Free Poison Spring by E. G. Vallianatos Page A

environmental laws.
    In 1994, the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation sued the EPA for its refusal to regulate the gas drilling industry. Several years later, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals recommended that EPA bring the gas drillers under its control. EPA ignored the court but agreed to look into the potential effects of drilling chemicals on drinking water. 3
    “Fracking a well” means pointing a cannon at the source of the suspected gas, usually found in stone formations thousands of feet under the ground, often in or near aquifers of drinking water. Huge amounts of water mixed with tons of chemicals and sand blast their way through a downward shaft under tremendous pressure and demolish the stone that encloses the gas. Some of the three hundred compounds used in hydraulic fracturing include diesel fuel, a dangerous mixture of benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene. Other materials in fracking fluids include acids, formaldehyde, polyacrylamides, chromates, and other potentially toxic or carcinogenic substances.
    Rather than reveal these chemical cocktails to a public that will inevitably see the stuff in their rivers (and in their tap water), companies routinely put their fracking chemicals on a list of “trade secrets” and refuse to divulge their names or compositions. And while the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory used to inform us about what chemicals companies release in our environment, even that basic source of information is dead: the oil and gas industries long ago maneuvered their way out of being subject to this fundamental environmental law. 4
    Here’s how that travesty came about. The EPA started a fracking study in 2001 and completed it in 2004, during the administration of George W. Bush, a former oilman, and Dick Cheney, whose former company, Halliburton, had pioneered the fracking process. Predictably, the administration’s 2004 study found that injecting toxic fluids into gas wells “poses little or no threat” to drinking water and “does not justify additional study at this time.” 5
    This finding dismayed Weston Wilson, a scientist who had been with the EPA for thirty years. Wilson, an environmental engineer in the Denver office with long experience with oil and gas drilling, had observed carefully how EPA did its study. He knew the politics of the gas drilling industry, and how tightly those politics were linked to the execution of the EPA study.
    Since Wilson’s home state of Colorado had grand fracking ambitions—and since the state’s coal beds producing natural gas are located within drinking water aquifers—Wilson had good reason to worry. He wrote to three Colorado politicians, Senator Wayne Allard, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, and Representative Diana DeGette, and attached a report entitled “EPA Allows Hazardous Fluids to be Injected into Ground Water.” 6
    The Bush administration’s EPA report, Wilson wrote, was “scientifically unsound” and ran afoul of the Safe Water Drinking Act that prohibits the contamination or poisoning of our drinking water. The EPA had not only failed to adequately assess the risks of the toxic fracking fluids, it had used a panel of outside experts who openly favored the drilling industry. Five of the seven members of the study panel “appear to have conflicts of interest and may benefit from EPA’s decision not to conduct further investigation or impose regulatory conditions,” he wrote.
    EPA’s failure to regulate the injection of fluids into gas wells “may result in danger to public health and safety,” Wilson continued, noting that fracking “can also create new pathways for methane migration into aquifers containing good quality ground water.”
    Beyond the dangers to Colorado residents, Wilson predicted that EPA’s “flawed analysis” would open the floodgates for the gas drilling industry, who no longer had to concern themselves with drinking water contamination. Sure enough, Congress (and Dick Cheney) used