270 gas drilling incidents in New York

An acceptable record or a call for stricter controls?

By FRITZ MAYER

NEW YORK STATE — A new voice entered the state-wide debate over gas drilling with the posting of documents that detail numerous incidents related to drilling in New York.

Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting in Ithaca, has collected a host of documents produced by the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) that he says show that there have been 270 accidents related to gas drilling in the state since 1979.

In a phone interview on November 13, Hang said, “We did this because the state has repeatedly said, ‘We’ve never had a gas drilling problem.’ But if you just look at the documents, you’ll see there are fires, explosions, massive pollution releases—100,000 gallons of brine that doesn’t get cleaned up, things like that.”

Hang’s company compiles data on environmental incidents and uses it to generate reports for banks and others with an interest in the environmental histories of commercial and industrial properties.

Officials with the DEC don’t see this as a really large concern. In an article published in the Binghamton Press and Sun Bulletin on November 8, Dennis Farrar, chief of DEC’s Emergency Response Spills Unit, is quoted as saying, “In the scheme of things, this is not really a problem.”

In an email on November 16, Yan-cey Roy, DEC director of communication, said the agency had broken down Hang’s list of 270 incidents. Roy wrote, “Of these, 55 spills actually related to natural gas, 61 to brine, and 154 to crude oil, and about half the brine cases were pipeline related.” Brine is a fluid containing water, salts and other materials that come back out of a well immediately after drilling.

Roy continued, “Keep in mind that these numbers are out of more than 350,000 cases in the spills database since 1979. That would mean that natural gas cases make up about 1.5 percent of the cases.”

Gas drilling proponents say with such a small number of gas-drilling incidents, Hangs revelations are actually an endorsement of the DEC’s drilling safeguards that are already in place.

Hang, and others, who have signed a collation letter to the DEC that he authored, see the matter in starkly different terms. He said there is a large difference in the way oil and gas incidents are handled versus other contamination incidents.

He said, for instance, if there is leak that is discovered in a gas station tank, there is a lengthy process that could involve pulling the tank, an investigation by a DEC official and serious remediation efforts. In contrast, he said, in many cases involving drilling spills, “There’s really no further action that can be taken because the oil or the gas, or the combination thereof, got washed downstream. It’s in a wetland, a pond, a dry gulch; there’s really nothing we can do about it.”

Hang said the basic DEC premise of the Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) process, which is nearing its final phase, is that existing regulations are adequate to cover many aspects of drilling and, therefore, the scope of the SGEIS was narrowly tailored. Hang’s point is that the documents show that the existing regulations are inadequate to protect health and the environment, and therefore the scope of the SGEIS needs to be dramatically expanded.

The documents can be seen at www.toxicstargeting.com by clicking on the Marcellus Shale link.