cleveland’s lesson for cove point

[This blog post first appeared on CCAN’s web site.]

While they’re in town this week, Dominion officials and shareholders should stop by Cleveland’s Grdina Park.

That playground marks where three shiny spheres and a giant cylinder once held millions of gallons of liquefied natural gas (LNG). They were a technological wonder in 1944, because 600 times more natural gas could be stored when liquefied at minus 260 degrees F.

But on Oct. 20, 1944, a spark ignited gas vapor seeping from one of the tanks, unleashing a fiery explosion. Homes along 61st and 62nd streets burst into flames, trapping residents. The gas flowed into the sewer system, launching manhole covers, bursting pavement, rushing into basements. Numerous blasts and waves of blistering heat shattered windows miles away. Telephone poles smoked and bent, grass caught fire, walls turned red, people’s shoes felt as if they were melting.

The East Ohio Gas Co. disaster left 131 people dead and hundreds injured. It destroyed a square mile of Cleveland’s east side, including 79 homes, two factories, 217 cars, seven trailers and a tractor. Nearly half the victims, including 21 never identified, are buried at Highland Park Cemetery on Chagrin Boulevard, where a monument honors the dead. If children had not been in school, the toll would have been much higher. After the disaster, public utilities started storing natural gas underground, in depleted wells, rather than as potential bombs in aboveground tanks.

This week, on May 7, less than four miles from Grdina Park, Dominion shareholders will consider dazzling CEO compensation packages and lucrative projects, including the proposed Cove Point LNG export plant in the Chesapeake Bay community of Lusby, Maryland. This $3.8 billion facility would liquefy fracked gas, pump it onto tankers and ship it to Asia.

But fears about explosions, thermal blasts, and limited escape routes dominate the debate. This facility, if approved, would once again place LNG tanks and much more next to too many people.

Opponents have raised numerous objections. The facility would ensure more fracking, compressor stations and pipelines. Exports would also raise prices for American consumers and manufacturers. A U.S. Department of Energy report shows that exporting gas harms every sector of the economy save one: the gas industry. And all that fracking, piping, compressing, chilling, shipping and re-gasifying is a climate nightmare.

But the most poignant alarms are from Lusby residents who live nearby. So near, in fact, that 360 homes are within a 4,500-foot radius. A vapor cloud, according to a state report on an earlier expansion, could drift nearly that far and still ignite — with a spark from a car, a lighter, a grill — enveloping all in a flash fire. Which sounds too much like Cleveland 1944. The nearest homes are 850 feet away. Confusion is widespread about a 60-foot-tall, three-quarter-mile-long wall around the site. Dominion calls it a sound barrier; documents suggest it would also serve as a vapor barrier; and company officials recently told residents that flames from an explosion could travel up the wall and, thereby, over the houses.

The unusual design, confined to the footprint of the existing and dormant import facility, means Dominion has to cram into tight quarters a utility-scale power plant, compressors and liquefaction equipment, and storage tanks for gases and toxic chemicals. Even minor accidents could escalate into a catastrophe. And 1,000-foot tankers would frequently lumber out of port with their explosive load.

Dominion insists accidents won’t happen. But residents have read with growing anxiety about the deadly 2004 explosion at an LNG export facility in Algeria, and more recent blasts at gas-processing plants in Washington, Wyoming and at Dominion’s Blue Racer in West Virginia.

In April, the local assistant fire chief resigned over concerns that his all-volunteer department lacks the staff, training and equipment to handle a disaster at the plant.

Despite all the hazards and questions, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is sticking to its lighter-weight environmental review and plans only one public hearing. The Obama administration even wants fast-track approvals for gas export facilities as another hammer in the geopolitical toolbox to use against Russia. Dominion will tell shareholders that Cove Point fits well with this nationwide rush to export gas.

Ideally, we would weigh the long-term effects of fracking and exporting on gas prices, our health, foreign policy, the climate. At the least, though, the explosion in Cleveland nearly 70 years ago teaches that LNG facilities have no place near homes and schools, playgrounds and parks, beaches and fishing docks. If they belong anywhere, and that is not a given, they belong in remote areas, not next to neighborhoods.

–elisabeth hoffman

 

the cautious approach

Mist on the mountains in unfractured Garrett County.//photo by Crede Calhoun

Maryland agencies that ignore studies linking fracking to explosive methane levels in water wells are on a par with climate-change deniers.

That’s according to a Duke University scientist who urged state regulators to take a “cautious” approach and protect people living near fracking wells with 1-kilometer buffers.

In their most recent updates to draft best practices, though, the agencies have not incorporated that safety zone.

Avner Vengosh, speaking this week via a Web hookup to members of the state’s Marcellus Shale advisory commission and state regulators, explained and defended his research that shows that some water wells within a kilometer of fracking operations have dangerously high levels of explosive and flammable methane, propane and ethane. This fugitive gas contamination is unlike the trace amounts of methane found in most water wells outside the 1-kilometer (3,280 feet) radius. The stray gas contains ethane and propane, he said, and has a heavier isotopic fingerprint. He said it comes from leaking annuli or faulty casings around the drill, a persistent problem industry has long documented. Homes near these wells have had to find other sources of water, and even the suspicion of contamination has devalued homes, he said. The gas migration also indicates a pathway for future toxic contamination, said Vengosh, a professor of geochemistry and water quality.

This industry diagram shows methane’s path through a leaky casing to the aquifer.

The Duke research is ongoing and the next study, in the review stage but soon to be published, he described as a “slam dunk.” The Duke scientists have published several studies about methane migration, each incorporating more well samples from northeast Pennsylvania. They also have studied the inadequate treatment and disposal of the radioactive and briny wastewater and surface contamination from leaks and spills.

Paul Roberts, the citizen representative on the shale advisory commission, told Vengosh that state agencies, echoing the industry position, had rejected the 1-kilometer setback. They had determined that the Duke study, because it lacked baseline levels, failed to show conclusively that drilling had caused the methane contamination.

Vengosh said he found that “kind of insulting.” He compared that stance to climate change deniers. “So, if shale gas is totally safe … if that is what this commission believes, I would suggest that the commission have no setbacks at all. Why is 1,000 feet good and 3,000 bad? … If you believe in something or not is irrelevant,” he said. The data show “3,000 feet would be more protective.”

He labeled the recent clamor for baseline studies “a clever way” to question the environmental science and suggested it was driven by lawyers trying to defend industry in contamination lawsuits. The water wells outside the drilling areas indicate the background levels, he said. He collects baseline levels when possible, but he said scientists should not be held “hostage” to pressure for a baseline to determine stray gas or other contamination. No one asks for baseline comparisons on, for example, wastewater, sewage or road salt contamination, Vengosh said.

He also cautioned that research is just beginning and ”our knowledge is very limited,” which puts state regulators in the position of having to weigh industry-funded studies against academic studies. “If I were in your position, I would try to be as cautious as possible,” he said.

Commission Chairman David Vanko asked Vengosh whether the research showed a correlation between the contaminated water wells and whether the water source was up- or down-gradient from the gas well. (Up-gradient is the below-ground version of upwind or upstream.) But Vengosh said the Duke scientists had not detected “any patterns” on that. Gas, he said, flows vertically — up the channel created by the well.

At the meeting, state regulators outlined several setback revisions for the draft Best Management Practices. But they weren’t buying the 1-kilometer setback.

The standard setback for private wells would be 2,000 feet, up from 1,000 feet —but could be reduced to 1,000 feet if the driller showed, through a hydrological study, that the well pad was not up-gradient from the underground water source. Also, the setback from streams, rivers, seeps, springs, wetlands, lakes, ponds, reservoirs, and 100-year floodplains would be 450 feet, up from 300 feet. Christine Conn, director of strategic land planning for the Department of Natural Resources, said the proposed setbacks are designed to reduce the risk of contamination from surface spills.

“The state is making a huge mistake,” said Roberts, who had long pressed for regulators to have a presentation from one of the Duke scientists. The 1,000-foot buffer, in particular, is based on regulations from the early 1990s before fracking in unconventional shales had begun, he said. The setbacks are “not protective in any way” and indicate state agencies’ refusal to accept the Duke findings, Roberts said.

“I object to that characterization,” Conn said. She said the agencies accept the study but disagree that the setback would be the “appropriate practice” to prevent methane contamination.

In a letter opposing a bill setting a minimum 1-kilometer distance between gas wells and drinking wells, however, the state Department of the Environment said its rationale was that “none of the published articles has shown a causal relationship between the gas wells and the measured [methane] concentrations.”

Commissioner Nick Weber of Trout Unlimited also endorsed larger buffers between drinking water and gas wells. “If you have this lack of data, then the precautionary principle or approach should be to embrace a broader protection area,” he said.

Commissioner Ann Bristow of the Savage River Watershed Association said the agencies should consider increasing the proposed 1,000-foot setback from occupied structures, such as homes and schools. Recent studies show air pollution could pose even greater harm than water contamination, she said. A 2012 study showed health risks significantly greater for residents living up to a half-mile (2,640 feet) from wells. And two studies have found fracking is bad for babies: A study in progress has found evidence of lower birth weights within 3.5 kilometers (11,482 feet) of a wellhead. A study not yet published but presented at the American Economic Association also found low birth weights and other health problems in babies born within 2.5 kilometers of fracking sites.

According to the commission’s timeline, air pollution is on the agenda for the May 16 meeting.

–elisabeth hoffman

Citizen Shale modified an EPA graphic to illustrate for legislators how the 1-kilometer buffer would protect private water wells. House Bill 865, which would have mandated that setback, didn’t get out of committee.

‘the moral crisis of our time’

Before speaking at Loyola, Sandra Steingraber lent her support to health professionals and others in Maryland who are criticizing the state’s study of fracking’s health effects. From left: Rebecca Ruggles of Maryland Environment Health Network, Katie Huffling of Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, Steingraber of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, Ann Bristow, a member of the state’s Marcellus Shale advisory commission, and Jorge Aguilar of Food & Water Watch.

Environmental activist Sandra Steingraber says her first kindergarten art project was a tiled ashtray. Children often made this “infrastructure” for adults’ tobacco addiction, she said. Her parents didn’t even smoke, but everyone needed ashtrays, if not for themselves then for guests. Marketing campaigns made smoking glamorous, pervasive, normal.

During her lifetime, tobacco has largely been “de-normalized,” Steingraber said. “We don’t try to regulate it into safety.” Because smoking is inherently unsafe, the goal is to have no smoking, to abolish it. When her son, then 4, first saw someone smoking outside a cafe, his reaction was, “There’s a man out there trying to light his face on fire.”

Now Steingraber is asking what de-normalizing fossil fuels would look like. Perhaps children of the future will ask: “Really? When you were a kid, you shoveled these fossils into your car to make you go? And you shoveled them into your house to keep warm … [and got asthma] and almost tanked the climate system? That’s just bizarre.”

Steingraber has devoted the last few years to de-normalizing fossil fuels, particularly fracked gas. Last week, she spoke at Loyola University about “The fracking of America: Ethics and Impact.” A scholar-in-residence at Ithaca College with a PhD in biology, Steingraber has “emptied” her bank account, donating her writing awards to form Concerned Health Professionals of New York and New Yorkers Against Fracking. She has testified in Albany repeatedly, analyzed data, written articles and books. A year ago this month, she was jailed for 10 days — becoming a gangsta’ mama to her two children and their friends — for blocking access to an energy company’s compressor station near her town on Seneca Lake. That company wants to store the byproducts of fracking — butane, propane, methane — in salt caverns under the lake, the source of drinking water for 100,000 people. To keep the “overhead costs low,” her family lives in a small house with unmatched dishes from Goodwill. She frequently leaves her children and husband, who is recovering from strokes. “My children have to grow up sometimes without me because I need to be able to tell them: ‘It’s my job as your mother to fight for your future and to make sure you are safe, and if there’s not a stable climate and if there are no pollinators, I can’t be your mother. … So I’ll see you on Friday.”

She is proud to be an activist in this battle, trying “to close the door on fossil fuels and to open the door to renewable energy. To me that seems like a remarkable honor to devote my life to that.” It is, she said, “the moral crisis of our time.”

She also was diagnosed at age 20 with bladder cancer, which almost always is linked to environmental causes. Turns out being a patient, undergoing MRIs and dragging an I.V. pole down a hall while holding closed a backless hospital gown prepared her well for days in a 7-by-7-foot jail cell and for negotiating stairs while wearing an orange jailhouse jumpsuit and ankle chains. Getting arrested and going to jail, she said, is less terrifying than cancer.

She describes our environmental crisis as two connected crises, like a massive tree with two trunks but a common root. “One trunk … represents what’s happening to our planet through the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.” That’s the climate crisis, discussed in dire detail in the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Follow the branches from this trunk and find drought, floods, unpredictable growing seasons, pollinators arriving at the wrong time, dissolving coral reefs and mass extinctions.

“The other trunk of the tree of crisis represents what’s happening to us through the accumulation of inherently toxic chemical pollutants in our bodies,” she said. Follow that trunk and find increasing asthma rates in children, pediatric cancers, learning disabilities, birth defects.

The common root, she said, is our dependence on fossil fuels. “In an age of extreme fossil fuels,” she said, “both crises are now getting worse.” We have moved from the easy-to-get fossil fuels, which are nearly gone, to mountaintop removal for coal, tar sands mining and massive pipelines, deep-sea drilling for oil, and fracking for natural gas. Maryland, like New York, is at the epicenter of the fracking controversy, she said. Neither state has permitted fracking. Yet.

Since the start of the industrial revolution, she said, we have burned fossilized or vaporized plants and animals for energy and, over time, altered the chemistry of the atmosphere. By lighting coal, oil and gas on fire (and leaking unburnt natural gas), we have tripled the amount of heat-trapping methane and increased by 30 to 40 percent the amount of CO₂ in our atmosphere. Excess carbon dioxide warms the planet but also acidifies the oceans. The ocean is 30 percent more acidic than it was before the industrial revolution. “We are on track, if we don’t cease and desist, for dissolving everything with a shell,” she said. Which is alarming not only for those who eat clams, she said. Microscopic zooplankton, the larval form of everything with shells, are key to the ocean’s food web. In addition, the extra heat in the atmosphere also warms the oceans, damaging phytoplankton, which are the food stock for the zooplankton. And phytoplankton? “Phytoplankton provide us with one out of every two breaths that we breathe.”

At the same time, methane — or natural gas — and oil are the starting point for petrochemicals, for plastics, fertilizers, and other toxic substances that alter chromosomes and hormones, that “place cells on the pathway to tumor formation.” And the fossil-fuel-derived pesticides, dioxins and dry-cleaner fluid also show up in human breast milk, which is “still far better than inferior pretender formula.”

Those addressing these crises, she said, have often worked apart. Typically men — such as Bill McKibben, Tim DeChristopher and James Hansen — dominate the climate change group. They look to the future and see climate change as an intergenerational inequality issue. The human rights issue is that we are destroying the climate for those who come after us.

Meanwhile women — she mentioned Lois Gibbs and Rachel Carson but certainly could include herself — have been most concerned with the world of chemical reform and “toxic trespass,” where the human rights issue is the right to bodily integrity and informed consent. “This movement looks to the past,” she said, “as chemicals brought to market years ago without any advance testing or demonstration of safety are now being implicated in human harm.”

The crises are entwined, she said, because “the chemicals that we use to make stuff out of we have available to us because we have chosen to use fossils for our energy system,” she said, and both are creating public health crises. As an example, she mentioned an ethane cracker facility proposed in Allegheny County north of Pittsburgh. The facility would take ethane and process, or “crack,” it into ethylene for plastic bags. “Why do we want to make plastic bags? We are not clamoring for plastic bags,” she said. “But the fracking boom that has blasted molecules of methane out of the ground for our energy has also liberated all this ethane,” she said. And so the cracker facility will make plastic bags that will end up as tiny bits of plastic in the ocean, where they already outnumber plankton by weight in some areas.

Emerging studies show that fracking, like lead paint, asbestos and smoking, can’t be made safe, that many risks are unmanageable. “We shouldn’t spend time putting filters on the cigarette of fracking,” she said. Studies, for example, show fracking connected with smog in otherwise pristine areas, low birth weights, asthma, birth defects. “These are all terrible, expensive problems,” she said. Other research shows 5 percent of the casings around fracking drills fail immediately, with more failing with age. In Pennsylvania alone, fracking has led to 161 cases of water contamination. Yet most of the scientific research has been done in the last year; it has not kept up with the pace of fracking.

Earlier in the day, Steingraber lent her support to Maryland health professionals asking for a delay in the state’s health study on fracking because it is behind schedule, underfunded, and science is just beginning to emerge.

The lateness of the hour and magnitude of the problem can cause despair, she acknowledged. But the good news, she said, is that if we solve the root problem — our dependence on fossil fuels — we will solve both the climate crisis and our health crisis: “We could divorce ourselves from our ruinous dependency on fossil fuels and not only solve our energy problem but detoxify our own lives.”

She highlighted the work of the Solutions Project, the Stanford University research that outlines 50 plans for 50 states to switch to renewable energy. Maryland’s solution, for example, includes a lot of offshore wind and solar power plants.

She acknowledges what psychologists call the “well-informed utility syndrome,” which makes people turn away from more knowledge as well as action because of “unbearable grief, unbearable rage or unbearable guilt.” But “not knowing about the problem isn’t going to engage our ingenuity to help us solve it, and being in despair is the opposite of taking action.”

She said she is “interested in writing in ways that overcome despair.” For inspiration, she looks to the abolitionists who took huge risks and made huge sacrifices to abolish slavery, even though the economy was as linked to it as ours is to fossil fuels. She also looks to 1930s Germany, where her adoptive father, then 18, went off to fight global fascism and parents often made the hard choice to send their children away. Her father knew that “you can’t pretend you don’t see the signs of atrocity all around you. And you can’t sit back on the sidelines and ask, ‘Can I win this fight or not?’ You simply have to do the right thing and put one foot in front of the other and inspire other people to do the same.”

“I didn’t start off intending to be a gansta’ mama,” Steingraber said, but she is willing to do all that she can, including civil disobedience and going to jail, to “redirect the destiny of our nation.”

“That’s what is required of us at this moment,” she said. “We can’t solve this with half measures and more dithering.” She urged everyone to figure out a role to play. And the question, she says, is not “How am I going to fit this into my schedule?” but “How can I change my whole life to address this?”

–elisabeth hoffman

line on the land

Student activists form a line in the road, blocking trucks headed for a frack site in a Pennsylvania state forest. So far, Western Marylanders are trying to negotiate a different line on fracking. //photo by Tom Jefferson

In Pennsylvania, activists draw the line by dragging tree branches into the road and then sitting, slipping their arms inside a massive concrete pipe, holding tight and waiting for the police. For nearly six hours last month, no trucks could pass. Far up the road was a fracking well pad in the Tiadaghton State Forest.

In Maryland, a much more modest line is being negotiated. If fracking were allowed, a large enough setback might help make the difference between relative safety and danger. It’s a circle on a map around a water well or house, school, park or other place within which fracking is not allowed. For skeptics, agnostics or nonbelievers on whether fracking’s risks can be made low enough, the setback is their line on the land.

Based on a draft set of Best Management Practices (BMPs) and existing regulations on conventional gas drilling, recommendations from the Maryland Departments of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Environment (MDE) include 1,000-foot setbacks from private water wells and occupied buildings and 2,000 feet from water intakes for municipal water sources. Of the more than 4,000 public comments on the BMPs, hundreds were critical of these and other setbacks.

Concerned Garrett and Allegany residents who formed Citizen Shale have been pressing for greater protection. At first, all they asked was to protect private wells as much as public wells — with 2,000-foot setbacks.

But when a Duke University study made a case for 1 kilometer (3,280 feet) based on research in active drilling areas in Pennsylvania, Citizen Shale and Paul Roberts, a co-founder of the group and the citizen representative on the state’s Marcellus Shale advisory commission, started insisting on that as the minimum setback. So far, the state departments have not budged. In fact, MDE told the House Environmental Matters Committee in a letter that “available scientific data” doesn’t support a 1-kilometer setback.

That rebuff came despite revelations about a long-forgotten Poolesville incident and a number of new health studies, leaving patience wearing thin for the agnostics, skeptics and nonbelievers alike.

“I don’t see the evidence that this industry can be effectively regulated. But, since we must try, the most important step is to move human activity a protective distance away from the drilling,” Roberts said. “There are public health and safety concerns, and worries about water contamination. It has turned into another full-time job for me — trying to get the state to adopt regulations based on real experiences from other states since, so far, our regulators dispute the available science.”

Here’s what’s on the table:

the case of the communicating wells

From Poolesville came a cautionary tale about the fragility of water sources. The Montgomery County town supplied water to about 5,000 residents with eight municipal water wells. As development started to outpace the water supply, town officials asked state regulators for permission to drill two more wells. Caroline Taylor, who lives in Sugarland Forest outside Poolesville’s border, was concerned enough about the effect on her private well, particularly during droughts, to demand a public hearing. She insisted on baseline testing and wrangled out of the state an agreement: Private wells would be monitored and, if necessary, replaced. Taylor had no interest in being hooked up to the municipal wells in Poolesville. She did not want to buy water by the gallon; she wanted a water well on her land. And the state’s project hydrogeologist, Patrick Hammond — who had studied water sources in the fractured-rock geological region that underlies Maryland west of about Interstate 95 — thought a “zone of interference” could extend even a mile from the town’s well and would need long-term monitoring. In other words, what happened in one well could affect what happened in another a mile away.

And so the municipal wells were drilled in Poolesville. They weren’t pumped at full capacity, however, until the middle of 2007. And two months later, one hot summer day, Taylor’s children turned on the outside faucet and heard a sputtering sound. Air came out but no water. Taylor called Hammond, who analyzed the monitoring data and determined that the town’s pumping activity, as well as that of a nearby golf course, had sucked dry her private well (and interfered with others) 5,000 feet to the south. In the rock formations under Poolesville, the water sources were connected. Poolesville and the golf course paid to drill new wells for the residents who had lost water.

At 300 feet, Taylor’s new well is deeper than her original one, which she described wistfully as “a great well.” The new one has more sediment, she said. “I preferred my 90-foot well. But I prefer water to no water.”

At a February shale advisory commission meeting, Hammond, now retired from MDE but a former consultant for the state’s study of water resources in the fractured-rock regions, stepped forward during the public comment period. The Poolesville case was on his mind, along with his research showing large-capacity water wells (and dewatering for coal mining) could affect private wells 5,000 feet away. He also pointed to a December 2013 report — not peer-reviewed but appearing in the industry trade journal American Oil and Gas Reporter — showing that contamination of water wells was probable within 1,000 feet, possible within 5,000 feet and possible as far as 10,000 feet, once a contaminant is in the aquifer and given certain geological conditions.

What was the rationale for the proposed smaller setbacks, he asked the commissioners. “They seem to be somewhat arbitrary,” he said.

At the March advisory commission meeting, Hammond returned. He said his research, presented at the 2012 Maryland Ground Water Symposium, backs up the findings from the Duke methane study and finds errors in the industry-funded Molofsky study that dismisses fracking’s role in water wells contaminated in Dimock, Pa. Leaky well casings are the most likely culprit for methane contamination in Dimock, he said. Based on his knowledge of the water and rock formations in Western Maryland, he said, 1,000-foot setbacks are insufficient. He has seen water wells affecting each other as far as 5,000 feet and contaminant plumes described in scientific journals extending to about that distance. And whether gas, water or chemicals: “If you can show a hydrological connection, it doesn’t matter what the fluid is.”

no help in annapolis

So far, state officials who work with the advisory commission haven’t commented on the Poolesville case. In a letter to the House Environmental Matters Committee, MDE opposed the bill that would have increased setbacks to 3,280 feet (1 kilometer), saying the larger setback “cannot be supported by the available scientific data and because codifying the setback distance now would preempt and undermine the work of the Departments and the Advisory Commission.”

The letter cited a study published in the bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists that was noncommittal about fracking’s link to methane contamination, which could be from “preexisting, and previously undiagnosed, methane,” or gas well operations, or “other anthropogenic activity.” Worth nothing is that AAPG is also noncommittal on human contribution to global warming. In 1999, it maintained that “[h]uman-induced global temperature influence is a supposition that can be neither proved nor disproved.” In 2007, it updated its position, acknowledging the rise in CO₂ levels in the atmosphere but saying the “membership is divided on the degree of influence that anthropogenic CO₂ has on recent and potential global temperature increases.” In 2010, AAPG disbanded its Global Climate Change Committee because it wasn’t advancing the organization’s goals, namely: helping to find oil and gas, creating and saving jobs in petroleum geology, and because “neither side [has] a politically winnable argument.”

Taylor, in the minute allotted for testimony in support of the 1-kilometer setback bill, quickly explained the case of the Poolesville wells. “Our water resources are irreplaceable, so we ask that you do due diligence and get it right.”

Del. Anthony J. O’Donnell, though, emphasized that fracking had nothing to do with the Poolesville case. “My point is this: The problems you had occurred naturally, right? It didn’t occur from hydraulic fracturing. It was a natural occurrence.”

Taylor replied: “Well, unless one would term the pump-down on wells that were drilled in proximity a natural occurrence, it was a man-made occurrence.”

O’Donnell: “But it wasn’t caused by hydraulic fracturing. … These things occur in nature is my point, not necessarily caused by hydraulic fracturing.”

Roberts, also testifying for the bill, persisted: “The only purpose of her testimony is to show that these wells are connected. … The aquifer is connected.”

But O’Donnell was having none of it: “We may blame hydraulic fracturing for some things that occur naturally in nature or are caused by other things. That’s the whole point.”

The bill didn’t even get out of committee.

a point of agreement

Those on the shale advisory commission found something to agree on at their most recent meeting in March: the placement of monitoring wells, which would detect contamination before it reached drinking wells. The closer, the better, several suggested. Otherwise, the drinking water supply becomes the test well.

No word, though, on larger setbacks. “Groundwater flow is much more complicated than any one setback,” John Grace, an MDE groundwater expert, told the shale commissioners. And that’s a huge understatement. After much talk of zones of influence, zones of transport and zones of contribution, Grace explained that the departments have been looking almost exclusively at how to contain surface spills. A sufficient setback, he said, could buy time and keep a surface spill from reaching public water intakes. In Garrett County, though, nearly 75 percent of residents have private water wells. Regarding methane contamination, Richard Ortt Jr., director of the Maryland Geological Survey, told the commission that he has not seen conclusive evidence of methane contamination from fracking, and 3-D mapping of faults and fractures would be very expensive. Grace said, “I don’t know how you can establish a setback for [methane].”

That assessment fits more closely with Cornell University Professor Anthony Ingraffea’s presentation to the commission in February about leaky wells. The question for Ingraffea — who has a PhD in rock fracture mechanics and was previously a consultant to and researcher for the oil and gas industry — is not so much if but when methane (and other substances) will leak and contaminate wells and surface water. It also fits with Zacariah Hildenbrand’s presentation to the commission about his findings of high levels of arsenic and selenium in wells within 3 kilometers (9,842 feet) of natural gas wells in the Barnett Shale in Texas.

“We’re still evaluating this whole issue of methane contamination and the causes of that,” said Christine Conn, director of strategic land planning at DNR.

And these setbacks don’t begin to address health problems showing up in studies near fracking sites, including a “sudden rise in the number of fetal anomalies detected among pregnant women.” (A state epidemiologist in Colorado is investigating that). Or endocrine-disrupting chemicals appearing in surface and groundwater in fracking areas in Colorado. Or a safe distance from gas well explosions, such as the Chevron accident in February in Greene County, Pa., that burned for days, killed an employee and required police to set up a half-mile perimeter (2,640 feet).  “Basically it was like a sonic boom. You could feel a little bit of vibration in the ground, and the loud hissing sound. I knew exactly what it was,” one witness told a Pittsburgh television reporter. “We were probably anywhere from 600-800 yards away down over the hill. You could just literally, it felt like warm air, spring air, coming down over the hillside. It’s very, very hot.”

So far, the only protection in place in Maryland is a liability law passed last year that says the driller is presumed responsible if water is contaminated within 2,500 feet of a frack well — during the first year.

–elisabeth hoffman

garrett realtors worried about fracking

The Garrett County Board of Realtors is concerned that fracking would harm vistas and tourism if local regulations aren’t in place.//photo by Crede Calhoun

The Garrett County Board of Realtors has waded into the fracking frenzy, pressing for sufficient local protections to be in place before drilling starts in Western Maryland.

The group, which represents individual Realtors as well as nine realty companies in the state’s most exposed county if fracking were permitted, says it is concerned about declining property values near fracking wells and gas infrastructure.

“We are not in favor of, nor are we against, fracking. Our main objective is preserving property values and property rights,” said Larry Smith, president of the county Board of Realtors. “We are merely asking that local government look at what’s being proposed by [the Maryland Department of the Environment] and — if there are any gaps or holes — that local government further regulate where MDE leaves off.”

This letter marks the first time a local business organization has said that local government needs to play a stronger role. The Garrett County Chamber of Commerce and the Farm Bureau, in contrast, have lobbied repeatedly in support of fracking for gas.

The Board of Realtors members “feel that promotion of shale gas development needs to also accompany a local commitment to regulation. … [T]hey are inherently linked,” said Paul Durham, government affairs director for the county Board of Realtors. “So far, we haven’t seen that local commitment. … We are calling on our county to start the processes to put the local regulatory framework together so, when drilling occurs, it’s in place.” Putting regulations in place could take a year or more, he said, so local officials should “start the process.”

Durham said the board members have been monitoring government committees studying fracking at the national, state and local levels. They also reviewed numerous academic studies that found a “stigma” associated with properties near fracking wells. One study, led by Ron Throupe at the University of Denver and published in the Journal of Real Estate Literature, showed a 5 to 15 percent decline in “bid values” depending on “the petroleum-friendliness of the venue and proximity to the drilling site.” (A bid value is the amount respondents in a survey would bid on a hypothetical property at a specified distance from a fracking site; it takes into account respondents who say they would not consider bidding on the property. Respondents in Texas were more “petroleum friendly” than those in Florida, the two states used in the survey.)

Over several months, the Realtors’ board of directors studied the issue, got feedback from its members and its government affairs committee and decided to write the letter.

The letter, dated March 17 and addressed to Michael W. Koch, executive director of the county’s Department of Planning and Community Development, said the board is worried about local “regulatory gaps” that could harm “vistas and tourism” as well as local roads, small towns and communities. “We have learned that our community should not expect the state to regulate all of these impacts associated with gas development,” Smith wrote. “Our local officials have been actively promoting shale gas development in Garrett County for a number of years. However, there has been a reluctance to couple that promotional effort with the important local regulatory planning that is needed to properly manage the negative effects of this issue.”

The board, according to the letter, adopted this position: “Garrett County government and our elected representatives should not promote or endorse shale gas development, nor should it occur, until the effects of shale gas development are evaluated and an effective local government regulatory framework is put in place to protect the rights of property owners and the investments they have made.”

A loss of property values, the letter said, would be significant in Garrett where “local services and the county budget depend on a stable property tax base.”

The board’s letter notes that Garrett lacks countywide zoning that might help fill the gaps in regulation and that a 2011 Economic Strategic Development Plan called for “responsible” development of gas drilling along with phased-in zoning. (Garrett has zoning only in the Deep Creek watershed and the towns of Friendsville, Oakland, Accident, Mountain Lake Park, Grantsville, and Loch Lynn Heights. In 2011, Mountain Lake Park passed a ban on fracking.) The letter urges that Garrett County “immediately engage” its departments “to initiate the processes needed to move forward in this area.”

James M. Raley, a county commissioner and member of the state’s Marcellus Shale Safe Drilling Initiative Advisory Commission, said that he would be meeting with the Board of Realtors this week to discuss the letter and that he wants to see documentation about effects on property values. As far as regulatory gaps, he said, “I feel I’ve been working on the gaps with our local [Shale Gas Advisory] Committee.” Although “not a big fan” of countywide zoning, he said, “local gaps are going to have to be handled at the local level.” The county, for example, will have to deal with road damage, emergency preparedness and trucks hauling hazardous materials.

Eric Robison, a member of the executive committee of the county’s Shale Gas Advisory Committee and president of Citizen Shale, said he’s concerned that the gaps won’t be apparent until the state develops regulations. “I feel it’s very important that we look at this. Any issues or impacts that arise [from fracking] should not be borne by the taxpayer, [and] we as a county should be looking to offer the best protections for our tax base and taxpayers,” said Robison, who is also a candidate for county commissioner in District 1. He said that only a countywide zoning plan would be “fair and equitable to everyone.”

–-elisabeth hoffman

 

jailbird for justice

The Frederick Four: me, Steve Bruns, Joanna LaFollette and Sweet Dee Frostbutter.
//photo by Chesapeake Climate Action Network

The police citation says I was charged with willfully obstructing and hindering free passage of others in a public place “against the peace, government, and dignity of the state.”

Along with three other activists, I blocked the doors to the Frederick County Courthouse last week as part of a peaceful protest against Dominion’s planned compressor station in Myersville, as well as its proposal to build a $3.8 billion giant facility on the Chesapeake Bay that would liquefy fracked gas and haul it off to Asia. We were the Frederick Four.

Dominion’s planned actions are far less peaceful and dignified than ours.

In Myersville, one division of Dominion wants to build an oversized, air-polluting compressor station for fracked gas against the wishes of the town’s residents and officials. In Cove Point in Calvert County, the scheme of another Dominion division involves a gas-fired power plant that would yield no power for Marylanders; storage tanks of toxic and combustible chemicals; a long list of air pollutants; and a six-story-tall-by-three-quarters-of-mile-long wall. The super-cooled gas in its liquid form would get to Asia on tanker ships fueled by the dirtiest of oils, bunker fuel, which coats and suffocates wildlife when it spills. This plan too has aroused resident fury, although Lusby officials seem happy to support and deal in secret with Dominion.

And the gas for both these facilities would come from fracking all over the Marcellus and other shales that lie under our homes, schools, businesses, farms, playgrounds, parks and rivers. Even though scientists and physicians are raising grave questions about the wisdom of allowing this industry to operate in our backyards, particularly because of the millions of gallons of water laced with toxic chemicals, the noise and countless diesel truck trips. And even though fracked gas is a bridge to a catastrophic 6 degrees F of warming on our planet.

But Dominion’s CEOs won’t be pondering their willful obstruction of our safe passage in our communities in a 7-by-11-foot dull yellow, concrete block cell anytime soon.

Our civil disobedience action was the second in as many weeks. Previously, four activists were arrested in Cumberland. We are making clear that — as much as Dominion denies it — Cove Point has everything to do with fracking and the connecting web of pipelines and compressor stations that would run through our communities. We are saying that rushing ahead with these plans without a thorough environmental review of health, environmental and climate effects puts us all at risk.

Ann Marie Nau being interviewed at the rally.//photo by CCAN

“We stand together,” Ann Marie Nau told a WFMD radio reporter at the rally. “We stand with Western Maryland. We stand with Lusby. We stand with Myersville. We stand with all the other communities that are impacted. Myersville matters, Lusby matters. Western Maryland matters. And we stand up for one another.”

At the rally before the arrests, we read our statements. Steve Bruns, who’s running for an at-large Frederick County commissioner seat, blasted the gas industry’s PR campaign to promote fracked gas as clean and safe, as well as Dominion’s lawsuit against Myersville and the Maryland Department of the Environment to force approval of the compressor station within a mile of the town’s elementary school and evacuation center. “This sort of contempt for the health and safety of the people of Maryland is unacceptable in a democratic society. If our government isn’t getting the message, then we’re just going to have to crank up the volume,” he said.

Sweet Dee Frostbutter, who grew up playing in the forests and fields of Calvert County and lives in Frederick, said: “This place and these people mean too much to me to stand by and just watch that happen. We have to resist, and I hope you’ll join us!” In June 2011, Sweet Dee was a cook on the weeklong, 50-mile March on Blair Mountain to stop another form of extreme energy extraction: the blasting away of that mountaintop to excavate the coal. The same mountain where, in the summer of 1921, 10,000 armed coal miners battled for the right to form a union against strikebreakers and lawmen hired by mine operators.

“Maryland could virtually turn into one large industrial zone and be sacrificed for energy being shipped overseas,” said Joanna LaFollette of Frederick. Joanna, who has asthma in a county that has a mortality rate from air pollution among the highest in the nation, was there in place of her son Dylan Petrohilos, whose arrest for civil disobedience at a frack-sand processing plant in Boone, N.C., was still being processed.

At a small rally in a plaza in front of the courthouse, we held signs and a banner, “Stop Cove Point.” We chanted, “Myersville is not for sale,” “Lusby is not for sale,” “Garrett County is not for sale” and “Allegany County is not for sale.” Sweet Dee made up the best chant, a syncopated “We gotta beat back, the frack attack, we gotta beat beat back, that frack attack.”

After about 30 minutes, one of the officers said we had to leave the plaza because we lacked a permit for a rally. Instead, the four of us risking arrest moved closer to the courthouse to block the doors. We chanted more and tried singing a verse of “This Land Is Your Land.”  Eventually, Sweet Dee and Joanna were given one more warning and then arrested. A few minutes later, police gave Steve and me our final warning. And then officers, who greatly outnumbered us, moved in and escorted us about 20 feet to the Frederick City police office, where we were quickly searched for weapons.

Sweet Dee and Joanna were booked first and never saw the inside of a jail cell. But Steve and I were put in adjacent concrete-block cells with sliding solid metal doors. Solitary confinement. The only opening on the door was a 4-by-6-inch window.

The cell had a metal bench with rings along the back wall, but I wasn’t handcuffed — or handcuffed to these rings. It also had a stainless steel toilet/sink combo on one side behind a partition. I was thirsty from all the yelling, but when I pushed the first of the three buttons on the sink, the toilet flushed. The only reading materials were the scratched messages on the bench from those who had gone before me under much more miserable circumstances. “Fox + Mel 4 Ever” was on someone’s mind. But so was “LSD” and “ebay.” And “This sux!”

My jail memoir will be short, as I was probably in the slammer about 35 minutes. Eventually, officers unlocked our cell doors and took us to an office for a mug shot and booking. They asked about our action. One officer had read a lot about global warming but said he hadn’t made up his mind about it yet. Another thought nuclear power was the answer.

The Frederick Four, released from jail with our citations.//photo by Liz Feighner

And then we were free to leave.

My arrest was a small action. I was trying to help make the future come out differently from the way it’s headed, one small shove to help steer us from fossil fuels and their giant corporate pushers. The Frederick Four and the Cumberland Four are not alone. In August, more than 2,000 people participated in a days-long campaign against fracking in Balcombe in the United Kingdom, including 20 who blockaded the headquarters of energy company Cuadrilla and six who superglued themselves to the doors at the London headquarters of Cuadrilla’s PR firm, Bell Pottinger. Last June, in Zurawlow, a rural community in Poland, 150 farmers slept in fields and blockaded a drilling site with cars and trucks. In the fall, farmers in Pungest, Romania, cut cables laid for seismic testing, scooped them up and dragged them through the street to protest Chevron’s plans for fracking on their land. They also formed a human chain around the land where Chevron wanted to place test drills. “We have to do these kinds of things. It’s our duty,” one farmer said.

“We are Romania. We don’t want to sell our country,” they shouted, echoing our chants in Frederick. Or, here’s a new one: “Out you flea-ridden dirty dogs.”

They don’t want fracking for “schist.” Even though Chevron offered the Romanian farmers T-shirts and yogurt — a ploy wackily similar to the cheese pizza Chevron offered residents in Greene County, Pa., after a well pad explosion and fire that burned for days and killed one worker. Note to Chevron: Communities want clean water and a safe place to live, not free dairy products and clothing.

Also note: Schist and fracking. In any language, it sounds like a curse.

Sometimes, civil disobedience is our only currency. We don’t have millions to spend on disingenuous television, radio and Web ad campaigns about “clean” energy that really isn’t and “jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs” that are inflated and too often in the rescue, emergency and mopping-up industries. Sometimes all we can do is get in the way, slow the machinery, free our voices, give the science time to catch up and emerge.

Fracking protesters locked themselves to a giant papier-mâché pig at a farm in western Pennsylvania. http://bit.ly/1qwMp0d //photo from the shadbush environmental justice collective

Just yesterday, at least 30 people were arrested in Philadelphia to protest the Keystone XL pipeline for tar sands oil. As were 398 students who either chained themselves to the White House gate or engaged in a mock human oil spill on a black tarp in an XL Dissent a week ago. In 2012, several protesters chained themselves to a giant papier-mâché pig at Maggie Henry’s western Pennsylvania farm 4,000 feet from a proposed Shell fracking operation. In Youngstown, Ohio, a nonviolent protest blocked the gate to an injection well for fracking waste. Last year, Sandra Steingraber and 11 other citizen-turned-activists spent 10 days in jail for blocking the entrance to a planned gas storage facility in salt caverns under Seneca Lake in New York. “My small, nonviolent act of trespass,” Steingraber said at her sentencing, “is set against a larger, more violent one: the trespass of hazardous chemicals into water and air and thereby into our bodies. This is a form of toxic trespass.”

At a Seneca in the Balance forum last night, Steingraber said that we each have to figure out our role in this movement and that “we can spend our bodies if we need to.” But, be clear, “we are way beyond the ‘every little bit helps’ stage. … When you think about what it is you are going to do next, know that it has be really big and something really heroic.”

Civil disobedience has been key to many justice movements, from Alice Paul and Martin Luther King Jr. to the many anonymous protesters who sat in at factories, lunch counters, nuclear facilities and treetops. As folksinger Anne Feeney would say, I’ve now “been to jail for justice” with the Frederick Four. The battle against fracking and Cove Point is now part of the justice movement to save life on the planet from catastrophic warming and, along the way, create energy forms that don’t bring sickness and misery to others. And the window for acting is small, not unlike the one in my jail cell door.

–by elisabeth hoffman

speaking out against cove point

Ori Gutin tells members of the state Public Service Commission that college students want clean-energy jobs.//photo by CCAN

Southern Maryland residents filled the Patuxent High School auditorium in Lusby on Saturday afternoon for state regulators’ sole public hearing on Dominion Resources’ plan to build a $3.8 billion facility for liquefying and exporting fracked gas from the town’s Cove Point plant. Area residents urged members of the Public Service Commission to deny Dominion’s permit on the grounds that the project would benefit the gas industry but threaten local safety and property values as well as the Maryland economy. Ruth Alice White attended the hearing and testified on behalf of HoCo ClimateChange. Following is her account of the day. Chesapeake Climate Action Network staff also provided some material.

By RUTH ALICE WHITE

This is one for the history books. Will the people of Calvert County and Maryland be able to persuade the state Public Service Commission that a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility, the fourth-largest in the nation, is a bad idea for Cove Point?

The Public Service Commission (PSC), whose members are appointed by the governor with approval from the General Assembly, will just listen today. A sign says the room has 800-plus seats. Not every seat is filled but most are, and some people stand at the back and at the sides.

We know union members will talk about jobs. They have a huge food tent in the parking lot, which we anticipated because of a Facebook announcement.

Some arrived as early as 7 a.m. to line up for the noon hearing, because the testimony is in order of sign-ins. My goal was to arrive by 8 a.m., but I am later and already about 12 people are in line — all but one opposed to the facility. As the union workers come in from their parking lot breakfast, they are appalled to see us in line and protest the line. We hear police are in the area to keep order.

We sign in with relative order and a minimum of jostling. Finally, the commissioners start the hearing only a few minutes late and explain the ground rules: Each person will have five minutes to speak; commissioners will not comment or ask questions.

The first and second person to testify were not in line. The first is Calvert County Commissioner Gerald Clark, who says: “Good leadership is making decisions under duress from citizens.” He characterizes opponents as “emotional.”  Someone says, “Who elected him?” Mostly the audience is silent. But as he drones on, people start to call out: “Five-minute rule.” Because of his position, he is apparently exempt from the time limit. He mentions jobs and tax revenues. He doesn’t mention the secret tax breaks the county commissioners gave Dominion.

Up next is the county sheriff, Mike Evans. He is confident that his office can handle security at proposed plant. He doesn’t mention a hearing in Annapolis last week when Sen. Roy P. Dyson’s expressed grave concerns about whether the Department of Natural Resources Police would be able to handle security threats at Cove Point.

Chiquita Younger, who grew up in Lusby, says Dominion has left too many questions unanswered.//photo by Ruth Alice White

Finally, those who waited in line and signed up to testify are called to speak. Patuxent High graduate Chiquita Younger, a Lusby native and program associate at Interfaith Power & Light, is first.  “Congregations across Maryland feel called to protect our climate and our water, so they oppose Dominion’s plans to build a major climate polluter that will export fracked gas,” she said. “But I’m here to testify today because, for me, this is personal. I grew up in Lusby, and my family has deep roots here. I’m here to speak out for my niece, my sister, my mother, my grandmother, and all those in Calvert County who have not been able to get their questions answered about the pollution Cove Point will cause and the dangers it poses to their neighborhoods.”

Jorge Aguilar, the southern region director of Food & Water Watch, says LNG exports won’t help the middle class – a theme repeated frequently by those testifying. “Natural gas companies always fail to deliver on the rosy economic forecasts they make,” he said. “In fact, a recent Department of Energy study on LNG exports said that the net economic benefits will actually lead to lower real wage growth due to increases in the price of natural gas domestically. The Cove Point project is an environmental and economic disaster waiting to happen.”

Sitting next to me is Robin Broder of Waterkeepers Chesapeake. She testifies that exporting LNG from Cove Point will increase pressure to frack in the George Washington National Forest, the watershed that provides the drinking water for millions in the Washington, DC, area. “What happens here will have ripple effects across the region,” she says.

Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, says the project will have radical effects on the entire state and region. “The PSC is here to serve the entire Maryland public. … Economically, it is hard to argue this makes sense for the state,” he said, because everyone will pay higher prices for natural gas.

Jean Marie Neal of the Cove of Calvert Homeowners Association lives across the road from the proposed LNG export facility and she, of course, is concerned about safety.  But she emphasizes fairness and process. How did Dominion evade the law that requires two years between project application and construction? Why did county commissioners waive zoning and building codes for the project? Who is safeguarding the citizens? Oh, and that six-story “sound barrier” Dominion has been talking about for months to “protect” citizens from noise at the site? A Federal Energy Regulatory  Commission (FERC) document posted to its website this week shows it is also a barrier for containing flammable vapor clouds in case of an explosion. FERC has said the proposed wall is insufficient and needs to be expanded. Why did Dominion repeatedly say the wall was only a sound barrier? And the supposedly 3,000 jobs (1,700 to 3,000, Dominion said) are JOB YEARS, so if 1,500 people work two years that counts as 3,000 “jobs,” Neal says.

“As a resident living and raising a family very close to the Dominion Cove Point terminal, I am alarmed that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is on the verge of approving one of the first LNG export facilities ever to be built in the United States —within 4,500 feet of approximately 360 residences and next door to a public park,” says Sue Allison, a homeowner living within view of Dominion’s facility and a member of Calvert Citizens for a Healthy Community. “I call upon the Public Service Commission to demand that FERC produce a publicly accessible, rigorous, quantitative assessment of the risks that Dominion’s facility poses to those residents living, playing or attending school in close proximity.”

Greg Farmer, who lives in Calvert County and worked on economic development in the Clinton administration, testifies that this is NOT economic development.

University of Maryland student Ori Gutin explains how unpopular this proposal is with many at the College Park campus who long to work in clean-energy jobs. Those in favor of Cove Point argue that the plant is good for business. But Gutin and many others say solar and wind could provide so many more jobs now and in the future — if only we would invest that money now.

Tracey Eno, a homeowner living within 1.5 miles of Dominion’s facility and a member of Calvert Citizens for a Healthy Community, says some people say they are environmentalists but “I am a people-ist. I am worried about the people.”  She mentions health and safety risks, decreasing property values, and the sound wall that is really a vapor cloud wall. This massive, unprecedented industrial plant would be next to where people live, she says.

David Harding talks eloquently about Little Cove Point Road and the planned overnight heavy traffic — to avoid traffic jams during the day.

I speak for www.HoCoClimateChange.org and echo common themes: air and water quality, beauty of the area, the sound/toxic vapor barrier, more compressor stations and pipelines throughout Maryland, increase in fracking (including the Taylorsville Basin, which extends north from Virginia to Annapolis), increase in gas prices, and the fact that gas is not a bridge fuel — it is a bridge to a cliff and fatal for our children and grandchildren. The whole gas process leaks methane, which increases climate change. So many friends in Howard County share these concerns. I feel their energy around me, and this helps me speak up and keep my voice strong in this huge room, standing at these intimidating microphones.

One woman testifies that she’s concerned about the facility’s proximity to the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant. She calls the plan a “privatization of profit and socialization of risks … and the local residents are left with all the risks.”

Cathy Mazur says Lusby is already a non-attainment area for air quality. Dominion will have to purchase carbon offsets in other areas in order to pollute the air here. But, she asks, how will offsets elsewhere help Calvert County residents who already have substandard air?

One man, questioning the wisdom of exporting the gas, testifies that propane exports have led to a shortage of heating fuel for homes across the country this winter.

The hall had been filled with union workers, but as they trickle out during the hearing the folks remaining are predominately those wearing red shirts and “NO COVE POINT” stickers.

Dan Craley asks whether some jobs and tax dollars are worth polluting our children’s future?

More testimony pro and con. A supporter of Dominion paints opponents as retirees who care nothing about the unemployed or the working class. But he ignores the hardworking Calvert citizens present who are obviously not of retirement age. He also ignores that Dominion is seeking maximum profits with short-term jobs rather than investing in solar and wind and green technologies that will provide many more jobs for many years to come. The weight of this unending recession on middle-income and unemployed people, on those foreclosed and risking foreclosure surfaces repeatedly in the testimony of those supporting this project. But this one project will not solve the job and money woes for Calvert County or this state. It will enrich Dominion and the gas industry, but impoverish residents in ways described so eloquently.

My head is spinning, but the next speakers do not reply to these attacks. They move on. Kelly Canavan points out that this project does not provide power for any Maryland residents and is not in the public interest. There is no trade-off with this plant. We get the pollution. Dominion gets the money. That’s it.

Janet Ashby tells the PSC members, “Your duty is for the necessity and convenience of MARYLAND.”

I am ready to leave – it is midafternoon and many people, mainly supporters are still here. But I stay to hear a few more. “Without health, money is meaningless,” Cathy Zumbrun says. She fears an accident and distrusts the gas industry.

As I walk out, the last speaker is trying to use black comedy – a last-gasp argument against all of us naysayers. She starts dramatically, almost yelling: “You will die.” Pause.  “I will die, too. We will all die. Global warming – is this really real?” Her point is that all life has risk and that we have to live now and move forward. She pokes grim fun at everyone who has talked about real consequences from building this plant.

All I can think of as I walk out is the movie “Dr. Strangelove.” I guess I am punchy after all this. But I have missed time with my husband and haven’t spoken yet to my daughter or grandson today. Those I love pull me back. And in the hour-and-a-half drive back, I talk to an old friend from high school who grew up in Maryland but lives in Arizona. Can she understand what our state and region are facing now?

Mike Tidwell of CCAN says the Cove Point plan is a radical turn in the wrong direction for Maryland.//photo by Ruth Alice White

yet another cove point problem

A local Unitarian minister and three western Maryland residents were arrested today at the Allegany County Courthouse during a peaceful sit-in. They were protesting Dominion’s plans to build a facility that would liquefy and export fracked gas from Cove Point. http://t.co/fhqss1XilB Turns out security would also be a challenge at the plant. //photo by Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

Add this to the list of hazards from the proposed Cove Point plant for liquefying and exporting fracked gas: insufficient police protection.

At a hearing Tuesday before the state Senate’s Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Roy P. Dyson said the Maryland Natural Resources Police “just don’t have the resources” to do the work they are supposed to do — including ensuring security at the Cove Point facility in Calvert County.

Dyson, a Democrat who represents Calvert, St. Mary’s and Charles counties, has introduced a bill that would combine the state Natural Resources Police (NRP) with the state police, even though he knows it doesn’t have a lobster’s chance in a pot of passing.  “But we’ve got to talk about this,” he said.

In addition to handling rockfish poachers and drunken boaters, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) police are charged with protecting Cove Point, where Dominion has plans to transform its mostly idle gas import plant into a $3.8 billion facility for liquefying and exporting fracked gas.

Said Dyson: “You know what else [the Natural Resources Police] have been given? They’ve been tasked as the homeland security folks out there. … Where I live we are about to create the largest LNG facility … in the United States of America. That is only 2 miles from a nuclear power plant, which by the way had to shut down twice last year … and less than 8 miles as the bird flies from [the] Naval Air Station [at] Patuxent River. What a vulnerable piece of property.”

He said the Department of Homeland Security gave money for the NRP “a couple years ago,” but some was allocated to the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office for police-car cameras and some went to the Charles County sheriff for a boat. “The point is … they are the ones that are tasked with protecting our homeland” despite devastating budget cuts. In 2009, the NRP had 425 officers, he said, but now it has 241 slots, of which 220 are filled. “That’s not acceptable. That’s not working,” he said.

And don’t expect the U.S. Coast Guard to pick up the slack either. At a meeting last year, he said, about increasing the number of tankers at Cove Point, “the Coast Guard told us they were not going to be able to add additional resources to protect that facility.” Although Coast Guard officials said the state would receive money, Dyson said he was concerned it would again be siphoned off for other departments.

Dyson said the DNR police can’t even keep up with routine calls. An officer at North Beach, for example, can’t quickly get to an incident at Point Lookout State Park, he said. Sen. J.B. Jennings, a Republican who represents Baltimore and Harford counties, agreed that the problem is severe, saying portions of Gunpowder Falls State Park in his district would also have to close in the summer “because DNR can’t police it.”

“We’ve got to do something,” Dyson said. The DNR reported 11 boating fatalities in 2012 “Who’s to say … if DNR officers — who are so good, so well-trained — … if they had been a little more available, maybe some of that wouldn’t have happened.”

Sen. Ronald Young, a Democrat representing Frederick and Washington counties, recommended a task force of NRP and state police, with Dyson at the head, to figure this out.

“I’m willing to do just about anything,” Dyson said.

Dyson has yet to take a position on Dominion’s plans for Cove Point. If he is willing to do “just about anything,” perhaps he would consider trying to slow the approval process for the export facility until we can assess the full environmental, health, security and economic effects on Marylanders from all the fracking, compressor stations, pipelines, forest disruption, methane emissions, air and noise pollution, tanker and truck traffic, and rising gas prices.

[An aide to Dyson took my questions on the phone and said the senator would get back to me. Then she asked for my home address, so when I get that form letter in June, I’ll give you an update. The senator has not yet replied to an email. ]

–elisabeth hoffman

 

protesters decry cove point

The Rev. Lennox Yearwood tells the crowd that the “Free State” should be renamed the “Fossil-Free State.”

A boisterous, determined, chanting, sign-waving crowd of at least 700 people from across the state and beyond converged on sunny Baltimore today to say that Dominion Resources’ planned Cove Point export facility for fracked gas is a threat to our health, our economy, our climate and our future.

“Maryland is here today because Maryland is at risk,” shouted Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, at the rally at the War Memorial Plaza downtown.

Nearby, the Public Service Commission was considering whether Virginia-based Dominion’s planned 130-megawatt gas-fired power plant and liquefaction facility would be in the “public interest.”

Outside, the protesters from around Maryland and neighboring states shouted, No, it would not be in their interest — or in the interest of future generations. “Listen to our voice; Dominion’s not our choice!” No, they said, it would not be in their interest to frack the countryside to get the gas for this enterprise. Because no matter how much Dominion says this facility has nothing to do with fracking, it has everything to do with fracking.

“Make this [fight] a part of your life until we win,” Mike Tidwell urged the crowd.

Tidwell compared the fight against Cove Point to the one decades ago against tobacco companies. The evidence in the surgeon general’s report on the dangers of smoking changed everything. “We have a new Camel cigarette threat,” he said. Like the tobacco companies, Dominion is insisting that lighting something on fire — fracked gas — is good for Maryland. Of the state’s 23 counties, 19 lie atop shale basins, he said. He demanded that the PSC “serve the public by rejecting this radical Cove Point plan.” And he urged U.S. Sens. Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin to “get our back” and demand the fullest environmental review of the project

“This is where Maryland makes its climate change stand,” said state Del. Heather Mizeur, a candidate for governor who for years has questioned the safety of fracking. “If I were in charge of this state, I would say no to Cove Point,” she said to cheers. If the plant were built, Maryland would see “rising pollution, rising prices and rising tides.”

“This is what dissent looks like. This is what democracy looks like,” Patuxent Riverkeeper Fred Tutman told the protesters.

Fred Tutman, the Patuxent Riverkeeper, rebuked Dominion for trying to buy off communities by “passing out money instead of straight answers.” Marylanders won’t “swap our environmental future for cash,” he said.

Many unanswered questions remain about the project, said Rebecca Ruggles of the Maryland Environmental Health Network. What are the health effects, she asked, of more pipeline explosions, more asthma cases, radon in the shale gas, water contamination and climate change?

The Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. of the Hip Hop Caucus encouraged Maryland to update its motto from Free State, in honor of its role in abolishing slavery, to Fossil-Free State. “This is our lunch-counter moment for the 21st century,” he said. “We must stop Cove Point.” He had the crowd chanting: “Thank God Almighty, we will be fossil free at last.”

“When you say no to Cove Point, you are saying no on behalf of yourselves, your communities and your natural resources,” said Karen Feridun, founder of Berks Gas Truth in Pennsylvania. “But you are also doing it for my state, my community, my natural resources.” Cabot Oil & Gas, the fracking company that left families in Dimock, Pa., without drinking water, has already signed a deal to send fracked gas to Cove Point, she said.

After the first round of speakers, protesters marched several blocks to the Public Service Commission, chanting, “Hey, O’Malley, what the frack. Get Dominion off our back!” and “Hey, O’Malley, lead on climate; it’s time to break your Cove Point silence!” And they yelled loudly so that the lawyers on the 23rd floor would hear them. They carried signs with a butterfly, salamander and fish. They hoisted little windmills that spun in the breeze. Some carried a huge inflatable pipeline with the sign “No Cove Point.” One sign said, “Fracking + Cove Point = Unacceptable Risk.” Another said, “Cove Point = Climate Disaster.” A banner from Frederick said: Fracking isn’t a bridge. It’s a dead end.”

Students came from Frostburg State, St. Mary’s College, Maryland Institute College of Art, University of Maryland and other schools. Parents, some pushing strollers, and workers and retirees came from as far as Garrett and Calvert counties. Some protesters also traveled from New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania. Clare Zdziebko lives four houses beyond the Dominion Cove Point property line in Lusby. She pushed her nearly 2-year-old son, Dominick, in a stroller. “He needs clean air and clean water,” she said.

After the march to the PSC came several more speakers. Ashok Chandwaney, a student at St. Mary’s, told the crowd he feared the world that his 15-month-old niece will inherit: “I wonder what the world will look like when she’s my age.” He said we are on the cusp of a climate catastrophe and he doesn’t want Dominion to be able to build this facility on a piece of land that will be submerged by climate change.

“We are united here today as one Maryland,” said Nadine Grabania, a winemaker who lives in Garrett County. “I’m here to ask you to promise me you will never think of Garrett or Calvert counties — or anyplace where the shale gas industry wants to do its risky business — as ‘elsewhere.’ ”

“We will not be silent,” said Ted Cady, whose town of Myersville in Frederick County is fighting a compressor station for fracked gas. “We will act. We will ensure the future health and safety of our children.”

“Polite people get poisoned,” Lois Gibbs told the crowd.

And Lois Gibbs, who led residents at New York state’s Love Canal in the 1970s, reminded the crowd that “facts will not win this fight.” For every fact you point out, industry will have an answer, she said. Those at Love Canal did not win “because we played nice,” she said. “Polite people get poisoned. Polite people get polluted.” When you brush your teeth and wash your face at night, also tweet O’Malley. Tweet your legislators. “Facts are critically important,” she said, but if we are going to win this fight we need to email and tweet and take vacation time for rallies.

“We’ve got a big fight ahead of us,” Tidwell said. “Make this a part of your life until we win. … Let’s go fight!”

—  elisabeth hoffman

Protesters march toward the Public Service Commission.

Paige Shuttleworth (left), who designed this banner and costumes, stands with protester Diane Wittner.

Ann Coren and Ron Meservey carry HoCo ClimateChange’s new banner.

 

sounds of science

  

My neighbor said he slept in for the first time in ages. That morning, our 15 inches of snow muffled the highway 500 feet behind his house, just beyond the stream and leafless stretch of woods. No cars drove in or out of our neighborhood. Venturing outside, we heard our shovels scraping, children sledding, birds chirping. That evening, with many side streets yet to be plowed, silence still reigned, broken only by footsteps, low voices of neighbors discussing inches fallen and inches to come.

If only we could muffle the industry spin to hear the voices of scientists on fracking. Science is quiet, methodical, cautious. So far, it has been no match for loud, overbearing, rash industry. Scientists collect water samples in drilling areas and find chemicals that disrupt hormone levels; they count birth defects in babies born in fracking areas; they note a decline in black-throated blue warblers and ovenbirds near drill pads; they tabulate the loss of core forests from well pad incursions. They are scrambling to measure and document the great unraveling around us and sound the alarm with PowerPoint presentations, laser pointers and conferences. It’s a tough slog.

Two scientists — Anthony Ingraffea from Cornell University and Zacariah Hildenbrand from the University of Texas at Arlington — explained their research, via webinar presentations, to Maryland’s Marcellus Shale advisory commission last week. Ingraffea’s message: Gas wells are leaky. Fracked gas wells leak more than the old-fashioned wells. And as gas wells age, the likelihood increases that they will leak. In fact, he says, 13 percent of fracked wells in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale will leak in about two years. Hildenbrand found elevated levels of arsenic and other disturbing surprises in drinking-water wells near drilling areas.

Ingraffea has a PhD in rock fracture mechanics and was previously a consultant to and researcher for the oil and gas industry. Now he spends much of his time (when he’s not teaching classes) aggravating his former clients by talking about his research on “loss of structural integrity” in wells or “loss of zonal isolation” or “sustained casing pressure” or “bubbling in the cellar” or any of the other euphemisms the industry uses to hide one of its big problems: leaking wells.

He’s also president of Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy, but the folks at industry’s Marcellus Drilling News call him a “fictional report writer” and “Tony the Entertainer.”

These wells, Ingraffea says, are leaking methane, a greenhouse gas 86 times more powerful over 20 years than CO₂. This leaking methane also can contaminate water wells, sometimes leaving homeowners with flammable tap water. Or contaminate rivers and streams far from the well site.

His recommendation for Garrett and western Allegany counties, which overlie the Marcellus Shale: “If you are really concerned about well-water contamination, impose the largest setback that industry will tolerate.” Also, limit the number of wells — by keeping drilling far from residential and commercial areas and parks. Also require frequent inspections and more thorough inspection techniques: “You will have to enforce and inspect for the life of the well — forever,” Ingraffea said. Regulations are like the Ten Commandments, he said. They are “suggestions that don’t preclude things from going wrong.” Also, keep in mind that the ability to inspect a structure that bores underground for two or three miles “is very limited” and expensive — and the “ability to repair is limited.”

If Garrett and Allegany counties allowed drilling on 90 percent of land (with the rest off-limits because of restrictions, such as setbacks), they could see as many as 7,800 wells (assuming eight wells per acre on 977 acres) — and in five years, at least 780 could be expected to be leaking, he told the commission.

Ingraffea’s latest research was an effort to predict how often wells would leak. Industry research, webinars and conferences indicate a constant struggle with leaks. As he said on a TEDx talk similar to his presentation to the commission: “Industry continuously sponsors conferences and workshops on leaking wells while proclaiming to the public and especially to regulators that very few wells leak.” Ingraffea and his team read through 75,505 inspection reports on 27,455 gas wells in Pennsylvania since 2000. Those before 2009 are mostly conventional wells, drilled vertically; those after 2009 are mostly unconventional or “deviated” wells, which drill down and then horizontally for fracking. Marcellus wells are exclusively those unconventional wells. Ingraffea used a Cox proportional hazard model, for those who understand statistics, to make predictions about well leakiness. Some of his conclusions:

• 13 percent of all Marcellus wells drilled in Pennsylvania since 2009 will leak after only two years.
• 45 percent of Marcellus wells drilled in northeast Pennsylvania since 2009 can be expected to fail after about six years.
• Unconventional (Marcellus) wells are 58 percent more likely to leak than conventional wells.

Implicit in fracking is that industry will put multiple wells on each frack pad in order to drill in many directions — as many as 19 at one site in Pennsylvania, he said. But “having many wells drilled close together on a pad … puts additional stress on a well that’s been cased and cemented,” he said. And more drilling means more demand placed on crews and equipment. And much of the drilling, he said, is being done by people who come from areas where snow and hills are rare. “If I were in charge, I’d be very careful who I give a permit to,” he said. (Although, he said, he found no correlation between size of the operator and number of leaks.)

Marylanders will have to decide “what leak rate you are willing to tolerate. Multiply [that] by the number of wells you want. … And figure how many people you’ll allow to lose water,” he said.

He said he didn’t know yet whether wells drilled after 2011, when Pennsylvania increased some requirements, were faring better. But he said strengthening well casings, which separate the drill from the aquifer, “is not the first place I would have gone” — because a casing is also supposed to be pliable and not shrink or crack.

“My opinion is that most of the contamination in Pennsylvania is a direct result of drilling through the aquifer.” While puncturing that aquifer, “there is no casing.” That would explain the quick contamination, he said.

Next up, Hildenbrand presented his study of arsenic levels in well water in 100 homes in the Barnett Shale in Texas. He and two other researchers chipped in $5,000 each to do the peer-reviewed study, which was published in 2013 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. They went door-to-door asking for water samples, getting doors slammed in their face and even a gun pointed at them, Hildenbrand said. Of the 91 water samples from wells in active drilling area (within 5 kilometers of a drill site), 29 had levels of arsenic above the level deemed safe by federal regulators; none of the samples beyond 3 kilometers had elevated levels. They also found elevated levels of barium, selenium and strontium in active drilling areas.

Critics dismiss these cases as “outliers,” Hildenbrand said. “But every single data point matters … because people drink that water. It’s our … moral obligation to tell them they have high levels of arsenic.”

The larger the setback, the greater the protection for people and groundwater, he said. In the area of his research, the setback was 250 feet and people were fighting for 1,000 feet. “I could throw a golf ball into a drilling site from people’s back porch.”

This project was the researchers’ “weekend job,” he said, explaining the decision to use their own money. “Taking funding from environmentalists or industry wouldn’t change our science but would change the perception of our science.”

Hoping to drown out these scientists at the meeting was the merchant of doubt, namely Mike Parker of the American Petroleum Institute and retired from ExxonMobil’s fracturing group. Setbacks are “a touchy subject,” he said. The concern — for industry, that is — is that setbacks “unreasonably limit development.” He said, “2,000 [feet] with a lousy company is no better than 500 with a stellar one.”

The Hildenbrand study? “Not quite the slam dunk” and “this needs to be looked at with a skeptical eye. They seem to pose more questions than conclusions.”

Of Ingraffea’s study of failing wells? “Not all ‘failures’ are necessarily failures.” They are “merely operators reporting something they have to report.” Some reports of “integrity issues” he termed “quite misleading.”

Reports of groundwater contamination? “To a scenario, most of these seem very unlikely.” He also repeated the industry claim that reports of methane in water are not industry’s fault because “methane in groundwater occurs naturally.”

He clearly hadn’t gotten the word about the research David Bolton presented to the commission last month showing that methane levels in Garrett and Allegany counties are very low — for now.

The unwilling bystanders, should fracking be permitted in Maryland, are hearing the scientists, as well as the warnings from residents in fracked states. Paul Roberts, the citizen representative on the state’s shale advisory panel, met with some of those bystanders in December. He told his fellow commissioners, “What I heard unequivocally is that right now, we all feel we ‘could lose the lottery’ and end up near one of these things. Farm families who have owned properties and mineral rights for generations might end up one mailbox down from a 40-acre fracking compound run by a Colorado-based contractor working for Chinese leaseholders drilling for gas to be shipped to Asia via Cove Point. Far-fetched? Well, it’s happening 50 miles away, in Greene County, Pennsylvania, and if Cove Point gets built, that’s the closest exit point.” He said he will push for a state “superfund” law that would cover fracking and “require the industry responsible to fully fund” a remediation program.

Scientists count and measure to show the changes, large and small, that industry dismisses as anecdotal and unimportant. Study by painstaking study, they outline the harm and the risks that industry would silence, even as every few days of late another pipeline ruptures or explodes, or a frack pad fire rages. And Chevron makes amends with pizza coupons. Or Halliburton pays a fine that will not undo the damage of, say, hydrochloric acid in the river. And then the Pennsylvania State Police labels as terrorists those who would protect our life-support system. The words of Pete Seeger are coming to mind: When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?”

Too risky:  CitizenShale and Chesapeake Climate Action Network released results from an independent risk analysis they commissioned by Ricardo-AEA. The European firm, which also led a fracking risk review for the European Commission, found a “high risk” of groundwater and surface water contamination; damage to water resources from excessive withdrawals; air pollution from gas flaring, pipeline leaks, compressors; noise; loss of biodiversity; damage to tourism from the industrial landscape; road hazards from traffic, accidents and spills. It also found a “very high risk” of loss of land to development.

–elisabeth hoffman