Setting out near dayfall was the next solemnest thing to do, rather than morning, for I would have missed all the faces and the updates around the table at the anti-fracking meeting. Some people meet for worship on Sundays. Mine is a daily walk, haphazardly organized around the fireplace during the morning, often out to the front porch on brilliant mornings, eyes closed but sensing the heat of fire or sun, and the hint of light. Vespers is a bike ride, these days by moon, or moonlight diffused through stacks of cold clouds, when I ask not to be careened into by one of the diesel engine trucks or Aunt Lillian in her station wagon with her big German Sheppard in the back. It is usually a reminder of what I’ve been reading, for, despite the traffic and the waft of combustion, there are moments of quietude where I can afford more wakefulness. The literature I’ve perused as of late has been more journalistic, and more scientific than I typically read outside of work. There are only so many articles and papers one can absorb regarding the dangers of hydraulic fracturing in a day before feeling ready to drink rum to oblivion. Down-in-the-toilet, staggering for lack of nutrients, clean air, clean water, nearly toxic-level rum drinking. It is, at times, a lonesome endeavor. But this is a journal, in part, of bike sojourns, of reading, and not of the need for drinking. That is ever-present and understood. One cannot drink caramel snickerdoodle non-fat lattés and talk about these things.
Jacki Schilke in North Dakota, in the heart of the Bakken Shale, regrets allowing hydraulic fracturing on her property. Currently some 32 fracking wells operate within 3 miles of her 160-acre ranch. She has dealt with chronic pain in her lungs and rashes ever since, for about one year. In one instance, she needed emergency care for a respiratory attack endured while working in her barn. Doctors have diagnosed her with neurotoxic damage and constricted airways. Ambient air testing by an environmental consultant showed high levels of benzene, methane, toluene and xylene, known to be affiliated with fracking. These hazardous wastes are also known to be highly carcinogenic, and can lead to birth defects and organ damage. Shortly after drilling began, in the summer of 2010, several of her cattle began limping from swollen legs and infections. Many cows quit producing milk for their calves. Within a year, five of her cattle dropped dead. Many of the volatile organic compounds associated with fracking leak from engines, compressors, open tanks, ponds holding the "produced" frack wastewater, flares, and spills. Chemicals injected underground - up to 400,000 gallons over the life of a single well - can migrate through abandoned wells or improperly cemented well casings. The petrochemical industry estimates that 60% of fracking wells will leak over a 30 year period. In 2011 alone, oil companies in North Dakota reported over 1000 accidental releases of oil or frack wastewater. This form of extracting natural gas has not been vetted as other methods of oil, coal, and gas extraction.
This has not been an isolated event. In New Mexico, hair testing of sick cattle grazing around hydraulic fracturing well pads showed that 54 out of 56 were positive for petroleum residues. Herd animals which are exposed but not apparently sick can be sold to middlemen. A peer-reviewed report by a veterinarian and researcher at Cornell suggests a strong link between fracking and illness in farm animals raised for food. The study's authors, Bamburger and Oswald, consider cattle to be sentinels for human health, like the canary in the coalmine. Farmers need clean water, air, and soil to produce untainted food - but as the largest private landowners of shale land in our country, they are disproportionately targeted by oil and gas companies.
I ride up Highway 1 in search of the source of toxic smells my family has experienced just a few years back. It started when we moved in about 11 years ago. The northeastern edge of Fort Collins, according to the map, contains active and inactive drilling sites. Several appear to lie just within city limits, while others are just outside, within Larimer County. Along Douglas Road are small ranchettes and horse properties, some of the nicest, uncrowded rural country in the Fort Collins area. I will not make it that far north this day, for the sun is fading fast as we approach the solstice. I turn up Richard’s Lake road, its claypan surface seemingly resistant to washboarding, quite nice for a bike. After 15 minutes or so I’ve traipsed through unexpectedly nice neighborhoods, and while the average property size is large, there are also clusters of houses like in my own neighborhood. Some of the undeveloped lots are all sagebrush, brome, cottonwood, and elm. There is a rabbit here and there, and more cars on the road than I was expecting. There’s a whole other world over here, about a mile north of our home, that I’ve never even explored. I cannot tell where Richard’s lake lies. I cannot find any pipes or fenced-off areas or signage to indicate well pads. It is dark, I will have to return, and perhaps venture further north and east. That must be where the action is.
I have wanted to ride to some of these fracking wells, to taste a hint of metallic arsenic, the sickenly sweet smell of toluene, the odourless spin and reel of benzene, the noxiousness of hydrogen sulfide. Satellite maps of the Poudre River snaking through Windsor show, when you keep clicking zoom, what appear to be fracking well pads. There are curious buildings along the course of the river towards Greeley, or rectangular plots just adjacent, perhaps just parking lots. But there are no cars. That will be an all-day trip superseded by immersion into the literature of havoc, of vaporous solvents which should only be used in a chemical fume hood, of sickened cattle, a sentinel species if there ever was one for the health of our rural landscape. It is a literature of cold science, describing the disruption of our endocrine systems, of backache due to overworked kidneys, of neurotoxic symptomology and severely constricted airways. There are rashes and teeth falling out for a rancher up in North Dakota. There are ponds and streams which refuse to freeze over, now that their freezing point has been reduced by supersaturation with brine and heavy metals, the spillage of frack wastewater that comes back to the surface. All these things are to be prevented.
Currently, no state requires a hydraulic fracturing company operating on private land to list the ingredients in its fracking fluid until fracking is complete. In these rural districts, it then becomes difficult for ranchers and farmers to prove that toxins in groundwater didn't come from application of pesticides, fertilizers, or farm equipment. The burden of proof is on the landowner. This has got to change. Those in our rural districts and growth management areas often lack the representation that those within city limits have access to, making it more imperative that legislation be passed to prohibit this form of gas extraction until it can be absolutely shown to not violate people's civil liberty to safeguard their health and those of their livestock. This is their livelihood, and in many ways an important part of our culture in the west. Ranchers are often good stewards of their land, as their survival and ability to establish a reputation as good food producers depends upon clean water resources. When a farmer pumps groundwater to irrigate a field or water his animals, that water will enter his crop plants or animals, exit as vapor to the clouds, and return as rain, perhaps even back to the watershed from whence it came, but likely will fall on other lands, perhaps a few time zones away. This is the basic hydrologic cycle. When a single well is fracked, several million gallons of water taken from lakes, streams, and groundwater aquifers become trapped in the deep geological strata, essentially removed from this cycle. The water that is returned to the surface, the flowback or frack wastewater, is untreatable. There is no known way to return this water back to a clean form for domestic use, or back to the hydrologic cycle, either. Another disparaging fact is that, in the midst of a drought cycle, many farmers are increasingly unable to compete with the oil and gas industry's cash assets when trying to purchase water. At auctions here in Colorado, they are able to offer up to twenty times the price that farmers typically pay water utilities.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005, Section 322, enabled the hydraulic fracking industry to be exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. This industry is also exempt from the Clean Air Act, Superfund Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, all designed to regulate other industrial activities. They do not have to report their emissions of chemicals into air or water based on exemption from the Toxic Release Inventory under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act. A recent study also shows that uranium and arsenic become solubilized in the process of hydraulic fracturing, coming back to the surface, and similar evidence that radon and radium are released as well. Jacki Schilke and her husband have both lost crowns and fillings in their teeth, a phenomenon that has been associated with radiation poisoning in past studies, as well as high selenium levels, also discovered in their water.
I am nearly back to Highway 1 when, trying to discern how many deer are grazing just to my right, I begin to veer too close to the edge. I overcorrect, cutting a sharp left which lifts me up and over the bike, smacking the clay with my elbow. I write now, still smarting, and still anxious to get further along. A few nights later I had a nightmare. Blue-uniformed officials were presiding over a great Hanukkah festival, and I stood in line to get my latkes. People were ecstatic about their latkes. I got mine and immediately discerned, as we sometimes do, something evil afoot. The latkes were clearly fried in oil waste, fracked from the specific homeland of our community. My body was already beginning to shudder from the smell. One of the officials noticed that I noticed, and pointed me out. Don’t eat the latkes! I cried. Panic and an all-out chase ensued.
References
Bamberger, Michelle & Robert Oswald (2012) Impacts of Gas Drilling on Human and Animal Health, New Solutions (22)51-77.
Coman, Hannah (2012) Balancing the Need for Energy and Clean Water: The Case for Applying Strict Liability in Hydraulic Fracturing Suits, Environmental Affairs (39)131-160.
DuBois, Shelley (2010) Does the EPA Have the Tools to Regulate Fracking?, www.money.cnn.com
'Fracking' Mobilizes Uranium in Marcellus Shale (2010) EurekAlert!, Oct 10, www.eurekalert.org.
Lustgarten, Abrahm (2008) Buried Secrets: Is Natural Gas Drilling Endangering U.S. Water Supplies?, www.propublica.org.
Royte, Elizabeth (2012) Fracking Our Food Supply, The Nation (Dec 17).
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