrazine.

Misleading Water Bills

The EPA plans to revisit its rules for atrazine in 2011. Presently the agency requires water systems to notify their customers if the quarterly state tests average higher than 3 parts per billion (ppb) annually. According to the EPA data obtained by the Investigative Fund, cities in four states — Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas — had yearly averages of atrazine violating that standard from 2003 to 2008.

In addition, more than 40 water systems in those states showed spikes of atrazine over 12 ppb – which if found in the state quarterly tests would have required the water system to notify the public within 30 days.

In none of those cases were residents notified of the high levels. In fact, the brochures in their water bills – reviewed for this report -- contained misleading numbers based on the state testing.

For example, based on the quarterly tests, residents of Mt. Olive, Ill., were told that the highest level of atrazine in their drinking water last year was 2 ppb. However, the EPA data shows a spike in June of 16.47 ppb. The same year, residents of McClure, Ohio, were told that the highest level of atrazine in their drinking water was 3.4 ppb. The EPA data shows a spike in June 2008 of more than ten times that amount — 33.83 ppb.

Both of these cities' water utilities received the weekly EPA data directly from Syngenta, but did not report it. Legally, they didn't have to. The drinking water act only requires cities to report data collected by the state. State tests are performed infrequently, so they are vulnerable to missing the chemical spikes that consistently occur around the time the weed-killer is being applied. With weekly tests, such as those ordered by the EPA, it is all but impossible to miss these spikes.

Asked why the results of the weekly tests had not been published, the EPA's Bradbury said "no data is withheld from the public." Bradbury said the information has been posted on the agency's electronic public docket. In fact, the weekly test results are one of the only items on the docket that are not posted on the site.

Instead they are listed as available only through the Freedom of Information Act.

In an on-camera interview with the Investigative Fund in June, Bradbury also said that the weekly monitoring had found no spikes in any watershed over 3 ppb. "It's these spikes that we're focusing on," he said. "There have been no exceedances." In fact, the EPA's data recorded more than 130 spikes over 3 ppb during 2008 alone — not only in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Kansas, but also in Missouri, Louisiana, and Texas. Bradbury declined to elaborate on the apparent contradiction.

The EPA does not consider one-time spikes of atrazine to be dangerous, but several peer-reviewed scientific studies suggest that the chemical may be harmful, particularly to developing fetuses, in doses as low as 0.1 ppb. One study, published this year in the medical journal Acta Paediatrica, found that birth defect rates in the United States were highest for women who conceived during months when atrazine levels were spiking.

"If you happen to become pregnant in June, you care about the levels [of atrazine] in June, not in January," said Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at the University of Rochester who has studied atrazine's effect on semen quality and development.

"For pregnant women, you have a critical period of a couple of weeks to a couple of months," Swan said. "If you have a peak exposure in that period, that's what's relevant to the pregnancy."

"The annual average might be relevant for [measuring the risk of] cancer, but it's obviously not okay if they [the EPA] care about regulating for reproductive toxicity," she said.

Had the EPA, the state or the local water companies made the weekly testing results public, residents could have made different choices about their water consumption, such as using inexpensive household carbon water filters or bottled water.

Asked about the discrepancies between the state and weekly EPA data, an EPA spokeswoman, Deb Berlin, said in an e-mail, "Consumers need accurate information to make health decisions for themselves and their families. EPA and state authorities would be interested in knowing about any situation where a public water system is not reporting accurate information to their customers as required by the Safe Drinking Water Act."

‘I'd Do More Testing'

Under the terms of its 2003 agreement with the EPA, Syngenta for the past five years has been monitoring water weekly in 10 states, with special emphasis on Illinois, Ohio, and Kansas.

This is how the EPA's testing program generally works: Syngenta sends boxes containing two tubes to about 150 water utilities. During the summer growing season when atrazine levels are likely to spike, water operators at these utilities take samples on a weekly basis. Every week, they fill one test tube with river water and one test tube with drinking water. They ship these samples to Syngenta labs, where the company analyzes them. Syngenta then reports the data to the EPA, as well as to the water utilities themselves and the state regulators.

Testing at the state level is much more modest. Up to four times a year, but as infrequently as once a year, water utilities ship one test tube filled with drinking water to their state regulator. The state analyzes the water and reports the data back to the water utility. This limited data is reported to the public, as required by federal right-to-know laws.

There are vast discrepancies between the two data sets. The Huffington Post Investigative Fund contacted water plant operators to see if they had noticed.

Some local water officials said they provided weekly samples to Syngenta but did not realize the company was acting under a requirement from the EPA intended to supply more data as a safeguard for their drinking water. They indicated they paid little attention to the results of the tests.

Robert Leonhardt, the water plant manager in Mt. Olive, Ill., received the weekly EPA data but said he was not aware of any of the spikes during the last five years, including a high reading of 16.47 ppb. He said the weekly testing was not a central part of his work. "This is a side thing," he said.

Steve Kubler, the water plant manager in Chanute, Kan., initially said of the state and weekly tests: "The numbers match up pretty well. I've never noticed a discrepancy." He added, "If I did, I'd do more testing."

According to that data, his town of Chanute recorded one reading of 6.51 ppb last year. The city reported a high of 1.4 ppb to the public. Asked about the numbers, Kubler said, "Look, what I do with Syngenta — it's in excess of what I have to do. I don't know even know why they're testing."

In Illinois, Roger Selburg of the state's Environmental Protection Agency said that he looks at the weekly data. But he said he does not use it to determine violations, nor does he report any of it to the public, because he does not know if the data are reliable or accurate. "We are only required to report the state data," he said.

Other water officials expressed some surprise and dismay about the levels of atrazine that showed up in the weekly tests. Osawatomie, Kan., showed a spike of 8.70 ppb in May 2008, although the city reported to the public a high of 0.89 ppb for the year. "That's a pretty good spike," said Marty Springer, water plant manager at Osawatomie's plant. "And no one knows about it."

McClure, Ohio, showed a spike of 33.83 ppb in June 2008, but the town told its residents the highest level that year was 3.4 ppb. "If we had been using Syngenta's data, obviously we would have hit the maximum contaminant level," said Christopher Diem, superintendent at McClure's water utility.

In Baxter Springs, Kan., atrazine spiked above 11 ppb in May 2008 while the town told its residents the highest level during the year was 1.3 pbb.

"We may have passed the quarterly tests for the state, but we're not passing them weekly or daily," said Stan Schafer, a water plant operator in Baxter Springs. "Somebody's got to do something," he said. "I live here. I drink the water. My parents drink the water. My kids drink the water. I just try to keep it clean."

Schafer said he regularly receives atrazine testing data from Syngenta, along with the results from the state, but he doesn't think he is allowed to report it to the public.

That fits with the impression that Kansas state health officials gave Lloyd Littrell, director of utilities in Beloit, about the weekly test results from Syngenta.

"I kept track of those numbers for a couple of years, but I stopped," Littrell said. "The state of Kansas would not let us report the results. We had several conversations about it. They said it wasn't certified by the state or something. I stopped trying. If we can't use it, what's the point of me looking at it?"

According to the EPA data, atrazine spiked above 20 ppb in May 2008, but Beloit reported a high of 2 ppb to the public.

"It concerns me," Littrell said. "If it's an actual health hazard and they know and the EPA knows it's getting in water — I can't believe they're not doing anything about it."

--

See also: Huffington Post Investigative Fund also obtained access to the EPA's data on atrazine levels for about 150 community watersheds in ten states from 2003 to 2008.

Reprinted courtesy the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. The article was first posted here.

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Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where recently our city made a splash when our newly minted sewage system -- which had been roundly celebrated for making the harbour swimmable for the first time in years -- failed. Now we're back to flushing it all into the ocean. So when it came time to clean my brushes the other day after painting our front door, I hesitated at the thought of using turpentine, knowing it would end up in the harbour. Is there a greener alternative?

Ceebie
Halifax, N.S.

A. Dearest Ceebie,

Oh my heavens yes. That turpentine should never make its way to the Halifax harbor. Turpentine, and all solvents, must be treated as household hazardous waste no matter where you live (the Halifax Hazardous Waste Depot is on Horseshoe Lake Drive, behind the Materials Recycling Facility). For your health, you might also look in to some less-toxic solvents next time you use oil paint; they will also need to go to HHW.

Don't let your painting habits give your local water supply the blues.Turpentine is a distillate of pine and other plant resins. It is flammable, volatile, and highly useful in thinning oil paint, cleaning brushes, and zillions of other applications. Unfortunately any substantial contact with turpentine is bad for us and the little animals in our biosphere. In one not very surprising experiment, mice painted with turpentine developed tumors. On the lesser end, it irritates our mucus membranes; on the significant end, eating it can result in tachycardia.

Citrus solvents with the active citrus-peel-derived ingredient d-Limonene have recently emerged as a less-toxic alternative to turpentine. These are sometimes actually made of orange peels, as a byproduct of juice production (see this interesting flow chart). Another source intimated that some citrus solvent is a byproduct of corn ethanol production, with citrus scent added. Either way, they will clean oily brushes and hands, but I don't think you can make your own at home.

It's not clear to me how safe d-Limonene is, as there seems to be a dearth of conclusive studies on the matter. It certainly is a mucus membrane irritant, and is flammable and needs to be handled with care. It has not been linked with tumors or tachycardia, so we happily will replace our turpentine and other confirmed higher-toxicity solvents with it. I also found a variety of other even less-toxic brush cleaners by searching online environmental home stores: here's a promising one.

No solvent should go down a household drain, whether that drain leads to Lake Washington or the Atlantic Ocean. When you need to use a solvent to clean brushes, find a metal can and dedicate it as the dirty solvent can. Soak and rinse the brushes in that can, then use rags to wipe off residue. You might also need a second can of cleaner solvent, then more wiping, then a little water if necessary. You can filter the residue out of the dirty solvent can, to render the solvent usable in future. Both cans and all rags should either be saved against future solvent needs, or taken to HHW.  If saved, the cans should be stored in a garage or other uninhabited building, not in a home. For more tips, see my earlier column on disposing of paint.

Safety first.

Turpsely,
Umbra

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Turn your turkey carcass into a spectacular gumbo

The city of Kingston, Tenn. plans to hold its annual July 4 "Smokin' the Water" celebration tomorrow at a public park near Watts Bar Reservoir. The event is expected to draw as many as 25,000 people with festivities including raft races, boating and swimming.

But the park is only a short distance downstream from the site of the massive coal ash spill from the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston power plant -- and test results released this week show dangerous levels of heavy metal contamination that could endanger the health of people who come in contact with the water. (Click here for a Google Earth image showing the proximity of the plant, address above and to the left, and the park, below and to the right.)

Among the toxic contaminants found at levels exceeding basic water safety standards were antimony, arsenic, barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium and thallium -- metals that have been linked to cancer and other health problems. For details on the chemicals' health effects, visit the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry's ToxFAQs page.

The tests were conducted by consultants hired by an environmental law firm that's suing TVA over last December's disaster, which released a billion gallons of toxic coal ash into a nearby community and waterways. The attorneys released the results to regulatory authorities this week. A June 30 letter sent by the firm to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation stated:

Although these samples have been taken for litigation purposes, we believe that the agencies with the responsibility to protect public health and the environment should have the results in order to make informed decisions about protecting downstream water users, particularly given the upcoming July 4th weekend, which will surely include significant public contact with the waterways as part of the holiday festivities and recreation.

The samples were taken recently by qualified consultants using methods approved by EPA and TDEC and analyzed by a certified in-state laboratory. To view the law firm's water testing data, click here. For the United Mountain Defense press release about the findings, which includes an excerpt of the law firm's letter to environmental regulators, click here.

Last month, EPA, TDEC and TVA jointly issued a recreational advisory for upper sections of the Watts Bar Reservoir. But the law firm warns that its data show unsafe concentrations of metals much further downstream than stated in the advisory. In fact, it found high levels of arsenic, lead and mercury 27 miles into the reservoir.

To date, TVA has spent more than $100 million on the cleanup of the Dec. 22, 2008 ash spill. The final cost of the project -- excluding fines and litigation -- is estimated at as much as $975 million.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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"How do we make this little planet of ours a big star?" asks actress Cameron Diaz in the cover story of Marie Claire's July issue. "The planet needs a publicist."

And this bubbly blonde is just the gal for the job. She's long been an environmental activist -- running around with an MTV video crew for her 2005 show Trippin', which took her to exotic locales all over the world -- but it wasn't until she attended the TED conference recently that she really felt the push to do something a bit more serious.

These days, she's doing a lot of press for her new film My Sister's Keeper, but she also happens to be the star of a much smaller production. She's been filming a documentary about our relationship with the planet, traveling to less-than-exotic locales across the country to talk to regular folk about the toxins in their air and water -- and what they're willing to do about it.

Check out this short video about her journey:

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It’s Getting Ha! in Here: Maria Bamford

Climate Citizen: Mary Stuart Masterson

Picture in your mind the Niger River Delta. What do you think of? Water, mangrove trees, fishing boats?

Wrong.

Try brown sludge-filled waterways flanked by constantly flaring gas stacks. Welcome to Oporoza, Nigeria -- the place where 10 percent of U.S. oil imports originates.

When filmmaker Sandy Cioffi traveled to Oporoza in 2006 to make a documentary about a community library, she did not expect to return with Sweet Crude, a film that mentions AK-47s more than books. But at the library's opening ceremony, a student group (read: political activist group) protested, objecting to Chevron's role in funding the library and calling for local resource control. At that point, Cioffi started to see a larger story about the oil industry's exploitation of Nigeria.

In Sweet Crude, we see the polluted rivers, the smoggy skies, the assassinated political leaders, the depressed villagers, the corrupt government leaders, the corrupt oil executives, the violent resistance fighters, the non-violent activists, the academic experts, the inept Western reporters, and even the arrested (yes, arrested) filmmaker herself. And if you're starting to feel like that's a lot of drama for a 100-minute movie, you're right.

Sweet Crude is long. And it's unwieldy. Cioffi starts with a discussion with local political leaders on the environmental devastation of the delta region, follows with a primer on Nigerian history, then debates violent vs. non-violent resistance, and ends with an indictment of the Western media's neglect of the Niger River Delta story. In each instance, she presents an elegant case, but she could have made four documentaries here, not one. Jamming all that material into one long film does a disservice to the bigger story.

However, it's hard to criticize Cioffi because her work provides an excellent expose of the downside of being a petro-state. The narrative of oil production causing misery for developing nations is not new, but watching someone in his mid-20s -- who, by the way, speaks perfect English and is dressed in Western clothes just like yours -- tell you that the life expectancy of his region has fallen from 60 to 40 years in just the last decade -- that's chilling.

What Cioffi does in Sweet Crude that's so memorable is simply to bring the human element of oil exploitation to the big screen. Westerners may be familiar with stories of gas price spikes caused by Nigerian rebel attacks, but rarely do we see the faces of the people behind the attacks or consider their rationale for engaging in such warfare. Considering the U.S. alone purchases 48 percent of the oil that Nigeria produces, it's time we start to face, and see the faces of, the consequences of our oil habit.

Watch it: Sweet Crude is showing at the Seattle International Film Festival on June 13. Check the SIFF schedule for details.

For readers outside of Seattle, check the Sweet Crude website for details on other screenings.

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Climate Citizen: Mary Stuart Masterson

Congressional watchdog issues update on coal ash regulation efforts

A proposal to mine uranium in south-central Virginia advanced this week when a key state body approved a study of the matter. The targeted site is in Virginia's Pittsylvania County just north of the city of Danville and close to the border with North Carolina's Rockingham and Caswell counties.

A subcommittee of the Virginia Commission on Coal and Energy OK'd the study yesterday after deciding on exactly what issues should be examined, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:

Some opponents asked the panel to vote against the study, hoping that would kill the mining proposal.

But state Sen. John Watkins, R-Powhatan, a member of the subcommittee, said approval of the study did not mean approval of mining in Pittsylvania.

"That decision is a long way down the road," Watkins said.

The panel will look at mining's effects on people's health and ecosystems, identify pollution issues and review current mining regulations. But it denied a request by Del. Watkins M. Abbitt Jr. (I-Appomattox) to consider how water pollution specifically might be prevented. The subcommittee's chair, Del. Lee R. Ware Jr. (R-Powhatan) argued that the study already included that issue.

The study, which will be conducted by the U.S. National Research Council, is expected to cost $1.5 million and last about 18 months. It remains unclear how the work will be funded, according to the paper.

As Facing South reported previously, Virginia has banned uranium mining for the past 25 years. Virginia Uranium -- a privately-held company formed several years ago by the owners of the land where the uranium was found -- has been pressing to get the ban lifted. To that end, Virginia Uranium contributed almost $30,000 to state lawmakers last year alone.

The Pittsylvania County site is believed to hold the largest undeveloped uranium deposit in the United States and the seventh-largest in the world. It holds an estimated 60,000 tons -- enough uranium to power all the commercial nuclear plants in the country for about two years. The company estimates its value at about $10 billion.

While the company has maintained that the uranium could be mined safety, uranium mining has a history of causing serious environmental health problems, having been linked to chromosome abnormalities, birth defects and cancer in communities from Texas to Germany.

Uranium mining also poses a serious threat to drinking water. In 1979, for example, a dam holding uranium mining waste at a New Mexico facility owned by the Virginia-based United Nuclear Corp. burst, sending more than 1,100 tons of toxic discards and 90 million gallons of contaminated water into the Rio Puerco. Once an important drinking water source for nearby Navajo communities, the river remains dangerously contaminated today.

Officials in Virginia Beach are among those opposing the uranium mining plans. They have noted that a tropical storm or hurricane could breach the mine's waste impoundment and pollute downstream water bodies including Lake Gaston, the city's drinking-water source.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South)

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The failure of governments in both rich and poor countries to prioritize basic sanitation is killing thousands of children every day, according to two reports released today by international aid agencies WaterAid and PATH. And a third report released yesterday suggests that the global economic crisis may increase the death rate, at least in Africa.

Public toilets in the developing world are fairly uncommon. Those that are available often fall into disrepair and disuse. Above, one of the glitzier example of public plumbing in the slums of Delhi, India.Kevin FergusonAll three reports offered this constructive advice: Promote access to drinking water, sanitation and hygiene together as part of national health care agendas. "It's just unfathomable that so little development aid is going to stop this enormous global killer," says John Sauer, communications director for Water Advocates, a nonprofit group that works with PATH and WaterAid. "There's no excuse not to prioritize funding for very simple, low-cost interventions. This is solvable."

The World Health Organization estimates that 28 percent of the 9.7 million children who die before the age of 5 every year do so because of poor sanitation and unsafe water. Ironically, that death rate may climb because "the recent and positive focus on ... the delivery of health services" does not included preventative measures, such as providing proper sanitation, states the WaterAid report.

The WaterAid report does not call for diarrhea-prevention and treatment to be given preference over other diseases, just that it be included in the mix.

Likewise, the PATH report, titled Diarrheal Disease: Solutions to Defeat a Global Killer, notes that over the last decade, momentum has slowed, with declines in research and funding commitments and competing global health priorities. "The perceived lack of urgency and taboo nature of the illness may have also contributed to the current low level of awareness surrounding the issue," states the PATH report.

Diarrhea, linked directly to unclean water and poor sanitation, is the second-biggest killer of young children, after acute respiratory infections, according to the WHO. That makes diarrhea, causing 17 percent of these deaths, more deadly than measles, malaria and HIV/AIDS combined, says WHO. When acute respiratory infections are factored in -- hand washing with soap and clean water greatly reduces the incidence of respiratory infections, according to a 2005 report published in The Lancet -- the mortality rate climbs to about 40 percent.

The reports did offer some good news. Some countries have learned to coordinate water and sanitation programs, says the WaterAid report: "Senegal is an example of a country that has got it right. The distribution of tasks and responsibilities between these structures was decided by an inter-ministerial decree, and the system is functioning well." Ethiopia and Uganda have made some progress, as well, says the report.

Other evidence backs up these findings. For example, in Uganda, a six-month program to improve drinking water in the Soroti District found that households that obtained access to clean drinking water were more likely to improve their sanitation and hygiene practices as well. The Safe Drinking Water for Uganda (SDWU) pilot project, funded by Proctor and Gamble (P&G), and implemented by Population Services International and Africare from December 2007 through May 2008, "had a spill-over effect on other non-direct beneficiaries, who also adopted the hygiene practices promoted by the project," according to Ruth Mufute, a regional director with Africare and author of the report. The project's goal was to reduce the incidence of waterborne diseases among 1,500 persons by promoting the use of P&G's PuR water disinfectant and better hygiene. However, lack of funding to support such projects means that residents typically revert to old habits, such as drinking from tainted wells, she says.

The fallout from the global financial crisis poses an additional impediment to expanding access to clean water, according to a report issued by AfricanEconomicOutlook.org, a coalition of intergovernmental agencies. The continent's economic outlook has turned "decisively negative," it said. "Growth in emerging economies is also expected to slow dramatically," states the report. Economic growth in Africa is expected to be only 2.8 per cent in 2009, less than half of the 5.7 percent estimated for 2008.

The economic downturn could well impact childhood health. In central Africa, childhood mortality increased by 13 percent from 1991 to 2007. However, some countries with initially high mortality rates made remarkable progress in reducing childhood mortality, the report states. "A number of countries, even poor ones, have displayed noteworthy performances (Eritrea, Malawi and Namibia), raising the possibility that progress is possible with political will, adequate resources and targeted strategies," states the report, which links poverty, poor sanitation and high rates of childhood mortality.

--

What WaterAid suggests to reduce childhood deaths:

1. All national health plans should confirm clear links between country health information systems, particularly disease prevalence data, and the process of planning and budgeting.

2. All countries should have a mechanism for inter-ministry coordination on reducing child mortality, with a joint agenda to deliver relevant strategies.

3. All national health plans should contain an adequate strategy for environmental health.

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

Should what we put down our sewers ultimately wind up back on our plates?Marc Samsom via Flickr

Urine, feces, menstrual blood, hair, fingernails, vomit, dead skin cells. Industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, soaps, shampoos, solvents, pesticides, household cleansers, hospital waste.

Sewage sludge, the viscous brown gunk left over when wastewater is treated, is more than just poop: it's an odiferous smoothie of everything we pour down the drain. There are pathogens; there are heavy metals. PCBs, dioxins, DDT, asbestos, polio, parasitic worms, radioactive material -- all have been found in sludge. Despite pretreatment programs that prevent some of the most noxious stuff from entering the public sewers, sludge can include so many toxins that the Clean Water Act lists it as a "pollutant."  

So it's a little surprising where it ends up: Today more than half of America's sewage sludge is spread on land as fertilizer.

Granted, this isn't a new idea. For most of human history, our crap has ended up back on land -- and it wasn't until the past century, which brought flush toilets and public sewers to mainstream America, that using excrement as fertilizer started sounding at all strange. Sure, this system was driven partially by convenience, but it also made ecological sense: our urine and feces contain the same nutrients that plants need. Spreading it on land closes the nutrient loop; it avoids the need for chemical fertilizers. Eat, shit, fertilize, and eat again. For thousands of years, this arrangement worked just fine.

Or, rather, almost fine. As human populations grew and concentrated, health problems like cholera outbreaks inspired a push for flush toilets and public sewer systems. This led to huge improvements in public health, but resulted in a new problem: sewers mixed domestic sewage with industrial waste and spewed it untreated into rivers and lakes. The next step was sewage treatment plants, which separated liquids from solids, but in solving one issue they created yet another: the cleaner they made the water, the dirtier the leftover sludge. Adding to the challenge, as the population of the United States grew, so did the amount of sludge: we're currently generating more than 7 million dry tons a year and counting -- and we have no intention of cutting back.

Meanwhile, as a mycelium of sewer pipes spreads underneath our cities to whisk our waste away from us, Americans became increasingly squeamish about dealing with excrement. We're now a nation of "fecaphobes," obsessed with toilet humor but unaware and uninterested in what happens to our actual crap. We don't want to think about it; we don't want to deal with it. We want to flush the toilet and forget.

**

Sludge from Los Angeles is dumped at Green Acres, a Los Angeles-owned farm in Kern County, California.Courtesy Bakersfield CalifornianThe Office of Water doesn't have the privilege of forgetting about sludge -- it's the Environmental Protection Agency department responsible for dealing with America's sewage. In the 1990s its job got even harder: sewers and wastewater treatment facilities mandated by the 1972 Clean Water Act more than doubled the amount of sludge America produced each year, and the 1988 Ocean Dumping Act eliminated the option of getting rid of it at sea. The OW had been encouraging land application on a limited scale since the 1970s.  Now, faced with limited options and a never-ending supply, it evaluated its remaining possibilities -- landfilling, incineration, or land application -- and settled on the cheapest option available: promoting sludge as fertilizer.

To make this palatable to the American people -- or, at least, to prevent them from thinking about it too hard -- the word "sludge" had to go. So the sewage industry's main trade and lobbying organization, the Water Environment Federation, stepped in. (WEF and OW often work closely together.) It organized a "Name Change Taskforce" and sponsored a contest to come up with a different term for sludge. Rebranding was an area in which WEF had experience -- originally founded in 1928 as the brown-sounding "Federation of Sewage Works Associations," it had recently gone through its fourth name change, and had begun referring to its members, who included sewage plant operators and waste management corporations, as "water quality professionals."

The renaming contest received over 250 entries, many of which suggested that even water quality professionals still enjoy a good poop joke. Submissions included "bioslurp," "black gold," "sca-doo," "hu-doo," "geoslime," and "the end product"; one person proposed rebranding sludge as "R.O.S.E." ("Recycling Of Solids Environmentally"). Critics asked whether a rose by any other name would still smell as bad, and in 1991 WEF settled on "biosolids," a term that Sheldon Rampton, co-author of Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, suggests "must have been chosen precisely because it evokes absolutely nothing in the minds of people who hear it."

Of course, from the wastewater treatment industry's perspective, that was the point: they didn't want any visuals. Armed with an empty word, their next goal was to make "biosolid" suggest something positive. So in 1992, OW and WEF joined in a "cooperative agreement" called the Biosolids National Public Acceptance Campaign and hired a public relations and lobbying firm called Powell Tate to produce a report on how to improve the public image of sludge.

The resulting campaign -- "Biosolids 2000" -- didn't answer important questions, like why people living near biosolids application sites complained of health problems, or why current federal legislation still permits every business, institution and industry in the country to dump 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of untreated hazardous waste into the sewer system each month, no reporting required. It also failed to prevent 2000 and 2002 reports from EPA's own Office of Inspector General from stating that "EPA cannot assure the public that current land application practices are protective of human health and the environment."

And yet partially because of OW and WEF's PR efforts, partially because of our willful ignorance, the effort to rebrand sludge as biosolids has largely been successful. Although some is still incinerated or buried in landfills, today more than 50 percent of America's sewage sludge is spread on land.

***

Biosolid digesters at the Hyperion Treatment Plant in Los Angeles.Courtesy Brian RaimondiDiane Gilbert, a spokesperson for biosolids at the Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant in Los Angeles, is a water quality professional of the sort endorsed by the Powell Tate report. Her enthusiasm seems genuine, but like other biosolids spokespeople I interviewed, she is also a master at following the guidelines articulated in biosolids media training guides. [Sample tip: "If the reporter asks rapid fire (multiple questions), choose the easiest."]

Enthusiastic and bubbly, Gilbert grew up in Louisiana and has been at Hyperion since 1987. But Gilbert's involvement with sewage sludge started even earlier; with a father who worked at a wastewater treatment plant and used sludge to fertilize the family's garden, she considers herself a poster child for land application. "I've been eating food fertilized with biosolids for as long as I can remember," she told me, after I'd returned from a tour of the plant. (Tip: "Encourage the reporter to meet you at a working location.") "So if anyone should be affected by biosolids, it should clearly be me."

I'd come to Hyperion because I wanted to learn more about this mysterious brown substance -- how it was made, how it was monitored, and how worried we should be. Eager to dispel my concerns about land application, Gilbert had originally wanted to take me to Green Acres, the 5,000-acre city-owned farm just outside of Bakersfield, where Los Angeles ships most of its treated sludge to grow various grass crops to be fed to dairy cows. (Tip: "Location visuals help enhance and give credibility to your message.")

Unfortunately, lawyers got in the way. Green Acres is in Kern County, and residents there don't like the idea of being the recipients of Los Angeles' crap. So, like an increasing number of communities across America, Kern County passed a ban on the land application of sewage sludge. Los Angeles responded by suing the county, and since the lawsuit is still pending, lawyers have gotten cagey about letting reporters visit the farm.

Instead Gilbert and I grabbed sandwiches and headed for a darkened conference room at Hyperion, where Gilbert popped in a promotional movie about Green Acres. With a synthesized soundtrack reminiscent of the theme song for Doogie Howser, M.D., the movie opened with a picture of a field of wheat, its title superimposed in yellow bubbly script.

"Imagine turning arid soil that can only grow tumbleweeds and sage brush into nutrient-rich soil that can grow crops for livestock," said a male narrator, blessed with the voice of a 1950s public service announcer. "Imagine doing this without saturating the soil with chemicals."

He continued, smoothly substituting euphemisms for That Which Must Not Be Named: "Now imagine tons of treated primarily organic material from wastewater treatment plants being used to change the soil through its own nitrogen, phosphate, phosphorous and other natural ingredients."

The movie was titled, appropriately enough, "Imagine." But instead of being a paean for peace, it invited me to imagine a world in which all of our "beneficial," "nutrient-rich" biosolids were put to use as fertilizer -- and followed a script that could have come directly from the Powell Tate report. I took a bite of my sandwich as the narrator dispelled concerns about using sewage sludge as a soil amendment. "There will always be skeptics who question the use of biosolids," he announced, "just like there were skeptics who didn't believe that people could fly -- until the Wright Brothers proved them wrong."

***

Among many others, these skeptics include two unrelated Georgia dairy farmers, Andy McElmurray and Bill Boyce. Starting in 1979 and 1986 respectively, both began using free sludge as fertilizer on their farms, a practice the city of Augusta assured them was safe. But starting in the 1990s, problems arose: hundreds of the men's cows died, McElmurray discovered his land was contaminated with aluminum, which he attributed to the sludge, and a 1999 test found that milk from some of Boyce's surviving cows contained thallium -- an element once used as rat poison -- at 120 times the concentration EPA allows in drinking water.

Both farmers filed lawsuits against the city and in March 2008, U.S. District Judge Anthony Alaimo issued a 45-page ruling on one of McElmurray's lawsuits that found that "senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash scientific dissent, and any questioning of the EPA's biosolids program."

And that's just the cows. Today, 16 years after the official federal sludge rules came into effect in 1993, EPA still doesn't have a system in place to monitor or investigate sludge-related health complaints. But in 2002, a team of researchers produced the first peer-reviewed article (whose findings were recently backed up in a separate study) to both document health complaints from people who'd been exposed to sludge and explain how this exposure might have made them sick.

The long list of health problems reported by the study's 48 participants includes asthma, fevers, nausea, vomiting, skin rashes, coughs, burning eyes and throats, sinusitis, and diarrhea. Two subjects died from Staphylococcus aureus infections acquired shortly after being exposed to freshly applied biosolids. (Interestingly, while EPA's Office of Water -- the department responsible for writing the sludge rules -- denies that these deaths were at all connected to biosolids exposure, EPA's office of Research and Development approved the paper for publication and supported its conclusions.) When the researchers compared their subjects' rate of staph infections to that of hospital patients, considered "a recognized risk group for S. Aureus," the infection rate of the study's subjects was approximately 25 times higher.

According to EPA paperwork, the lead author of this study, David Lewis, Ph.D., resigned from EPA in 2003.  Lewis, however, says he was essentially fired for speaking out on sludge -- and his former lab director backs him up. She wrote in a 2008 statement that Lewis's termination was "involuntary" and that Lewis "was an excellent researcher and an asset to EPA science."

Motivated by stories like these, several passionate groups -- like Citizens for Sludge-Free Land, Sludge Victims and Riles (Resource Institute for Low Entropy Systems) -- have dedicated themselves to fighting the land application of sludge. They run websites; they lobby politicians to try to change the rules. But as for the rest of Americans, the subject of sludge is still not something we dwell on.

Unfortunately, as arguments and lawsuits against land application pile up -- not to mention the sludge itself -- our days of blissful ignorance might be limited. I'd come to Hyperion not just because it had occurred to me that we should be thinking about what happens to our sewage, but because I could see a day in the not-so-distant future when we'd be forced to.

Given the inconsistency and toxicity of the ingredients in sludge, the loopholes in its regulations and the mounting criticisms against its use, I kept reaching the same conclusion: despite the Office of Water's insistence on the safety of spreading sludge on land, we should be looking for alternatives. The United States will never stop producing shit. But there must be a better way to deal with it.

Tomorrow: Businesses try to figure out how to turn poop into gold.

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Capturing the massive social benefits of fuel efficiency requires regulation

Biosolids are regulated under what's known colloquially (to those who speak colloquially about sewage) as the 503 Sludge Rule, which came into effect in 1993. Technically titled "40 CFR 503 -- Standards for the Use and Disposal of Sewage Sludge," it's complicated enough that EPA came out with a "Plain English" guide to help make sense of the rule's requirements and details.

It's not light reading, so here are the basics: The most recent version of the 503 rule regulates seven heavy metals in sludge. It also divides biosolids into two categories for land application, Class A and Class B, based on the number of detectable pathogens that they're allowed to contain.

For biosolids to qualify as Class A, they have to be treated with a method that's been shown to "persistently reduce pathogens in biosolids," according to USDA agronomist Rufus Chaney, like composting or heat drying. The resulting material must contain non-detectable levels of fecal coliform or salmonella, enteric viruses and helminth ova (i.e. parasitic worms) according to EPA-specified testing methods. 

Class B biosolids must also be treated to reduce pathogens, but the only pathogen reduction requirement is for fecal coliform.

To prove they qualify as Class A or Class B, biosolids can either be tested directly for pathogens, or the sewage plants can demonstrate that they've used a treatment process which has been proven to achieve the required level of reduction.

Class A biosolids -- which can be created through methods like heat drying and composting -- can be used on most land without any restrictions (hence Milorganite); Class B biosolids have regulations about where and how they can be used, including waiting periods before crops can be harvested for human consumption.

EPA doesn't have any testing requirements for other potential contaminants like synthetic chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, pharmaceuticals, pathogens or metals not listed in the 503 guidelines, or radioactive material (which can be excreted in the urine and feces of people going through radiation therapy). 

Chaney, a senior researcher at the Agricultural Research Service who is supportive of land application, claims that there's no need to test for additional substances because "biosolids have not been found to contain levels of these materials which cause risk to humans or the environment." He also commented in a separate message that "there has been no evidence of infection from Class B biosolids used according to EPA regulations, and certainly none from Class A biosolids products" -- a statement that anti-sludge advocates criticize. As Caroline Snyder, founder of Citizens for Sludge Free Land, put it to me in an email, "Since EPA and Chaney and the rest have bent over backwards NOT to document adverse effects, have worked to COVER up adverse effects, [and] used fraudulent data in these cover-ups, it is not surprising that there is little documented evidence."

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This article was written by ProPublica's Abrahm Lustgarten.

Pat Farnelli, top left, Ronald Carter, bottom left, Richard Seymour, top right, and Norma Fiorentino, bottom right, live in Dimock, Pa. A year after Cabot Oil & Gas landmen knocked on their doors to sign drilling leases, they are finding that their drinking water now contains methane, the largest component of natural gas. Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublicaNorma Fiorentino's drinking water well was a time bomb. For weeks, workers in her small northeastern Pennsylvania town had been plumbing natural gas deposits from a drilling rig a few hundred yards away. They cracked the earth and pumped in fluids to force the gas out. Somehow, stray gas worked into tiny crevasses in the rock, leaking upward into the aquifer and slipping quietly into Fiorentino's well. Then, according to the state's working theory, a motorized pump turned on in her well house, flicked a spark and caused a New Year's morning blast that tossed aside a concrete slab weighing several thousand-pounds.

Fiorentino wasn't home at the time, so it's difficult to know exactly what happened. But afterward state officials found methane, the largest component of natural gas, in her drinking water. If the fumes that built up in her well house had collected in her basement, the explosion could have killed her.

Dimock, the poverty-stricken enclave where Fiorentino lives, is ground zero for drilling the Marcellus Shale, a prized deposit of natural gas that is increasingly touted as one of the country's most abundant and cleanest alternatives to oil. The drilling here -- as in other parts of the nation -- is supposed to be a boon, bringing much-needed jobs and millions of dollars in royalties to cash-strapped homeowners.

But a string of documented cases of gas escaping into drinking water -- not just in Pennsylvania but across North America -- is raising new concerns about the hidden costs of this economic tide and strengthening arguments across the country that drilling can put drinking water at risk.

Near Cleveland, Ohio, an entire house exploded in late 2007 after gas seeped into its water well. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources later issued a 153-page report (PDF) that blamed a nearby gas well's faulty concrete casing and hydraulic fracturing -- a deep-drilling process that shoots millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into the ground under explosive pressure -- for pushing methane into an aquifer and causing the explosion.

In Dimock several drinking water wells have exploded and nine others were found with so much gas that one homeowner was told to open a window if he planned to take a bath. Dishes showed metallic streaks that couldn't be washed off and tests also showed high amounts of aluminum and iron, prompting fears that drilling fluids might be contaminating the water along with the gas. In February the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection charged Cabot Oil & Gas with two violations that it says caused the contamination, theorizing that gas leaked from the well casing into fractures underground.

An underground gas line in Dimock, Pa. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)Industry representatives say methane contamination incidents are statistically insignificant, considering that 452,000 wells produced gas in the United States last year. They also point out that methane doesn't necessarily come from gas wells -- it's common in nature and can leak into water from biological processes near the surface, like rotting plants.

The industry also defends its construction technology, saying it keeps gas and drilling fluids -- including any chemicals used for hydraulic fracturing -- safely trapped in layers of steel and concrete. Even if some escapes, they say, thousands of feet of rock make it almost impossible for it to migrate into drinking water aquifers. When an accident happens, the blame can usually be traced to a lone bad apple -- some contractor who didn't follow regulations, they say. Those arguments helped the gas drilling industry win rare exemptions from the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act when Congress enacted the 2005 Energy Policy Act.

But now an exhaustive examination of the methane problem in western Colorado is offering a strong scientific repudiation of that argument. Released in December by Garfield County, one of the most intensely drilled areas in the nation, the report concludes that gas drilling has degraded water in dozens of water wells (PDF).

The three-year study used sophisticated scientific techniques to match methane from water to the same rock layer where gas companies are drilling -- a mile and a half underground. The scientists didn't determine which gas wells caused the problem or say exactly how the gas reached the water, but they indicated with more clarity than ever before that a system of interconnected natural fractures and faults could stretch from deep underground gas layers to the surface. They called for more research into how the industry's practice of forcefully fracturing those deep layers might increase the risk of contaminants making their way up into an aquifer.

"It challenges the view that natural gas, and the suite of hydrocarbons that exist around it, is isolated from water supplies by its extreme depth," said Judith Jordan, the oil and gas liaison for Garfield County who has worked as a hydrogeologist with DuPont and as a lawyer with Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection. "It is highly unlikely that methane would have migrated through natural faults and fractures and coincidentally arrived in domestic wells at the same time oil and gas development started, after having been down there ...for over 65 million years."

The Garfield County analysis comes as Congress considers legislation that would toughen environmental oversight of drilling and reverse the exemptions enjoyed by the gas companies. Colorado has already overhauled its own oil and gas regulations, despite stiff resistance from the energy industry. The new rules, which went into effect earlier this month, strengthen protections against, among other things, methane contamination.

Drinking water with methane, the largest component of natural gas, isn't necessarily harmful. The gas itself isn't toxic -- the Environmental Protection Agency doesn't even regulate it -- and it escapes from water quickly, like bubbles in a soda.

But the gas becomes dangerous when it evaporates out of the water and into peoples' homes, where it can become flammable. It can also suffocate those who breathe it. According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as the concentration of gas increases it can cause headaches, then nausea, brain damage and eventually death.

Under Pressure

The carefully documented accident in Ohio in December 2007 offers a step-by-step example of what can happen when drilling goes wrong.

A spark ignited the natural gas that had collected in the basement of Richard and Thelma Payne's suburban Cleveland home, shattering windows, blowing doors 20 feet from their hinges and igniting a small fire in a violent flash. The Paynes were jolted out of bed, and their house lifted clear off the ground.

Fearing another explosion, firefighters evacuated 19 homes in the small town of Bainbridge. Somehow, gas had seeped into the drinking water aquifer and then migrated up through the plumbing.

Gas had shown up in water in this part of Ohio in the past. In 2003 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services investigated nearby residents' complaints of "dizziness," "blacking out," "rashes," "swelling of legs" and "elevated blood pressure" related to exposure to methane through bathing, dishwashing and drinking. That study concluded that gas in the area could migrate through underground fractures and said that "combustible gases, including methane, in private well water present an urgent public health hazard."

According to Scott Kell, deputy chief of Ohio's Division of Natural Resources, those earlier instances were determined to have had nothing to do with drilling activity. But by the time the Paynes' house exploded four years later, the Natural Resources Department had begun to aggressively monitor for gas and this time it suspected a clearer link to drilling: It all had to do with how a well is constructed.

Called GEsford 3, this well is adjacent to Dimock resident Pat Farnelli's house. There have been complications in drilling that well, including a drill bit that clogged the well for weeks, forcing them to have to drill a new hole. That is one of the possible causes being considered for the contamination in Farnell's drinking water. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)To reach natural gas, a well bore is drilled into the earth through dozens of geologic formations stacked like layers in a cake, until the bore reaches the layer holding gas. In Ohio, gas is produced from almost 3,700 feet, or three-quarters of a mile, below. In Colorado or Pennsylvania, wells can be a mile or two deep -- far below drinking water aquifers.

In many geologic regions, the deeper gas-bearing layers are under extraordinary pressure from the weight of earth and water above, but that pressure normally is contained by thousands of feet of leak proof rock that separate the gas from the surface. When a drill bit sinks down, though, the tight seal of each geologic layer is broken and the pressure is released, forcing water, gas or oil into the newly opened pathway. That’s how an oil well can become a gushing geyser.

To keep the gas and drilling fluids from leaking into the natural environment, drilling companies insert as many as three concentric rings of steel pipes inside the well bore to isolate what flows through them. When the bore passes through areas where extra protection is needed -- such as drinking water aquifers -- concrete is pumped into the gap between the rings of pipe to ensure an impenetrable seal. Most states, including Ohio, require these measures in part to protect drinking water.

"That's pretty much the holy grail, good and proper cementing and casing," said Michael Nickolaus, former director of Indiana's Department of Natural Resources, Oil and Gas Division and special projects director for the Ground Water Protection Council, a group of scientists and state regulators that studies industries' impacts on water. Nickolaus added that if these zones are properly isolated from one another, the issue of groundwater contamination, whether from gas or hydraulic fracturing, goes away.

The investigation into the explosion at the Paynes' home found that a drilling company working nearby had failed to properly build that protective concrete casing and had continued to process the well despite warning signs that should have alerted it to stop. Six weeks before the explosion, the company, Ohio Valley Energy Systems, pumped concrete into the well casing. But it couldn't fill the gap, evidence that somewhere a crack was allowing the concrete to seep into the space between the pipes, and probably out into the surrounding earth.

If the concrete could leak, then so could drilling fluids -- or the gas itself.

A week later, "despite the fact that the cement behind the casing was insufficient by standard industry practice," according to the state's report (PDF), the company began hydraulic fracturing. More than 46,000 gallons of water, sand and chemicals were pumped into the well bore with enough force to crack the rock and release the gas.

Again, the drillers saw signs of a leak in the well. The company tried to recover as much of the leaking fluid as possible, but the state report said at least 1,000 gallons of fracturing fluid, including about 150 gallons of oil, disappeared into the space between the well pipes and possibly out into the ground.

Finally, the company shut down the well. But the underlying pressurized gas formation had already been punctured, and its contents were trying to escape. The gas collected inside the well for the next 31 days, until 360 pounds of pressure built against the valve at the top. It was enough, state investigators wrote, to force the gas out of the well bore by any means it could find.

"This overpressurized condition resulted in invasion of natural gas from the annulus of the well into natural fractures in the bedrock below the base of the cemented surface casing," the report states, adding that it was the first time anything like this had been confirmed in Ohio.

Ohio Valley Energy Systems did not return calls for comment on the state's findings.

On Dec. 12, three days before the Paynes' house exploded, methane was detected in the Bainbridge Police Department's water well, 4,700 feet from the gas well in question. Two days later nearby residents reported sediment in their water and artesian conditions in their wells, meaning the water was spurting out under pressure. By the next morning the gas -- still seeking an outlet -- had forced its way into Richard Payne's basement, where it reached a flammable concentration. All it needed was a spark.

Science Blames Drilling

Dimock resident Norma Fiorentino's drinking water well was a time bomb. On New Year's morning, her well exploded. After the blast, state officials found methane in her drinking water. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)As regulators in Ohio struggled to reconcile what was happening there, officials in Garfield County, Colo., were waiting for the results of the three-part, three-year study examining the connections between methane leaks and drilling there.

The report is significant because it is among the first to broadly analyze the ability of contaminants to migrate underground in drilling areas, and to find that such contamination was in fact occurring. It examined over 700 methane samples from 292 locations and found that methane, as well as wastewater from the drilling, was making its way into drinking water not as a result of a single accident but on a broader basis.

As the number of gas wells in the area increased from 200 to 1,300 in this decade, the methane levels in nearby water wells increased too. The study found that natural faults and fractures exist in underground formations in Colorado, and that it may be possible for contaminants to travel through them.

Conditions that could be responsible include "vertical upward flow" "along natural open-fracture pathways or pathways such as well-bores or hydraulically-opened fractures," states the section of the report done by S.S. Papadopulos and Associates (PDF), a Maryland-based environmental engineering firm specializing in groundwater hydrology.

The researchers did not conclude that gas and fluids were migrating directly from the deep pockets of gas the industry was extracting. In fact, they said it was more likely that the gas originated from a weakness somewhere along the well's structure. But the discovery of so much natural fracturing, combined with fractures made by the drilling process, raises questions about how all those cracks interact with the well bore and whether they could be exacerbating the groundwater contamination.

"One thing that is most striking is in the area where there are large vertical faults you see a much higher instance of water wells being affected," said Geoffrey Thyne, the hydrogeologist who wrote the report's summary and conclusion (PDF). He is a senior research scientist at the University of Wyoming's Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute, a pro-extraction group dedicated to tapping into hard-to-reach energy reserves.

The report, referred to as the Garfield County Hydrogeologic Study, has been met with cautious silence by the industry and by its regulators.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the state's regulatory body, would not respond to questions from ProPublica because it hasn't thoroughly analyzed the data behind the December report, said its director, David Neslin.

Neither the Colorado Oil and Gas Association nor Encana, the Canadian energy company that drills in the study area, would comment on the Garfield County report. Both referred questions to Anthony Gorody, a Houston-based geochemist who specializes in oil and gas issues and frequently is employed by the energy industry.

Gorody dismissed the report's conclusions as "junk science."

"This is so out of whack. There are a handful of wells that have problems. These are rare events," said Gorody, president of Universal Geosciences Consulting. "They are like plane crashes -- the extent tends to be fairly limited. I do not see any pervasive impact."

Most of the methane in the study area, Gorody said, came from decaying matter near the surface -- not from the deep gas produced by the energy industry. He criticized the report's methodology, saying the way that researchers linked the stray gas with the deep gas formations was speculative at best.

To Dimock resident Pat Farnelli, seen here pointing to the drilling rig in her backyard, the promise of making money off her family's land came at just the right time. But perhaps not at the right price. Now she spends more than $100 of her monthly food stamp allotment to buy plastic jugs of drinking water. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica) Thyne, standing by his report, said researchers had traced the origin of the gas by conducting the equivalent of a forensic investigation, analyzing its isotopic signature, or molecular fingerprint. The molecular structure showed that most of it was thermogenic, meaning it matched the deeply buried deposit where gas was being drilled, called the Williams Fork Formation. A minority of the samples were difficult to identify by this method, so Thyne used another scientific process to study them. He is confident they, too, were thermogenic in origin.

In most cases, the study couldn't pinpoint the exact pathway the contaminants had used to travel a mile and a half up into the drinking water aquifer. So Thyne could only reason the possibilities.

The methane could be seeping into water wells through natural fractures, he said, or through leaks in the well casings or concrete, or from the well heads.

When a pipe extends 8,000 feet below the earth's surface, he said, "there are numerous potential leak points along the way. So is it leaking at 8,000 feet and coming up a well bore, a natural fault or fracture? Or is it leaking 500 feet from the surface? We don’t know."

The most plausible explanation, Thyne said, is that the same type of well casing and cementing issues that had proved problematic in Ohio were presenting problems in Colorado too.

"The thesis is that because of the way the wells are designed they could be a conduit," said Garfield County's Jordan, who commissioned the report.

Jordan worries that the methane leaks could be a sign of worse to come.

"We suspect the methane would be the most mobile constituent that would come out of the gas fields. Our concern is that it's a sort of sentinel, and there are going to be worse contaminants behind it," she said. "It's not just sitting down there as pure CH4 (methane). It's in a whole bath of hydrocarbons," she said, and some of those "can be problematic."

'You Can't Buy a Good Well'

When landmen from Cabot Oil & Gas came knocking on doors along the rutted dirt grade of Carter Road in Dimock, Pa., last year they sold a promise many residents in the farming community were eager to hear: Sign a gas lease and the land might finally pay for itself.

Many of Dimock's 1,300 residents had fallen on hard times. Approximately one in seven were out of work, and more than a few homes were perched on the precipice of foreclosure.

Cabot offered $25 an acre for the right to drill for five years, plus royalties when the gas started flowing. To outsiders it might seem a small amount, but it would make an immediate difference to people who owned fields but few other assets.

"It seemed like God's provenance," said Pat Farnelli, whose husband, a farmer, had taken a job as a night chef at a diner on the Interstate to pay one more month's mortgage. The day Cabot's man showed up -- with a wide-brim hat and a Houston drawl -- the Farnellis mistook him for a debt collector. "We really were having a rough time right then -- that day. We thought it was salvation. Any ray of hope here is a big deal."

Richard Seymour, seen here with his wife Wendy, runs a certified natural farm that ships produce across the state. His well is now running red and turbid and bubbles with so much gas that he fears he'll lose his agricultural certification. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)That was more than a year ago, and since then Cabot -- which earned close to a billion dollars in revenue last year -- has drilled 20 wells and is producing $58 million worth of gas there annually. In its annual report Cabot bullishly called the Dimock field a once-in-a-lifetime "game changing event" (PDF) for the company and announced it would drill 63 more wells there next year.

The wealth has begun trickling down to the residents of Dimock. A few will earn more than a half-million dollars this year, and bimonthly checks for $6,000 are not uncommon. Cabot and its contractors also support the local economy by hiring local labor and patronizing hotels and restaurants in nearby towns.

But the water contamination is forcing the people who live there to accept a difficult compromise.

"You have to evaluate which is more important, the money or the water," said a Dimock resident who declined to be named because he doesn't want to antagonize Cabot, which he says will pay him more than $600,000 this year for the wells on his property. "The economy is so tough. Suppose you could stop drilling -- no one wants Cabot to go away."

For some, though, the benefits can be easily erased.

Norma Fiorentino, whose well exploded on New Year's morning, got just $97 in royalties in February. Now a part of her monthly $646 Social Security check goes to buy water. "You can't buy a good well," she said.

Down the road, Pat Farnelli spends more than $100 of her monthly food stamp allotment to buy plastic jugs of drinking water. Next door, Ronald Carter paid $7,000 to install two water treatment systems for his family, then learned they won't remove the gas.

Cabot has begun voluntarily supplying water to at least five homes in Dimock, a gesture the company says does not mean it has acknowledged fault. "For now Cabot is simply trying to do the right thing while studies are being performed and data is being obtained," said Kenneth Komoroski, Cabot's spokesman.

Others have yet to get any aid.

"This isn't something that people should be living with," said Craig Lobins, the regional oil and gas manager for Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection. "It's serious."

Pennsylvania's DEP places responsibility for the contamination squarely on Cabot.

In January the DEP blamed the company for polluting one water well. Then in late February it sent Cabot a list of violations (PDF) it said led to methane seepage in other area wells. Investigators think the seepage was caused by a weakness in the well casing or an improper cementing job, much like what had been reported in Colorado and Ohio. The good news was that they found no evidence that any of the hydraulic fracturing fluids had leaked into well water.

Komoroski, the Cabot spokesman, said it's too early to conclude the company is responsible for contaminating Dimock's wells.

He said Cabot has hired an expert who is still investigating exactly what happened in the case.

"The DEP's letter was premature," Komoroski said, "It is possible that Cabot is responsible. It's possible it is not. That's what we hired a hydrogeologist to help us determine."

Cabot has since cemented the entire length of its well casings in Dimock -- a safeguard similar to what has been prescribed in Ohio and Colorado -- and believes that measure, which is more extensive than state regulations require, will solve the problem.

Yet the DEP sees no need to require such precautions at all the state's wells, because what is happening in Dimock is "an anomaly."

"Last year we permitted 8,000 wells, and this may be the only incident that occurred," said the DEP's Lobins. "You can't cover every possible scenario that you could encounter out there, so when the regulations are crafted it addresses the ones that will be most protective of 99.9 percent of the wells."

Industry spokesmen also oppose making the precautionary cementing practices mandatory.

"For one thing it is very costly," said Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations at the Independent Petroleum Association of America. "At the same time if you try to put in too much cement you can risk collapsing the well. So it's drawing a balance between protecting the groundwater" and "protecting the well that you are constructing."

At the bottom of the hill on Carter Road, Richard Seymour runs a certified natural farm that ships produce across the state. His well is running red and turbid and bubbles with so much gas that he fears he'll lose that agricultural certification. If there's a technology, like cementing, that can protect his water, then shouldn't it be required in every case, he asks?

"We feel pretty alone on this, pretty frustrated," Seymour said. "I assumed the DEP, EPA, the state -- the government -- would protect our land. We didn't know that as a landowner the burden was on us."

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Photo: ehpien via Flickr.Views like this are one of the reasons we Seattleites suffer through our long, cloudy, rainy fallwinterspring season. But the beauty can be quite deceptive.

Beneath that reflective surface flow poisoned waters, contaminated with chemicals from agricultural runoff, prescription meds, cosmetics, industrial pollutants, and more -- reflections, you might say, of modern life.

"The irony is that everybody looks at that [picturesque] scene and thinks that it's great; everything is right with the world in Elliott Bay," says scuba diver Mike Racine. "But in point of fact, not 100 feet away from where they are drinking a nice glass of wine off their white linen, there is this unbelievable gunk coming out of the end of this pipe."

PBS' Frontline tomorrow night explores this irony and reflects on the state of the nation's waterways some three decades after the Clean Water Act. Speaking to concerned citizens like Racine as well as scientists, corporate-folk, and politicians, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith focuses on the Chesapeake Bay and the Puget Sound to tell the story of how we've neglected these hidden ecosystems and what it'll take to restore them.

"We thought all the way along that [Puget Sound] was like a toilet: What you put in, you flush out," says Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) of the 150,000 pounds of untreated toxins that hit the Sound each day. "We [now] know that's not true. It's like a bathtub: What you put in stays there."

Here's the (depressingly honest) trailer:

The two-hour Poisoned Waters episode airs April 21 from 9-11 p.m. ET on PBS. Check your local listings for more information.

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