In 1976, Mary Ellen McConnell, a “concrete city kid,” moved from Bethesda, Maryland, to the verdant hills and river valleys of Clearville, Pennsylvania. She fell in love with rural life and settled on a 124-acre farm on the Marcellus Shale, a vast geological formation that stretches from New York to West Virginia and blankets Pennsylvania. 

But that tranquility proved to be short-lived: A few decades later, the area would be overrun with big fracking rigs from natural gas companies drawn to the rich stores of methane gas trapped in the 500 million-year-old sedimentary rock below.

The previous owners of McConnell’s home had signed a lease in perpetuity with Columbia Gas, a subsidiary of a major natural gas company. That meant that even though McConnell owned the farmhouse, she had no say in how the minerals below the surface were used. In return, she received an annual check of $248, or $2 per acre. 

McConnell spent years trying to cancel the lease, petitioning the company directly and even seeking legal counsel, but in 2010, Columbia Gas filed an injunction against McConnell and began seismic testing to use the area beneath her land for “storage” — of exactly what, McConnell does not know. 

Over the next few years after the injunction, she and her family experienced a barrage of severe health problems. McConnell developed breathing trouble, severe leg pain, and high blood pressure. She had two massive heart attacks. A 2012 test conducted by a private company, Martin Water Conditioning, revealed that her water contained more than twice the safe concentration of arsenic. A media representative from TC Energy, the parent company of Columbia Gas, said in an email that the reservoir formations beneath McConnell’s property are used to temporarily store natural gas beneath one mile of rock.

“Up until 10 years ago, I was a pretty healthy bitch,” said McConnell, now 80. “And, unfortunately, I’m dying.” 

The fracking process, the primary method of gas extraction in Pennsylvania, involves drilling vertically then horizontally into the earth and injecting pressurized water, sand, and chemicals into the ground to fracture the shale and force naturally stored methane out. It uses over a thousand different chemicals and pollutants, some of which are considered proprietary trade secrets, meaning nearby residents don’t always know what they’re exposed to. 

Of the nearly 18 million Americans living near oil and gas wells, close to 3 million are 65 and older, many concentrated in Pennsylvania, the country’s second biggest producer of methane gas behind Texas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

Living in an environmentally polluted area is dangerous for anyone, but for older adults like McConnell, exposure over many years has the potential for devastating, even life-ending, health problems. Compared to younger people, seniors are less able to excrete harmful substances, like arsenic and other heavy metals, as the liver and kidneys filter out toxins less effectively with age. And seniors are also more likely to have pre-existing conditions such as respiratory and cardiovascular problems that can amplify health risks.

In Pennsylvania, many older adults have been living in the shale field since fracking began in the early 2000s, meaning they have experienced decades of chronic, cumulative exposure to polluted air, water, and soil. Some don’t have the financial resources to move, let alone the mobility or community support to settle elsewhere. 

“We say ‘the dose makes the poison’ in public health,” said Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington. “So more exposure over a longer period of time is likely to be related to worse health outcomes.” 

Dr. Ned Ketyer, a retired Pennsylvania physician and president of the state’s chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has talked to many seniors suffering from a range of health problems they think are related to fracking. People living near oil and gas development report breathing problems, nosebleeds, rashes, cancer, high blood pressure, heart problems, dizziness, depression, and anxiety, according to a Physicians for Social Responsibility report Ketyer helped review.

“I’m convinced that, at the very least, exposure to this type of pollution contributes to the illnesses,” he said.

In recent years, studies published by researchers at Harvard and the University of Chicago have shown that the risk of death and hospitalization for cardiovascular events increases for older adults who live near oil and gas wells. 

Still, there remains a large gap in our understanding of how oil and gas development affects older adults’ health. Much of the research has focused on pediatric and perinatal health outcomes, which are easier to study in a shorter time period, while chronic diseases in older adults may take years to emerge.

Indeed, because the risk of chronic diseases, especially cardiovascular and respiratory conditions and cancers, increases with age, seniors are particularly vulnerable, said Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and Grist board member. 

“If you add environmental exposure to that, that can amplify your risk of having those disease outcomes or worsening your conditions,” Morello-Frosch said.

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Ray Kemble, a 68-year-old resident of Dimock, a town in northeast Pennsylvania, invested everything he had in his property, a five-bedroom home on a seven-acre lot. In 2006, he signed a gas lease with Cabot Oil and Gas, now Coterra. But he says he hasn’t gotten rich, only receiving about $5,000 in total. 

“I’ve worked every day in my daggone life,” said Kemble. “I never expected this shit to happen.” 

Kemble is far from a standout case. Many Pennsylvanians who were exposed to fracking waste didn’t benefit financially from fracking, according to a 2022 study published by a team of researchers including Casey, Morello-Frosch, and UC Berkeley environmental scientist David González.

One reason for that is that the people living on the land being fracked aren’t always entitled to royalties from extraction. In Pennsylvania, estates can be split, meaning one person can own what sits above ground — say, a house or farm — and someone else can own all the minerals that lie under the surface. In a split estate, the person who gets paid for leasing the minerals to a gas company may not live on the land where the fracking occurs. The authors of the study found that in poorer communities, the owners of mineral rights were less likely to live where extraction occurred, while those living on the land were more likely to be exposed to high volumes of fracking waste.

Even when residents do sign gas leases and earn royalties from fracking, they often don’t reap the big economic benefits they anticipated, Morello-Frosch said. And they’re left dealing with a host of unanticipated consequences, like poisoned air and water.

In 2009, Kemble’s well became contaminated by the gas industry and he had to start hauling water from a neighboring town. Since then, he says his health has deteriorated dramatically. He experiences breathing problems and has lost all but five teeth after the others began rotting and falling out of his mouth. In the span of a year and half, he has undergone seven cancer surgeries. 

Last winter, Kemble traveled to Florida for several doctors’ appointments. Immediately, his breathing improved, he said. But within 24 hours of returning to Dimock, he once again had trouble breathing.

Kemble doesn’t think his health problems can be attributed to the wells alone: He worked for the gas industry for three years and believes the job may also have exposed him to harmful chemicals. “This industry is basically killing us,” he said. 

Kemble’s neighbor Rebecca Roter had a similar experience. After signing a gas lease, she noticed her water smelled like an “organic chemistry lab.” Testing by a private company hired by the gas company revealed contamination from volatile organic compounds, which are produced during the fracking process and are linked to health problems including eye, ear, and throat irritation, headaches, kidney and liver damage, and cancer. Roter said she developed skin rashes, sinus and ear infections, mouth ulcers, and swollen lymph nodes. 

Like Kemble, she had to find replacement water for herself, her dogs, and her late father, who was living with her at the time. Every week, Roter would fill up 20 five-gallon jugs at a friend’s house, no matter the weather. She found the situation untenable. When she trudged through snow and ice to retrieve the water, she would sing to herself the Rolling Stones’ “You Gotta Move.” 

And eventually, she did. In 2015, Roter sold her mineral rights to the gas company, giving them the ability to extract gas from the land beneath the property without having to pay her royalties. Rather than the series of small payments over time she had received under the lease agreement, the sale generated a large lump sum — enough money for her to relocate to Georgia. 

Now 62, Roter calls herself a “Pennsylvania shale gas refugee.” Since leaving, she says her health has gotten much better.

The water situation in Dimock, however, has improved only marginally since Roter left. As part of a 2022 plea agreement, Coterra Energy Inc., the corporate successor of the company responsible for the initial water contamination in Dimock, now delivers weekly water to affected homes. The service will continue until a new water line is constructed by 2027. George Stark, a Coterra employee, told Grist that the company has completed payment for the water line and that Pennsylvania American Water will be responsible for its construction.  

But Kemble still fears he won’t be able to sell his home for anything close to what he paid for it. He has all but abandoned the country lifestyle that drew him to Dimock. He has a swimming pool in the backyard but doesn’t have safe water to fill it. He stopped growing vegetables because he thinks the soil is poisoned. Kemble doesn’t hunt anymore because he worries the animals themselves are contaminated. But he remains stuck in place.

“When all your money’s tied up right here, you’re kind of screwed.” 

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For older adults like Kemble who can’t afford to leave the land they fear is poisoning them, many say there are not enough official resources to help. Area agencies on aging typically do not offer specific support to seniors affected by gas development. Instead, they often recommend older residents file complaints with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP. 

The DEP responds by testing for 26 possible contaminants. If officials determine there is a need to test for additional pollutants, they may expand the list — but it can be difficult to pinpoint what to look for. Although well operators are required to disclose all the compounds used in the fracking process to the department, companies may still designate some compounds as proprietary, said Colleen Connolly, a DEP communications manager. 

Organizations such as the Environmental Health Project and Reducing Outdoor Contaminants in Indoor Spaces work to educate Pennsylvanians about the hazards of living close to gas development. The latter offers instructions for constructing at-home air-filtration systems and leads a low-cost monitoring program that allows Pennsylvanians to measure the level of particulate matter — tiny airborne substances, both solid and liquid — in their homes. 

But González, the UC Berkeley epidemiologist who was part of a team that examined strategies to protect people from oil and gas development, said that isn’t enough. He and other researchers concluded that eliminating the hazard — banning new wells and phasing out existing fossil fuel development — was the best way to protect people’s health. The least effective ways were providing residents with mitigation tools, like air and water filters, and asking them to wear personal protective equipment. Scant resources exist specifically for affected seniors, many of whom are low-income. 

Even for older Pennsylvanians who have not developed serious health problems since gas development began, bearing witness to the destruction of the forested countryside elicits tremendous grief and stress. 

Barbara Jarmoska, a 75-year-old resident of Lycoming County in central Pennsylvania, nicknamed the “bull’s-eye of the Marcellus Shale,” has a lifetime of memories on her land. She grew up taking baths in the nearby creek, as the house had no indoor plumbing. She would fall asleep to the croak of bullfrogs and walk through the woods in search of box turtles. 

As the gas industry has fracked the area, Jarmoska has watched the box turtles disappear, the cacophony of bullfrogs replaced by the din of drill bits and 18-wheelers. Now, the landscape she loved is preserved only in her memory. 

“It changes your sense of place and safety,” Jarmoska said. She has started taking medication for high blood pressure, which she suspects is related to the “relentless stress” of living near gas development, “both seeing the consequences and fearing the unknown.” 

Back in Clearville, McConnell says she received an appraisal of “no value” on her property — which she attributes to the nearby fracking. Even if she were able to sell her land, she has limited mobility and would be leaving behind neighbors on whose friendship and support she has relied. 

Still, there’s a part of her that cannot bear the thought of moving anywhere else. McConnell has buried her loved ones, including her son, who died from cancer at age 50, on her farm. 

“The farm was bought for me, and that is where I intend to stay,” she said. “Everything I love is right here. It’s dead, but I love it.”

Kate Raphael is a writer with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. She reported this story through a grant from The SCAN Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pennsylvania’s fracking boom is hurting its oldest residents on Nov 6, 2023.

Earth just experienced one of its hottest, and most damaging, periods on record. Heat waves in the United States, Europe, and China; catastrophic flooding in India, Brazil, Hong Kong, and Libya; and outbreaks of malaria, dengue, and other mosquito-borne illnesses across southern Asia claimed tens of thousands of lives. The vast majority of these deaths could have been averted with the right safeguards in place.

The World Meteorological Organization, or WMO, published a report last week that shows just 11 percent of countries have the full arsenal of tools required to save lives as the impacts of climate change — including deadly weather events, infectious diseases, and respiratory illnesses like asthma — become more extreme. The United Nations climate agency predicts that significant natural disasters will hit the planet 560 times per year by the end of this decade. What’s more, countries that lack early warning systems, such as extreme heat alerts, will see eight times more climate-related deaths than countries that are better prepared. By midcentury, some 50 percent of these deaths will take place in Africa, a continent that is responsible for around 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions each year.

“The interconnection between climate and health is undeniable,” WMO Secretary-General ​​Petteri Taalas wrote in an introduction to the State of Climate Services report. The assessment has been published annually since 2019. This is the first time its authors have focused exclusively on health. 

“Climate services” is an umbrella term for the varied methods governments use to alert communities to pressing climate-related hazards. Seasonal forecasts, flash flood alerts, and excessive heat warnings are all examples. Climate services can be harnessed to safeguard public health, but a small fraction of countries assessed by the report — just 23 percent — use climatological data to inform their surveillance of potential health risks, which means much of the world is at a disadvantage. The report emphasizes that investing in climate services is an effective and relatively affordable way to help the people most vulnerable to the consequences of global warming. 

“We’re going to see more and more of these unprecedented weather events, and countries need to start preparing,” said Madeleine Thomson, head of climate impacts at the global charitable foundation the Wellcome Trust, which was one of more than 30 nonprofit, governmental, and academic contributors to the report. 

The report highlights a number of examples that demonstrate how governments can successfully harness climate data to produce better health outcomes in their communities. 

Up to a million people experience food insecurity in Mauritania every year, particularly during the agricultural lean period, which lasts from May to August. These conditions force families in the northwest African country to sell their livestock at extremely low prices and marry off their minor daughters in order to reduce the number of mouths they have to feed at home. The Mauritanian government, in collaboration with the World Bank, the U.N. World Food Programme, and other groups, developed a predictive early-warning system for drought conditions using remote sensing, a vegetation and biomass index, and household food security data. The system, called the Elmaouna program, sent cash to 47,000 of the nation’s most vulnerable households during the 2022 lean season. 

Other case studies presented in the report include a climate and health bulletin in Colombia aimed at reducing cases of dengue and cholera, a temperature-extremes alert system in Argentina that issued 987 regional heat alerts in 2021 and 2022, a drought-alert network in Kenya, and a Lyme disease surveillance system that helped raise awareness about the spread of the disease in Canada. 

International institutions, such as the WMO and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are waking up to the importance of centering public health in their approach to addressing climate change and its effects. Research journals have been sounding the alarm about the climate and health overlap for years. The Lancet, a leading medical journal that has been covering the health impacts of climate change annually since 2015, published a report in 2020 that warned that the fallout from rising temperatures threatened to undo five decades of progress on public health. Nevertheless, health has never featured prominently in global climate talks — until now. 

Next month, the United Nations will hold its 28th Conference of the Parties, or COP28, in the United Arab Emirates. The international climate conference will host its first-ever “health day,” a signal that the topic is starting to become a bigger priority for climate change negotiators. At COP27 last year, a number of wealthy countries announced tens of millions in funding for climate services in underdeveloped nations. That funding helped spur some of the examples outlined in WMO’s report this year. The report and others like it that raise the alarm about the health impacts of warming could inform negotiations at this year’s conference and lead to more funding commitments from developed countries. 

“People are being affected and health services are being affected by a changing climate,” said Kristie Ebi, an epidemiologist and climate change researcher at the University of Washington who reviewed WMO’s data but was not involved in the writing of the report. “At the same time, there are insufficient resources to help make sure that we can protect people’s health. One relatively easy way to change the situation is more investments in climate services.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate data can save lives. Most countries can’t access it. on Nov 6, 2023.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The prolific oil and gas wells of Texas also generate billions of gallons of salty liquid known as produced water. A lot of this toxic water, just like crude oil, tends to get spilled. 

Not just occasionally, but hundreds of times a year. From a large spill of 756,000 gallons into the Delaware River in West Texas that sent chloride levels soaring, to hundreds of small spills in one Permian Basin county, there’s hardly a corner of Texas not impacted. But messy record-keeping and ambiguous rules at the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates oil and gas drilling, have long obscured the scope and severity of these spills from the public.

The Railroad Commission has never formally adopted 2009 draft guidelines for reporting and cleaning up produced water spills. The agency delegated the authority to set different reporting thresholds to district offices, in a system that relies on self-reporting by offenders and includes little enforcement to assure accuracy and compliance. 

A commission spokesperson said that produced water spills must be reported and that the agency fully investigates and mitigates all spills. But the agency has never adopted official produced water spill guidelines and numerous companies are under the impression they are not required to report spills at all.

Inside Climate News has conducted the first-ever public analysis of produced water spills in Texas, working from data provided in response to open records requests to the Railroad Commission. 

Over the decade from 2013 and 2022, the analysis found that oil and gas companies reported more than 10,000 individual spills totaling more than 148 million gallons of produced water. Where possible, companies use vacuum trucks to suck up as much spilled water as they can. But only about 40 percent of the water reported spilled from 2013 to 2022 was recovered.

The spills ranged from small leaks of less than 10 gallons to massive incidents—19 of the reported spills exceeded 500,000 gallons. Although they represented a tiny minority of spills, with about 350 reported in the data, some of the most damaging incidents took place when produced water was spilled directly into streams, rivers or lakes. 

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Both conventional oil and gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, rely upon large quantities of water, sand and proprietary chemicals, some of which are toxic, to free the oil and gas from geologic formations deep underground. Produced water is the liquid waste that comes back to the surface and contains both the proprietary drilling fluids and naturally occurring hazardous compounds from the earth, including arsenic and organic compounds like benzene, a carcinogen.

The highly saline water can render land barren for years. Residents have filed lawsuits detailing damages from contaminated well water to poisoned cattle.

In East Texas’ Anderson County, cattle rancher Tate Willfong noticed a produced water spill on his property from Vista Energy Consulting’s pipeline in July that killed the grass his cattle graze on. He said he reported the spills to the Railroad Commission but only got help after he went to a local television reporter at KETK in Tyler. Vista Energy Consulting did not respond to a request for comment.

“I ain’t got a beef with the Railroad Commission at this time,” Willfong said. “But I didn’t get a lot out of them in the beginning.”

In Lamesa, the county seat of Dawson County in the high plains where Permian Basin oil production borders cotton farms and towering wind turbines, Doty Huff and Saul Torres filed a lawsuit against an energy firm named Enhanced Midstream, alleging that two leaks from one of the company’s produced water pipelines contaminated their well water and caused a “total loss of fair market value” of their property. Enhanced Midstream did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In Knox County, North of Abilene, rancher Tim Foote sued after his cattle knocked down a fence around a Texcel Exploration tank where produced water and oil was stored. The livestock came into contact with spilled produced water and 132 cattle died. An appeals court recently upheld a trial court’s decision that the company cannot be held responsible.

“There’s a reason why you salted your enemy’s land in the Bible,” said Sarah Stogner, an oil and gas lawyer in the Permian Basin, who has documented damages from produced water spills. “Nothing grows.”

Spill logs reveal trends

The Railroad Commission records of these spills are not held in a database allowing easy analysis. Instead, they are recorded in chaotically-maintained spreadsheets called “spill logs.” Before running the analysis, Inside Climate News had to diagnose and fix various problems with the data, including inconsistent use of units, incorrectly entered dates, misaligned columns, duplicated entries, misspellings of company names and more.

The totals from the analysis are likely incomplete. Different district offices of the Railroad Commission ask companies to report spills at different thresholds, and the entire system depends on operators self-reporting their mishaps—with little enforcement to ensure that they do so consistently and accurately. 

In addition to analyzing the central spill logs provided by the Railroad Commission, Inside Climate News obtained spill logs from its regional offices throughout the state. The analysis of these sprawling records, spread across more than 200 spreadsheet files, gave a similar overall picture, but recorded almost 11 million additional gallons of spilled water. 

Further scrutiny of the differences between the central- and district-level records revealed several large spills of produced water recorded at the district level which were not found in the Railroad Commission’s central records. In some cases this was because the corresponding central record had apparently not been updated from an initial entry. Others, including a spill of more than 500,000 gallons in November 2022 from a corroded pipe operated by Occidental Petroleum at a site in Gaines County, seemed to be missing from the central records altogether. Occidental did not respond to a request for comment.

“There have been different systems of tracking spills over time, so there could be differences if you’re comparing different logs,” a Railroad Commission spokesperson said.

Railroad commission leaves produced water spill rules vague

As hydraulic fracturing allowed Texas to rapidly increase oil production, vast amounts of produced water were also generated. But even as fracking transformed the oil and gas industry, the Railroad Commission did not adopt formal rules for reporting and remediation of produced water spills.

A 2022 report calculated that the Permian Basin alone is generating 3.9 billion barrels, or over 168 billion gallons, of produced water a year. That means wastewater must be piped off well pads, stored in tanks and trucked to disposal wells. At each step in the process, the risk for spills is present. 

The Railroad Commission currently has 180 oil and gas inspectors statewide. As of July, Texas had over 161,000 oil wells and 86,000 gas wells in production. 

The Railroad Commission’s Rule 3.20 requires oil and gas companies to immediately notify a district office after spills of oil or condensate, a low-density hydrocarbon liquid present in natural gas. Those spills are reported on a publicly available Railroad Commission form known as the H-8. Any crude oil spill of over 210 gallons, or five barrels, must be reported. State law prohibits pollution of above-ground or subterranean water.

The H-8 form does not include produced water spills. However, a Railroad Commission spokesperson told Inside Climate News that companies must report produced water spills. 

The spokesperson said the Commission issued 116 violations of Rule 3.20 during fiscal year 2022. However, Railroad Commission staff were not able to identify how many of these violations were for produced water spills as opposed to oil spills.

The commission drafted the guidelines for produced water spill cleanup in 2009 that were never formally adopted. The guidelines state that companies are not required to report produced water spills but are “encouraged” to do so, an apparent contradiction of the commission’s statement to Inside Climate News. 

This ambiguity has bred confusion. A spokesperson for Apache, a Houston-based oil and gas company operating in the Permian Basin, said the Railroad Commission does not require reporting. 

In an email exchange provided to Inside Climate News, a Chevron employee told a Crane County land owner who had complained to the company about a produced water spill on her ranch that the company was not required to report produced water spills. A Chevron spokesperson said the company’s policy is “to follow all RRC requirements for reporting spills, including produced water,” without elaborating. 

According to the District 8 office in Midland, which covers the heart of the Permian Basin, companies only must report spills larger than 250 barrels (10,500 gallons) of produced water. But there are many smaller spills on the district spreadsheets, indicating companies may have their own internal standards.

Meanwhile, produced water is included in neighboring New Mexico’s spills rule, which classifies spills of 25 barrels or more as major releases and spills between five to 25 barrels as minor releases. In New Mexico, both major and minor releases are prohibited and must be reported and remediated.

According to the conservation non-profit Center for Western Priorities, during 2022, operators in New Mexico reported 5,085,654 gallons (121,087 barrels) of produced water spills.

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Company policies vary

Inside Climate News reached out to the 10 companies with the highest total volume of produced water spills with questions about their internal policies for reporting spills and remediation. Several of the companies have been sold since the spills occurred, in which case the new owners were contacted.

“Texas has robust reporting requirements and cleanup standards for spills that may incidentally occur during oil and gas production,” Permian Basin Petroleum Association President Ben Shepperd said in a statement. “Oil and gas operators in the Permian Basin each have best practices they follow for handling produced water.”

An Apache spokesperson said the company takes “strict measures to store and transport produced water in a manner that reduces the risk of impacts on soil, groundwater and surface water quality.”

The spokesperson said the company reports any spill larger than 100 barrels (4,200 gallons) that “breaches secondary containment or may be deemed sensitive.”

A spokesperson for ExxonMobil, in reference to its subsidiary XTO Energy, said the company complies “with the reporting requirements of the Texas Railroad Commission” but did not elaborate. The spokesperson said remediation depends on salinity and soil type.

Diamondback Energy, which is not on the top 10 list, but in 2019 acquired Energen, which appears on the list, is one of the few companies to include produced water spill data in its annual sustainability reports. According to the Midland-based company’s 2023 report, spills increased 67 percent from 2021 to 2022.

Ashley Watt, the owner of Antina Ranch in Crane County who complained to Chevron about a 2020 spill on her property that she said killed a number of mesquite trees, said oil and gas operators in the Permian Basin often fail to report spills to the Railroad Commission. 

“I have never seen an operator self-report anything. Full stop, that’s it,” Watt said. “How many speeding tickets would be written if the only way that you got caught was self-reporting?”

Watt said her property alone has “hundreds of wells” and “hundreds of miles of flow lines,” which transport oil and gas. Watt said landowners, let alone inspectors, are unable to regularly check on every well or pipeline. 

“It’s almost just luck when us or anyone catches a spill,” she said.

Watt said a Chevron representative eventually told her that produced water is not included in the Railroad Commission “definition of spills required to give notice” and the company would not be reporting the spill to the Railroad Commission.

A Chevron representative declined to comment on the spill.

Railroad commission spill response protocol

Although the Railroad Commission spokesperson told Inside Climate News that the agency requires remediation of all spills, records and interviews show that the commission only required cleanup after some spills, not all.  

Apache reported that a storage tank spilled 77,500 barrels (3,255,000 gallons) of produced water on July 29, 2020 in Reeves County, about 10 miles north of Balmorhea, Texas.

According to documents provided in a records request, Railroad Commission inspectors visited the spill area, which covered approximately one-quarter mile by one-half mile, on July 29, Sept. 8 and Nov. 12, 2020. During each inspection, the RRC noted produced water pooled on the ground, heavy salt crystals and distressed vegetation.

On Nov. 17, the Commission moved to sever Apache’s lease because the spill violated state rules. Apache contacted the Commission to appeal. On Jan. 26, 2021, District 8 Director Jeffery Morgan replied, siding with Apache. 

“After further review, no further action will be needed for this site at this time,” Morgan wrote. 

Apache kept the lease. The Railroad Commission did not require remediation or issue any penalties.

An Apache spokesperson said regulators and the company agreed that it would be “more harmful” to dig up the soil instead of allowing rainfall to dilute the produced water.

The Commission spokesperson said companies are required to remove as much of the liquid as possible after spills and in some cases remove the contaminated soil. But experts said the agency should take a more holistic approach to remediation.

In the case of the 756,000 gallon spill from a flow line into the Delaware River in West Texas, the Railroad Commission’s Midland District Office was notified immediately on Aug. 1, 2017, but took a back seat to other agencies in monitoring potential pollution.

The event occurred after a Cimarex Energy saltwater disposal unit in Culberson County lost power during a rainstorm. Roughly 18,000 barrels of produced water—or 756,000 gallons, more than enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool—spilled from the flow line into the Delaware River, in addition to 420 gallons of oil. The river is home to the endangered Texas hornshell mussel. 

The produced water had chloride levels between 80,000 and 100,000 parts per million. The EPA recommends drinking water not exceed 250 parts per million. 

On Aug. 4, a staff member at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality emailed a colleague after a counterpart in New Mexico had told her about the spill. “Did they notify y’all about this?” she asked. “We obviously have concerns. Do we have anyone checking this out?”

On Aug. 5, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department documented a fish kill in the Delaware River, including minnows, perch and carp. A Railroad Commission inspector, Glenn Gainey, visited the site on Aug. 7 and district engineering specialist Wade Goode met with company executives two days later. 

“I had a meeting with Cimarex representatives to discuss the progress on the remediation, the plan going forward, and to get water sample test results,” Goode wrote in an inspection update. “Cimarex informed me the booms they deployed have not seen any oil sheen.”

The Environmental Protection Agency sent their own inspectors on Aug. 9. By Sept. 21, the company seemed to think remediation was wrapping up. 

“We conducted a flyover this past Thursday and since we are not observing any sheening or negative impacts to the river or surrounding shoreline, Cimarex will be discontinuing this operation,” a Cimarex supervisor wrote.

The EPA disagreed. The agency’s Region 6, which covers Texas and New Mexico, eventually issued a consent agreement requiring Cimarex to pay a $13,220 penalty and continue water testing for three years on a 40-mile section of the Delaware River. 

Cimarex Energy has since merged with Cabot Oil & Gas to create Coterra Energy, which did not respond to a request for comment. 

The involvement of EPA, TCEQ and other agencies in the Cimarex spill was, in many ways, atypical. For most produced water spills, the Railroad Commission acts on its own. A TCEQ spokesperson said while the Railroad Commission has jurisdiction over produced water spills, the TCEQ may initially respond to reports of spills. 

A spokesperson for EPA Region 6 said the Railroad Commission is not required to notify federal officials about produced water spills, unlike crude oil spills over a certain size.

The Railroad Commission’s 2009 draft guidelines for cleaning up produced water spills focus on reducing chloride levels in soil and identifying potential groundwater contamination. The guidelines also recommend testing for additional contaminants, including benzene, toluene and metals in some cases.

Stogner, the attorney, said in practice, many companies in the Permian Basin simply remove the soil and replace it with caliche, a sedimentary rock common in the area. She said the remediated areas are unfit for any other productive use like agriculture. Stogner is running against incumbent Railroad Commission Chair Christi Craddick as a member of the Forward Party. In 2022, she unsuccessfully challenged Commissioner Wayne Christian.

John Lacik has used his proprietary soil amendment for produced water spills on sites from North Dakota to Louisiana. He advocates for remediating the soil onsite, instead of trucking in soil or rock. Lacik, who now owns the Texas-based remediation company Gromega LLC, said chloride shouldn’t be the only constituent considered in remediation. 

“Treatment types have to be based and determined on each site,” Lacik said. “If there was a cure-all fix, we’d be using it everywhere.”

Experts agreed the problem of salty produced water spills in Texas isn’t going away any time soon. But Lacik said there are solutions for those willing to look for them.

“Maybe I’m just a dreamer on this,” Lacik said. “But the good Lord only made so much land. What is the cost limit to restore land so that it will be productive again?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Oil and gas companies spill millions of gallons of wastewater in Texas on Nov 5, 2023.

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Five-gallon plastic pails holding a toxic chemical linked to cancer sat for years on the shelves of a fire department in south-central Wisconsin. Finally, in a heralded statewide cleanup, they were gathered up and shipped off. 

“I don’t have to worry about something being knocked over, broken open,” said Jefferson Fire Chief Ron Wegner. “So it’s just nice to have it gone.”

But where did it go?

It turns out there are no easy answers for dealing with “forever chemicals” called PFAS: a family of 12,000 human-made compounds that don’t readily break down in nature. Removed from Wisconsin, the birthplace of the modern environmental movement, means buried in the ground in Alabama, where the federal government has flagged areas as vulnerable to environmental injustice.

In Wisconsin, experts weighed the most socially and environmentally responsible solutions. The state is trucking more than 38,500 gallons of PFAS-containing firefighting foam more than 700 miles to Emelle, Alabama, the home of one of the country’s largest hazardous waste landfills.

It sits in the Alabama Black Belt, a string of rural counties historically known for fertile and dark soil, America’s Cotton Kingdom and the slave trade. Remnants of that legacy still show today. Sumter County is home to 12,345 residents, about 70 percent of whom are Black and nearly a third of whom live in poverty. More than half are unemployed.

“A state that is predominantly white is sending its waste that’s toxic to the Black Belt,” said sociologist Robert Bullard, a Texas Southern University professor who surveyed Emelle residents in the 1980s as part of a landmark study on environmental racism in the American South. “It’s not going to a predominantly white area in Alabama. It’s not going into the rich area. It’s going to the Black Belt.”

In 1977, relatives of segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace opened the landfill, which Chemical Waste Management purchased the following year. It sparked opposition from its birth, with detractors believing developers targeted a community that lacked the power to object. Today, Chemical Waste Management annually disposes of 274 million pounds of hazardous waste from all over the nation.

The landfill’s entrance sits a few hundred yards from M&M Market, a gas station and lunch counter where two old high school friends chatted on a summer afternoon.

A woman served the day’s lunch special, country-fried steak. The two companions reminisced about graduating from Sumter County High in 1973. Talk turned to rumors about the next batch of waste destined for the landfill.

“You can’t safely contain nothing that’s man-made,” said military veteran Jimmie Williams, 69. “So why bring it in here?”

He sees a lot of sickness around him — conditions people don’t understand, like heart disease, strokes and even unexplained death in young people. There is no evidence to suggest it is connected to PFAS or the landfill, but he feels in the dark.

“We don’t know,” Williams said. “We’re lost.”

PFAS cleanups left to states

As public alarm about PFAS grows, many states are grappling with the chemicals, which are found in a bevy of consumer products like nonstick pans, food wrappers and raincoats.

Firefighters question how to handle stockpiles of fluorinated foam that contains PFAS. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has yet to institute disposal requirements, leaving states to “figure out what to do,” observed Darsi Foss, a former Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources division administrator who led the team that developed the foam collection program.

Officials in some states opted to burn the foam, which can disperse PFAS into the air.

Without an affordable and safe way to destroy the compounds, a hazardous waste landfill seemed best.

But Bullard, often called the “father of environmental justice,” said transporting PFAS to Emelle perpetuates — even if unintentionally — environmental racism by disproportionately shifting the burden and risk onto a largely poor community of color. While Wisconsin can discard a piece of its PFAS problem, Sumter County residents lacked the choice of whether to accept it.

Emelle fits into a larger pattern, Bullard said. A 2007 study he led found people of color made up 56 percent of the population in neighborhoods near the nation’s hazardous waste landfills. The figure jumped to 69 percent when analyzing clusters of two or more facilities. Race independently predicted hazardous waste locations— more than income and education levels.

There has been no reported contamination of community drinking water due to the Emelle landfill, and company spokesperson Tricia Farace told reporters the facility “utilizes engineered controls to prevent impacts to groundwater and the neighboring environment.”

But Bullard says medical outcomes alone can’t measure effects. 

Few people, he said, want their community to be considered America’s “waste dumping ground.”

“Harm can be measured in terms of the extent to which people are disrespected.”

Wisconsin touts firefighting foam collection 

Manufacturers comprehended the hazards of PFAS by the 1960s but concealed them for decades.

Thousands of U.S. cities and counties, and a host of states and utilities, including many in Wisconsin and Alabama, sued the 3M Company, DuPont and other manufacturers, alleging they failed to alert the public of exposure risks, such as altered hormone levels, high cholesterol, hypertension in pregnancy, kidney and testicular cancers and reduced vaccine effectiveness. In 2022, the EPA released health advisories, suggesting virtually no amount of several PFAS is safe for consumption.

The chemicals are increasingly turning up in public drinking water around the country, prompting cleanup efforts nationwide.

In a 2020 survey of Wisconsin fire departments, about 76 percent of respondents said they possessed or previously used fluorinated foam, some dating to the 1980s. Many wanted to learn about their liability and how to get rid of the stuff. 

One department explained that nobody would take its stored foam, while another reported awaiting government assistance, according to redacted survey responses provided to reporters through a public records request. Two departments previously sent their foam to an incinerator, and one dumped it into the sewer.

In 2021, Wisconsin lawmakers allocated $1 million to collect the foam.

“We’ll be gathering that PFAS and finding the right and appropriate way to get rid of it and get it off the landscape,” extolled former Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Secretary Preston Cole, the state’s top environmental official, last year. “What we’re doing at the DNR is rolling up our sleeves, and on the heels of the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act.”

Officials examined other state approaches.

At least two, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, opted to incinerate their fluorinated foam. Washington considered doing so, but withdrew the proposal in the face of public concern over pollution risks. Colorado paid fire departments to store their foam. New York officials would not disclose their disposal methods to reporters. Michigan and Indiana contracted with a company that owns a hazardous waste landfill in Idaho.

Wisconsin took its cues from its Midwestern neighbors.

“We really felt like, at that time, using the hazardous waste landfill was the safest option available,” said Mimi Johnson, director of the Office of Emerging Contaminants at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. “There are not many in the country, and in particular, that will take PFAS, knowingly.”

None of the country’s 60 permitted hazardous waste landfills are in Wisconsin.  

The state contracted with North Shore Environmental Construction, which it previously hired to clean up PFAS spills.

Dave Johnson, the company’s executive vice president, said North Shore has long worked with Chemical Waste Management.

Chemical Waste Management also offered indemnification to Wisconsin for liability in case the  landfill is ever flagged for cleanup under the federal Superfund law.

“We give recommendations on where it goes,” Johnson said. “The customer has to decide: What is their company’s risk? What is their company’s image? … What’s cost-effective now? What’s socially responsible?”

When North Shore contracted with the state, the company committed to avoid contributing to environmental injustice. 

“You obviously don’t want to go into an area that’s going to be a disadvantage to somebody,” Johnson said.

When asked, Mimi Johnson said the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources was unaware of the Alabama landfill’s contentious history.

In November 2022, the agency hired an environmental justice policy adviser, Julie Majerus, who was not involved in the planning of the PFAS collection program.

“The DNR cannot change the fact that the disproportionate harms currently exist,” she said, “but we can begin the work to right those harms and better engage with the communities most impacted to include their voices in our decision-making.”

Landfill ignited Alabama protests

Multiple protesters chained themselves to a fence in protest of Emelle becoming what they called the nation’s “pay toilet.” It was November 1987, and they aimed to block waste trucks from entering the landfill.

Traces of toxic chemicals had been found in the soil at the site, according to local news reports. The state said it would test further.

One chained activist was a local housewife and a former Baptist Sunday school teacher. Another was a civil rights leader who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.

They were arrested and charged with criminal trespassing.

From the landfill’s founding, the site generated numerous demonstrations and spurred the formation of grassroots organizations like Sumter Countians Organized for the Protection of the Environment and Alabamians for a Clean Environment, or ACE. However, Chemical Waste Management also was one of the region’s largest employers, and its payments through a state-imposed waste tax provided crucial revenue for schools and county government, increasing the difficulty of opposing the facility.

Linda Munoz, an early ACE leader, initially had no idea a hazardous waste landfill had been built in Emelle, about 23 miles away from her antebellum home in the woods of Cuba, Alabama. It was an era when the country was still trying to figure out what to do with its hazardous and toxic waste, prior to federal regulations.

“And I thought, ‘No way. That’s just not possible.’ So I started doing some research,” she told reporters this summer. “There was nothing that had to be done about the waste or the way it was dumped or the linings or anything.”

Munoz worried that toxic materials might leak into the aquifer beneath the landfill.

“Are they giving us blood money for this?” she asked. “We have one of the poorest counties in Alabama and probably in the United States. So it just isn’t fair for us to be the sacrifice zone.”

‘You have to beg for what you want’

On a June afternoon, Dorothy Oliver stepped into the small mobile home she runs as a convenience store — selling chips, toilet paper, soap, cigarettes and basic essentials in Panola, a town of 74 about 15 miles north of Emelle.

Oliver jokes that she is Panola’s informal mayor, and her trailer store is like a city hall. People seek her help when trees fall. She and a county commissioner work to get the area roads fixed. Oliver helped bring vaccines to Panola during the COVID-19 pandemic, and she’s trying to build a tornado shelter.

“We’re in a rural, Black area in Sumter County,” she said. “You have to beg for what you want, and that’s sad.”

Oliver worked in Chemical Waste Management’s records department for three decades, and she thinks the company was well run — and that it properly handles waste.

But how does she feel about Wisconsin’s PFAS?

“I don’t think it’s fair for you to take your waste and ship it to an almost all-Black county,” Oliver said.

Sumter County accepted it, she said, but she can’t imagine the reverse.

“Wisconsin would have said, because they’re majority white, they would have said, ‘We ain’t going to have it.’”

Landfill handles most toxic waste

The Emelle landfill’s approximately 130 employees pass by farms, pastures and woodlands on their way to work. Turning off the two-lane State Highway 17, they reach a 2,630-acre campus surrounded by a chain link fence. Signs warn, “Danger, Unauthorized Persons Keep Out.”

One active landfill trench at the site is large enough to hold 1 ½ times as much waste as could fit inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. Nearly two dozen more trenches are filled and closed. The oldest underlie the employee parking lot and several buildings. Others are capped and covered in grasses and crimson clover.

The facility receives “virtually every type” of hazardous and toxic waste regulated by federal and state officials: asbestos, cyanides and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, to name just a few. All of it arrives by truck, usually semitrailers — about 50 a day. Drivers sign in at a guard house, then pass through the main gate before laboratory staff verify the contents of waste and determine how to manage it.

Some containers are stored in corrugated metal buildings before they are transferred, treated or buried. Hundreds of plastic and steel drums fill the interior aisles, sometimes stacked two high, atop concrete and stainless steel floors.

Mike Davis, the landfill’s senior district manager, said the facility expects more PFAS to come.

“Because it’s an issue of public concern,” Davis said. “A lot of people don’t know what to do because there hasn’t been any direction given yet. So the best thing to do is send it to a facility like ours, and we manage it correctly.”

Region boomed when cotton was king

Emelle Mayor Roy Willingham Sr., 80, stepped out of a white pickup truck and walked into city hall.

Construction of the tan, concrete building was paid for by Chemical Waste Management. But there isn’t much else to Emelle: a grassy park with an old basketball court, shouldered by a post office, an abandoned antique shop and a shuttered country store. A once-paved road, mostly eroded to gravel, encircles the park. The derelict gas station on the nearby highway sports vintage pumps.

Emelle’s population of mostly older residents live in trailers or one-story, brick mid-century homes. But Willingham remembers, many decades ago, when a cotton boom brought crowds.

“There was a train running all the way to Mobile,” he said. “There were so many people out. It was amazing.”

Willingham said his grandparents were emancipated from enslavement in Mississippi and his father moved to Alabama to open a blacksmith shop. His mother was a schoolteacher.

Willingham joined the Great Migration, moved to Detroit and served in the military. He went to college under the G.I. Bill and eventually moved back to Emelle to be with his elderly mother. He worked at a Walmart in Tuscaloosa, and later at the Department of Mental Health.

“I played around with several different jobs and I ended up being mayor of the town,” he said.

On a July night, Willingham joined a meeting concerning the town’s failing sewage system. 

“Come back and get a drink of water!” he told a pair of reporters.

Willingham said Chemical Waste Management brings money and jobs to Emelle. He doesn’t worry about the landfill because the town lacks the information to scrutinize health effects.

Willingham said profit and wealth have shaped life in Emelle ever since the American slave trade.

“What was done to create a labor force through slavery is done to bury chemicals in a poor neighborhood,” he said. “That’s just finances. It was about money.” 

Landfills store PFAS but don’t destroy them

Wisconsin might save money by ditching its foam now.

Department of Natural Resources administrators believe the EPA will eventually classify PFAS as hazardous waste and implement national PFAS drinking water standards, driving up disposal costs. Prices could climb after the Federal Aviation Administration lifts mandates that airports use fluorinated foam, as more of it will need a resting place.

Chemical Waste Management’s parent company, Houston, Texas-based Waste Management Inc., recently told investors that new PFAS standards can be viewed as “potential business opportunities.” With revenues of $19.7 billion in 2022, the company owns or operates North America’s largest network of landfills, including five storing hazardous waste.

Depositing fluorinated foam in a hazardous waste landfill is “a step in the right direction” because the waste will be treated and monitored, said professor Rainer Lohmann, who directs the University of Rhode Island’s STEEP lab, which researches PFAS’ effects on health and the environment.

But landfills would better be viewed as a PFAS “storage facility” than a means of disposal, he said. The properties that make the chemicals so useful, like heat resistance, also make them difficult to destroy.

Modern hazardous waste landfills are designed to last for centuries, with double liners, leak detectors and collection and treatment systems for leaching waste.

Yet the EPA acknowledges that all landfills represent a potential contamination source after closure. “Even the best landfills at this stage,” Lohmann said, “they will start failing.” 

Chemical Waste Management says landfill protections robust 

Chemical Waste Management calls the 600 feet of “Selma Chalk” limestone atop which the Emelle landfill sits virtually “impermeable,” allowing water to penetrate at a rate of approximately 1.2 inches per year. If there were any problems at the facility, the company argues, it would take millennia for spills to reach the aquifers below. Additional safeguards should prevent any chemicals from leaving the trenches.

Several use special liners that collect leachate, fluids generated when liquids percolate through waste contained in a landfill. The leachate is pumped to a colossal cluster of tanks for treatment, after which it is mixed with a substance like kiln dust or fly ash that forms concrete when water is added. The resulting material is buried on site.

Most landfills send their leachate to wastewater treatment plants for treatment and release into the environment. But those facilities aren’t designed to remove or destroy PFAS, so the chemicals reenter the environment. Davis, the manager, said releases like that can’t happen at Emelle since no liquids are discharged.

Emelle’s operators tout the landfill’s robust system of protections, but it’s not perfect.

Twenty of the landfill’s trenches, many dating to the late 1970s, use no base liner other than compacted chalk or clay. Several leak.

As early as the 1980s, monitoring wells detected toxic chemicals within the vicinity of the facility’s first six trenches, which stored 160 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of corrosive waste, toxic metals, ignitable materials, herbicides and pesticides, wastewater sludge and PCBs.

As the trenches were excavated, workers installed a chalk cutoff wall to minimize the movement of hazardous contaminants through groundwater, but continued monitoring also has detected the toxic chemicals in the soil and groundwater outside the wall’s perimeter. 

Chemical Waste Management attributes their presence to mishandling and spills during waste disposal, not trench leaks, and insists the chalk wall has effectively halted leaching.

Meanwhile, recent inspections by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management have documented multiple violations.

More than two dozen containers of hazardous waste were found rusting or damaged, and 16 more were leaking, according to an April report. Inspectors observed an uncleaned spill, approximately two years old, from a leachate storage tank. A concrete floor on which mercury containers were stored was cracked, the report added.

Landfill management disputed many of the regulators’ findings — no containers were damaged or leaking, they said, and spots inspectors thought were spills were actually stain residue. Other violations were corrected.

State and federal inspectors also found during a recent visit that the company failed to maintain records of PCB waste and properly label containers. Inspectors struggled to identify items, which had been “randomly stored,” intermingled with other types of hazardous and non-hazardous materials.

Landfill hearing draws sparse crowd

Recently, Chemical Waste Management’s 10-year operating permit went up for renewal.

Before the start of a state-required public hearing held in Livingston, Alabama, in April, local and state officials, along with company representatives, stood by booths awaiting questions from residents. Few appeared.

As the hearing began, Sumter County Commission Chairman Marcus Campbell stepped up to a lectern and sang the landfill’s praises.

“We’re in an area where all is needed, and, again, we want to provide our citizens with the best,” Campbell said. “We look at the North Sumter Daycare, we look at our local hospital, Hill Hospital, we look at our Industrial Board, just a few of the entities, whereas Waste Management, with the waste tax, we’re talking about over a total, probably over 30-plus entities that are supported by Waste Management.”

Two residents, Terry Roswell and Pierce Boyd, spoke out against renewing the permit. Their families own property nearby and have fought against the landfill for decades.

“I think they picked this area because people were poorly informed, and many of them poorly educated,” said Roswell, later saying he worries about the safety of drinking water. “And it’s like you’re living with the sword of Damocles over your head all the time. If it ever goes bad, it goes.”

The landfill manager said anyone with concerns could tour the site. He invited reporters in attendance to visit. A spokesperson later told reporters that there were no tours and denied the request.

Waste Management did not respond to a list of emailed questions about landfill practices, but offered a statement that noted, “The health and safety of our communities is Waste Management’s top priority, and we are committed to playing an active role in the solution to the disposal of PFAS.”

America must reckon with its refuse

Wisconsin’s collection program will continue into the fall.

Dave Johnson of North Shore expressed confidence in Chemical Waste Management’s “state-of-the-art” safety controls and decades of experience. But one day, he said, America must reckon with its refuse.

“Really all we’re doing in this country is just putting our waste into centralized locations,” he said. “At some point, all these landfills are going to have to be dealt with.”

Johnson called Bullard’s remarks “very fair.”

“Unfortunately, we can only do what current regulations and disposal options are available to us and what provides the best protection long term for the waste and the state of Wisconsin,” he said.

Protests of Alabama’s role as the nation’s dumping ground have quieted since drawing national attention in the 1980s.  

A historical marker in Emelle touts the town while acknowledging residents’ unsuccessful bid to shutter the facility. The landfill remains a fact of life.

M&M Market’s owner, Mary McClure Ozment, 40, operates the cash register while the two friends eat.

She isn’t worried about the landfill, and neither is anyone else she knows.

Ozment talks to people who work there who tell her it is safe, and she says that is enough for her.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wisconsin cleanup shifts toxic PFAS burden to Alabama Black Belt on Nov 4, 2023.