Signs of the water crisis continue

Farmworkers’ Endless Worry: Tainted Tap Water

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

Published: November 13, 2012

SEVILLE, Calif. — Like most children, the students at Stone Corral Elementary School here rejoice when the bell rings for recess and delight in christening a classroom pet.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Fifth and sixth grade students in Seville, Calif., took a water break before physical education class.

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Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Bertha Diaz used the seat belts in her car to strap in a five-gallon water bottle she filled at a vendor's stand in Orosi, Calif., to provide drinking water for her family.

But while growing up in this impoverished agricultural community of numbered roads and lush citrus orchards, young people have learned a harsh life lesson: “No tomes el agua!” — “Don’t drink the water!”

Seville, with a population of about 300, is one of dozens of predominantly Latino unincorporated communities in the Central Valley plagued for decades by contaminated drinking water. It is the grim result of more than half a century in which chemical fertilizers, animal wastes, pesticides and other substances have infiltrated aquifers, seeping into the groundwater and eventually into the tap. An estimated 20 percent of small public water systems in Tulare County are unable to meet safe nitrate levels, according to a United Nations representative.

In farmworker communities like Seville, a place of rusty rural mailboxes and backyard roosters where the average yearly income is $14,000, residents like Rebecca Quintana pay double for water: both for the tap water they use only to shower and wash clothes, and for the five-gallon bottles they must buy weekly for drinking, cooking and brushing their teeth.

It is a life teeming with worry: about children accidentally sipping contaminated water while cooling off with a garden hose, about not having enough clean water for an elderly parent’s medications, about finding a rock while cleaning the feeding tube of a severely disabled daughter, as Lorie Nieto did. She vowed never to use tap water again.

Chris Kemper, the school’s principal, budgets $100 to $500 a month for bottled water. He recalled his astonishment, upon his arrival four years ago, at encountering the “ghost” drinking fountains, shut off to protect students from “weird foggyish water,” as one sixth grader, Jacob Cabrera, put it. Mr. Kemper said he associated such conditions with third world countries. “I always picture it as a laptop a month for the school,” he said of the added cost of water.

Here in Tulare County, one of the country’s leading dairy producers, where animal waste lagoons penetrate the air and soil, most residents rely on groundwater as the source for drinking water. A study by the University of California, Davis, this year estimated that 254,000 people in the Tulare Basin and Salinas Valley, prime agricultural regions with about 2.6 million residents, were at risk for nitrate contamination of their drinking water. Nitrates have been linked to thyroid disease and make infants susceptible to “blue baby syndrome,” a potentially fatal condition that interferes with the blood’s capacity to carry oxygen.

Communities like Seville, where corroded piping runs through a murky irrigation ditch and into a solitary well, are particularly vulnerable to nitrate contamination, lacking financial resources for backup systems. Fertilizer and other chemicals applied to cropland decades ago will continue to affect groundwater for years, according to the Davis study.

“You can’t smell it,” Mrs. Quintana said of the dangers of the tap. “You can’t see it. It looks like plain beautiful water.”

Situated off the state’s psychic map, lacking political clout and even mayors, places like Seville and Tooleville to the south have long been excluded from regional land use and investment decisions, said Phoebe S. Seaton, the director of a community initiative for California Rural Legal Assistance. Residents rely on county governments and tiny resident-run public utility districts. The result of this jurisdictional patchwork is a fragmented water delivery system and frequently deteriorating infrastructure.

Many such communities started as farm labor camps without infrastructure, said John A. Capitman, a professor at California State University, Fresno, and the executive director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute. Today, one in five residents in the Central Valley live below the federal poverty line. Many spend up to 10 percent of their income on water. “The laborers and residents of this region have borne a lot of the social costs of food production,” Professor Capitman said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/us/tainted-water-in-california-farmworker-communities.html?hp

Oil exec in Stark County Court for frack water disposal practices

Oil executive Nathan Garber made an initial appearance at the Stark County Courthouse in Dickinson on Wednesday on charges that he illegally threatened area drinking water with his company’s hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” waste disposal practices.

By: Bryan Horwath, The Dickinson Press

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• In court

Flanked by his attorneys Monte Rogneby, left, and Mandy Maxon, oil executive Nathan Garber listens to Judge Zane Anderson during an initial appearance at the Stark County Courthouse Wednesday morning.

Oil executive Nathan Garber made an initial appearance at the Stark County Courthouse in Dickinson on Wednesday on charges that he illegally threatened area drinking water with his company’s hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” waste disposal practices.
Garber faces a felony charge for allegedly knowingly attempting to deceive Industrial Commission inspectors.
Garber is set to return for a preliminary hearing over the charge, though no date had been set.
The North Dakota Attorney General’s Office is charging Garber with a violation of the rules and regulations of the IC in a case that represents the state’s first criminal charge against an oil and gas operator.
Stark County Judge Zane Anderson began the approximate 10-minute hearing by inquiring if Garber had read the charge against him. After answering softly that he had, Anderson told Garber that it was “important that you speak up so we can get your answer on the record.”
Anderson agreed to release Garber, listed in court records as a resident of Kalispell, Mont., on his own recognizance, as requested by Garber’s lead attorney, Mandy Maxon. Garber’s council pointed out that he has no criminal history and that he made the initial appearance voluntarily.
The state alleges that Garber, president of Executive Drilling LLC, knowingly violated IC rules by directing employees of another company to modify their fracking waste water dump site practices. The state alleges that Garber’s action could have led the drinking water near the Lodgepole formation to be contaminated with salt water.
The Class C felony charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a $5,000 fine or both.
The IC has control of the site in question and officials continue to run tests for possible contamination. Any findings related to groundwater testing would not be released until a trial, North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources spokesperson Alison Ritter said.
Garber and his attorneys would not respond to questions on their way out of court.

Tags: nathan garber, executive drilling, oil, news, fracking, water, waste, disposal, felony, charge

Water safety has me unconvinced

Regardless of if this is a re-occurring issue or not, should we not be concerned, upset or even outraged that the public concerns about the safety and quality of water are being given a caviler response when testing and examination of our water should occur.

Foul odor in water draws complaints

A foul odor and taste in the local water supply had Dickinson residents voicing their concern to City Hall on Monday.

By: Bryan Horwath, The Dickinson Press

official at the Southwest Water Authority, however, said the city’s water is safe for consumption and that the issue is temporary.A foul odor and taste in the local water supply had Dickinson residents voicing their concern to City Hall on Monday.

“This is an issue we typically deal with twice a year in the spring and again in the fall,” said SWA administrative assistant Pam Courton. “Lake Sakakawea actually turns over when the temperatures change, stirring up algae and vegetation within the lake.”
Lake Sakakawea, supplies water to the Southwest Pipeline, which is operated by the SWA. The water from the lake is treated and stored before it makes its way to Dickinson residents.
Dickinson City Administrator Shawn Kessel said the city had received a number of complaints from residents about the odor.
“We took a number of calls about that issue (Monday), which we passed along to the Southwest Water Authority,” Kessel said. “It’s our understanding that they’re aware of the problem and it’s something that they would handle.”
Duane Ott, owner of bottled water distributor Dakota Water Treatment in Dickinson, said he has fielded complaints about the city’s water in the past, but hadn’t received any in the past few days.
“This time it came a little earlier than expected due to some recent low temperatures, but this is something residents can expect twice every year,” Courton said. “My understanding is that the lake turned this past weekend. It can sometimes take a week or two for the affected water to be flushed out of the pipeline.”
Courton said that it there is no specific area or neighborhood affected and that some may be more sensitive to the change. Courton added that sodium permanganate, a disinfectant chemical, is typically applied to the water because of the odor issue.
“We understand why residents are concerned,” Courton said. “But the water people are drinking and bathing in is completely safe.”

Tags: southwest water authority, local, waterwater

same local problems across the nation

Truly heart breaking to know that so so many of our communities across the nation are grappling with the realities of powerful companies engaging in frackin. Each community is having its individual challenges, however we are all the same overarching challenge, how do we make our local and individual voices heard against these multi billion dollar companies? How do we recognize the progress they bring to us and still confront the damage? We need a leader and a voice to bring us all strength and a space to share and gain power to make changes.

Destroying Precious Land for Gas

By SEAN LENNON

Published: August 27, 2012

ON the northern tip of Delaware County, N.Y., where the Catskill Mountains curl up into little kitten hills, and Ouleout Creek slithers north into the Susquehanna River, there is a farm my parents bought before I was born. My earliest memories there are of skipping stones with my father and drinking unpasteurized milk. There are bald eagles and majestic pines, honeybees and raspberries. My mother even planted a ring of white birch trees around the property for protection.

A few months ago I was asked by a neighbor near our farm to attend a town meeting at the local high school. Some gas companies at the meeting were trying very hard to sell us on a plan to tear through our wilderness and make room for a new pipeline: infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing. Most of the residents at the meeting, many of them organic farmers, were openly defiant. The gas companies didn’t seem to care. They gave us the feeling that whether we liked it or not, they were going to fracture our little town.

In the late ’70s, when Manhattanites like Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger were turning Montauk and East Hampton into an epicurean Shangri-La for the Studio 54 crowd, my parents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, were looking to become amateur dairy farmers. My first introduction to a cow was being taught how to milk it by hand. I’ll never forget the realization that fresh milk could be so much sweeter than what we bought in grocery stores. Although I was rarely able to persuade my schoolmates to leave Long Island for what seemed to them an unreasonably rural escapade, I was lucky enough to experience trout fishing instead of tennis lessons, swimming holes instead of swimming pools and campfires instead of cable television.

Though my father died when I was 5, I have always felt lucky to live on land he loved dearly; land in an area that is now on the verge of being destroyed. When the gas companies showed up in our backyard, I felt I needed to do some research. I looked into Pennsylvania, where hundreds of families have been left with ruined drinking water, toxic fumes in the air, industrialized landscapes, thousands of trucks and new roads crosshatching the wilderness, and a devastating and irreversible decline in property value.

Natural gas has been sold as clean energy. But when the gas comes from fracturing bedrock with about five million gallons of toxic water per well, the word “clean” takes on a disturbingly Orwellian tone. Don’t be fooled. Fracking for shale gas is in truth dirty energy. It inevitably leaks toxic chemicals into the air and water. Industry studies show that 5 percent of wells can leak immediately, and 60 percent over 30 years. There is no such thing as pipes and concrete that won’t eventually break down. It releases a cocktail of chemicals from a menu of more than 600 toxic substances, climate-changing methane, radium and, of course, uranium.

New York is lucky enough to have some of the best drinking water in the world. The well water on my family’s farm comes from the same watersheds that supply all the reservoirs in New York State. That means if our tap water gets dirty, so does New York City’s.

Gas produced this way is not climate- friendly. Within the first 20 years, methane escaping from within and around the wells, pipelines and compressor stations is 105 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. With more than a tiny amount of methane leakage, this gas is as bad as coal is for the climate; and since over half the wells leak eventually, it is not a small amount. Even more important, shale gas contains one of the earth’s largest carbon reserves, many times more than our atmosphere can absorb. Burning more than a small fraction of it will render the climate unlivable, raise the price of food and make coastlines unstable for generations.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, when speaking for “the voices in the sensible center,” seems to think the New York State Association of County Health Officials, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the New York State Nurses Association and the Medical Society of the State of New York, not to mention Dr. Anthony R. Ingraffea’s studies at Cornell University, are “loud voices at the extremes.” The mayor’s plan to “make sure that the gas is extracted carefully and in the right places” is akin to a smoker telling you, “Smoking lighter cigarettes in the right place at the right time makes it safe to smoke.”

Few people are aware that America’s Natural Gas Alliance has spent $80 million in a publicity campaign that includes the services of Hill and Knowlton — the public relations firm that through most of the ’50s and ’60s told America that tobacco had no verifiable links to cancer. Natural gas is clean, and cigarettes are healthy — talk about disinformation. To try to counteract this, my mother and I have started a group called Artists Against Fracking.

My father could have chosen to live anywhere. I suspect he chose to live here because being a New Yorker is not about class, race or even nationality; it’s about loving New York. Even the United States Geological Survey has said New York’s draft plan fails to protect drinking water supplies, and has also acknowledged the likely link between hydraulic fracturing and recent earthquakes in the Midwest. Surely the voice of the “sensible center” would ask to stop all hydraulic fracturing so that our water, our lives and our planet could be protected and preserved for generations to come.

Sean Lennon is a musician
.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 28, 2012, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Destroying Precious Land for Gas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/opinion/sean-lennon-destroying-precious-land-for-gas.html?src=me&ref=general

Oil Well explosion, North Dakota

Not wanting this to go by unnoticed.....

Crews clean at oil well blowout site

WILLISTON — Cleanup crews baled contaminated vegetation, scraped away affected soil and power washed equipment Monday after an oil well blowout south of here that sprayed oil and salt water into nearby fields.

By: Amy Dalrymple, The Dickinson Press

• Site

Amy Dalrymple/Forum Communications Kris Roberts, an environmental geologist with the North Dakota Department of Health Division of Water Quality, oversees the cleanup of an oil well blowout near Williston.

 Talk about it

WILLISTON — Cleanup crews baled contaminated vegetation, scraped away affected soil and power washed equipment Monday after an oil well blowout south of here that sprayed oil and salt water into nearby fields.

Meanwhile, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the death of a worker who was struck by a pickup as a worker drove it away from the spewing oil.

The blowout, which sprayed 400 barrels of oil and 400 barrels of produced water used for hydraulic fracturing, is not believed to have contaminated water sources, said Kris Roberts, an environmental geologist with the North Dakota Department of Health Division of Water Quality.
However, the cleanup contractor expanded the perimeter of the affected area because workers were seeing vegetation that was wilting and turning brown, Roberts said. The area that was most heavily affected is estimated to be about 30 to 40 acres. A mist of oil and salt water is believed to have extended no further than a mile in opposite directions of the well, affecting crop and pasture land.

Workers estimated they recovered about 200 barrels of each fluid as they got control of the well, Roberts said. The incident occurred during the evening of Aug. 14 and into the next day.
Cleanup crews placed absorbent booms to prevent the contamination from spreading to Long Creek, which empties into Lake Sakakawea. They also worked to cut and remove vegetation that was contaminated, Roberts said.

“By getting it out of there as quickly as possible, we will see very little impact to the soil itself,” Roberts said.

Crews had completed the drilling and hydraulic fracturing process for that well and were completing the well for production when the blowout occurred, Roberts said.

The release of salt water and chemical solution is more devastating than an oil spill, Roberts said.
“A lot of times, if it’s just an oil release, vegetation will have completely recovered by the next season,” he said. “With a salt water release, if we don’t handle it properly and quickly, that type of impact could last three years.”

The company that controlled the well, Zavanna, which is based in Denver, is cooperating with the cleanup and being proactive, Roberts said.

“They are very concerned with the impacts and working to clean up the impact so that the landowners have as little problem as possible,” Roberts said.

Roberts said Zavanna also deserves a pat on the back for the design of its well site, which has a raised area similar to a racetrack around the site. That design helped contain the spill.
The company could face fines from the Department of Health or the Department of Mineral Resources, depending on the outcome of the investigation.

Zavanna did not return calls seeking comment.

Field inspectors from the Department of Mineral Resources are investigating what led to the incident, said spokeswoman Alison Ritter.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been advised of the spill but so far is not involved, Roberts said.

Wayne Biberdorf, a former Hess Corp. engineer who now serves as energy impact coordinator for Gov. Jack Dalrymple, said a blowout incident is rare, and industry leaders will be studying this case. A blowout is an uncontrolled release of reservoir fluids into the wellbore.

“Even a small number is serious,” said Biberdorf, who was not familiar with the specifics of this incident. “Most companies take a long, hard look at those types of incidents.”
Roberts estimates that health officials have responded to about four or five blowout incidents in the past two years.

“It’s very few, considering the number of oil wells that are being drilled and the ones that are already in existence,” Roberts said.

Eric Brooks, assistant director for the Bismarck Area OSHA Office, said the victim worked for Steamboat Energy Consultants as an independent contractor who oversaw the operation of the workover rig.

The man was identified as 39-year-old Jason Pinasco of Higden, Ark.

As oil was spraying all over, workers moved their pickups away from the well, Brooks said. One of the pickups struck and killed Pinasco. Brooks said he did not have information about the driver’s employer.

Williams County Sheriff Scott Busching said his office considers the case an accident. The Williams County State’s Attorney’s Office was still reviewing the case on Monday.

This is the eighth workplace death from the oil and gas industry since Oct. 1 that the Bismarck Area OSHA Office has investigated.

Pinasco was married and had a son and daughter, according to an obituary published in Farmington, N.M. The obituary said he spent his career working in the oilfield.

“He loved his work and the wonderful people he met all over the states,” the obituary reads.
A representative from Steamboat Energy Consultants referred questions to Zavanna.
Dalrymple is a reporter stationed in the Oil Patch. Reach her at adalrymple@forumcomm.com or 701- 580-6890.