Texas missed an opportunity to delve deeper into health impacts of oil and gas production on surrounding urban areas when regulators looked at cases in Flower Mound and Dish, says a University of Texas lecturer and researcher in the UT School of Architecture. Rachael Rawlins, in a paper in the Virginia Environmental Law Journal last year, looked at existing data and studies on air emissions in the Barnett Shale and state efforts to monitor potentially harmful effects. She concludes that "state and federal regulatory programs do not effectively address cumulative emissions in urban areas, the risk of malfunctions in equipment, encroaching land uses, or the potential interactive effects of mixtures of chemicals." Rawlins describes her work as focusing "on the intersection of law and science."
Rawlins takes to task the Texas Department of State Health Services' finding in 2010 (updated in 2011) that a cluster of leukemia cases were within an expected range of occurrences, and the frequency of breast cancer was statistically greater than expected but "likely" the result of rapid population growth. She thinks DSHS looked at too large a geographical area -- two zip codes that encompass most of the city's population in the leukemia cases -- and demanded too high a certainty of proof to link higher breast cancer reports to environmental contaminants. "We need better coordination and research supported by both health and environmental agencies working together. We also need to think carefully about setbacks, and planning to minimize cumulative emissions," Rawlins told us in an email.
A spokeswoman for DSHS said the agency was reviewing Rawlins' paper. She noted that "our cancer experts and epidemiologists issued the state’s analysis in 2010 in response to community concerns at the time. This type of analysis looks at whether there is more cancer in the area that we would expect, not whether there is association with environmental or other risk factors."
The city of Flower Mound on Monday said it had just been made aware of the paper, and had reached out to Rawlins for more explanation.
-- Jim Fuquay
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