PA Congressman launches frack waste investigation

DOCUMENTS

October 29, 2014 | 5:25 PM

By Susan Phillips

$A truck delivers fracking wastewater to a Susquehanna County recycling center$

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

A truck delivers fracking wastewater to a Susquehanna County recycling center.

The state’s new acting secretary for the Department of Environmental Protection, Dana Aunkst, has lots of questions to answer regarding how the state oversees frack waste disposal and transportation. On Wednesday, Congressman Matt Cartwright, a democrat from Schuylkill County, sent Aunkst a 3-page letter seeking information as part of an investigation into how states monitor waste generated by shale gas drilling. The states have responsibility for the waste because it’s exempt from federal oversight. The investigation comes on the heels of a report released by the Pennsylvania Auditor General’s office in July, which criticizes the DEP’s role in protecting drinking water from contamination by gas drillers.

“The audit concluded that Pennsylvania’s current system for oversight of fracking waste “is not an effective monitoring tool” and “it is not proactive in discouraging improper, even illegal, disposal of waste,” wrote Cartwright in the letter.

Cartwright is leading the investigation through the Economic Growth, Job Creation, and Regulatory Affairs Subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Aunkst was just recently appointed acting secretary after former secretary Chris Abruzzo resigned in the wake of the porngate scandal. Aunkst has until November 12 to respond. Read the letter and Cartwright’s questions below.

Comments

Jack Wolf

About time.
paulroden

The impact of fracking waste is not the only thing that needs to be investigated. No one is studying the impact of the radioactive radon in the fracked methane gas. There are higher concentrations of radon in the natural gas extracted with fracking. The radioactive half life of radon is 3.8 days. I doubt the gas drillers and gas companies are storing the gas from either the Marcellus Shale or the Barnett or Eagle Ford Texas gas plays, are storing the natural gas for 31 days or 10 half lives for the radon to decay to a safe enough level before being pumped to market. We know that radon causes cancer. You can’t buy or sell a home in most places without testing and mitigation for radon. You can’t vent stoves, gas furnaces and gas hot water heaters. The uranium miners, homeowners who built homes on top of or with the uranium mill tailings, all came down with higher rates of lung cancer. But the gas industry will just dismiss this concern as not important or trivial. The impact of radiation is culminative. There is no “safe level of radiation.” We don’t need this gas for our energy needs. Go to thesolutionsproject.org/. Fracking is too dangerous, too expensive and totally unnecessary for our energy needs.
AlSever

This should be interesting. Doubt very much if any of the retards that put their opinions on this site ever bothered to attend Water Resources Advisory Committee Meetings, but if they had, they know that Dana was the driving force to mandate that ONLY the Fracking Industry have to meet TDS limits on their discharges. Every other industry in Pa that attended WRAC meetings argued successfully to be exempt from mandatory TDS limits. The Chemical industries threatened to move their facilities out of Pa if TDS limits such as those assigned to unconventional drilling operations were assigned to them. The Coal industry testified that similar TDS limits would shut down the coal industry in Pa. Hopefully this action by Matt Cartwrigth will result in the gas industry being allowed to discharge wastewater to the standards assigned to other industries and not have to meet effluent limits that were promulgated due to the mistaken projection that 2000 drilling digs would be operating in Pa—–there are less than 60 operating!

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