![]() “Approximately half of all Pennsylvanians will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetime, and about one in five Pennsylvanians will die of cancer.”įifty-five known chemicals that fracked oil and gas operations release into the air and the water can cause cancer, a Yale Public Health analysis found last year. “Pennsylvania also has the third highest cancer incidence rate of all U.S. states,” Environmental Health News reported, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Credit: Science of the Total Environment, Hill et al. 2019Ī full 80 percent of the waste produced by the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania stayed in Pennsylvania - or at least that’s as far as the Commonwealth’s reporting system tracked it. Pennsylvania wastewater production, largely from “unconventional” gas wells, rose sharply in 2017. ![]() One out of every seven of those gallons was produced in 2017 alone. The oil and gas industry has flooded Pennsylvania with over 380 million barrels of liquid waste from 1991 to 2017, that study found - enough to fill an area the size of a standard city block with a column of wastewater over 200 feet tall.Īnd that flood has been picking up pace. The decision comes as a new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science of the Total Environment, calls attention to the oil and gas waste produced in Pennsylvania for nearly that entire time. In the meantime, regulation has been left to the states - and the rules can vary widely. “EPA has known since 1988 that its rules for oil and gas wastes aren’t up to par.” “Rather than acting in the best interest of the public, EPA has continually shirked its duties and left our communities’ health, drinking water, and environment at risk,” said Adam Kron, senior attorney at the Environmental Integrity Project, one of the two groups that had asked the agency to consider its stance towards the waste. The EPA’s decision this week echoes that. But in July 1988, after burying clear warnings from its own scientists about the hazards of oilfield waste, the EPA offered the oil and gas industry a broad exemption from hazardous waste handling laws. ![]() If equally contaminated waste came from other industries, it would usually be designated hazardous waste and subject to strict tracking and disposal rules designed to keep the public safe from industrial pollution. Oil industry wastewater has even been used to irrigate crops - in California, where state regulators haven’t set rules to keep dangerous chemicals like the carcinogen benzene out of irrigation water. It’s been sprayed into the air in the hopes of evaporating the water - a practice that spreads its blend of volatile chemicals into the air instead. The corrosive salt-laden wastewater from fracked wells has been spread on roads as a de-icer. State regulators have repeatedly proved unable to prevent the industry’s toxic waste from entering America’s drinking water supplies, including both private wells and the rivers from which public drinking water supplies are drawn, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded in a 2017 national study. On April 23, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told two environmental groups that it had decided it was “not necessary” to update the federal standards handling toxic waste from oil and gas wells, including the waste produced by fracking.
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