New testing finds contamination in North Texas water spreading; scientists point to driller

HOUSTON — Texas’ oil and gas regulator has opened a new investigation into allegations that methane is contaminating North Texas water after residents complained that independent sampling by university researchers revealed high levels of the explosive gas in their residential wells, the state agency and scientists said.

Further analysis by another independent scientist, Geoffrey Thyne, of testing done by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and natural gas company Range Resources indicates the contamination is spreading to more wells and the levels are increasing in some cases. Thyne said his preliminary analysis strengthens his belief that the contamination originates at wells drilled by Fort Worth-based Range.

“The leak continues and it’s spreading,” Thyne told The Associated Press. “I can say, based on the current data, there are at least two other wells that show the same source … which is the Range well.”

The Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that oversees oil and gas drilling, opened its new investigation in August, spokeswoman Ramona Nye said in an email. Additional information will be released when the investigation is complete, possibly in February, she said.

Range Resources has no evidence the gas in the water and the gas it is producing is the same, company spokesman Matt Pitzarella said in an email. The gas in the water is naturally occurring, as sometimes happens. Range’s tests do not find dangerous levels of methane in the water, but the company encourages all homeowners to vent their wells.

However, Thyne and Duke University scientist Rob Jackson say they have seen dangerous levels of methane. The findings are likely different because the oil and gas industry typically uses a different sampling method, Thyne said.

Thyne’s study includes isotopic analysis. This fingerprint-type analysis allowed him to review the unique chemical makeup of the gas found in the water wells and compare it to the gas Range Resources is producing and methane in a rock formation called the Strawn, which is where Range says the gas contaminating the water originated.

Thyne had already reviewed some data for the EPA after it opened its investigation in 2010, but in recent months he did a more thorough analysis. Now, after a preliminary review, Thyne said he is more convinced the gas in at least three of the water wells originates in the Barnett shale — the rock layer from which Range Resources is extracting gas — and is identical to what is found in the company’s well bore.

At first glance, it may appear that the gas in the Strawn and Barnett layers are indistinguishable “but in fact, people are able to notice subtle differences,” Thyne said.

The case began in 2010 when homeowner Steve Lipsky, who lives in an upscale subdivision in Weatherford about 60 miles west of Dallas, complained to the Railroad Commission that his water was bubbling.

The agency found methane in Lipsky’s water. Lipsky, afraid his family could be in danger and that the Railroad Commission was not working fast enough, contacted the EPA. Methane can be explosive if it builds up in a confined space and has an ignition source.

The EPA ruled the gas in Lipsky’s water was likely coming from Range Resources’ well site in a wooded area about a mile from the family’s home. The company used hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” — a method of pumping millions of gallons of chemical-laced water into the ground to break up hard rock — to drill the two wells that were later sold to Legend Natural Gas.

The EPA issued a rare emergency order in late 2010 demanding that Range Resources resolve the problem and supply Lipsky’s family with water. But in March 2011 the Railroad Commission ruled Range Resources was not to blame. Range agreed, and refused to comply with the EPA’s order, which landed the company in court.

Range settled in March 2012 and the EPA withdrew its order. The company agreed to conduct testing for a year.

Later, at the insistence of Republican congressmen who accused the EPA of needlessly going after the gas driller, the agency conducted an internal review. That investigation sided with the EPA’s initial actions, and the Office of Inspector General in a report released Dec. 24 asked for additional measures to ensure there is no risk.

The EPA has shared Range Resources’ test results with the Railroad Commission but “no immediate next steps” are planned, said David Bloomgren, an EPA spokesman in Dallas, in an email. Officials from the two agencies met this week, Nye of the Railroad Commission said.

Jackson, the Duke University professor, also specializes in isotopic analysis. He declined to share his study — funded by Duke and the National Science Foundation — until it is peer-reviewed and published, but some homeowners shared test results with the AP.

Jackson found higher levels of methane in some water wells — sometimes five to 10 times higher — than what Range Resources’ tests showed. In some cases, the levels are five times higher than the 10 parts per million per liter set as a threshold limit by the U.S. Geological Survey.

“We’re seeing high methane concentrations and that result alone indicates to me that EPA closing the case was premature,” Jackson told the AP.

Range Resources declined to comment on Jackson’s findings, saying he has not shared the results.

Elizabeth Struhs, whose property abuts Lipsky’s, fears her family is in danger. Jackson’s samples found 17 parts per million of methane per liter of water in her well, while Range Resources said its tests did not detect any hazardous methane level.

“We had good water before they came here and we should have good water now,” Struhs said.

Source: The Republic

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Review: Site’s groundwater, soil cleanup working

 by Betsy Blaney

Pantex Plant in 1992

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — The effort to clean up soil and groundwater contamination at the nation’s only plant for assembling and disassembling nuclear weapons has been effective so far and will continue for years, according to the first five-year review of the site.

Pantex in the Texas Panhandle was added to the national Superfund cleanup list in 1994 because of past site practices that included burning chemicals in unlined pits, burying waste in unlined landfills and discharging waste into on-site surface waters known as playa lakes.

The review says the long-term project is focusing on removing contamination from soil and a shallow aquifer beneath the plant, located 17 miles northeast of Amarillo.

“We are already seeing significant reduction in contaminant concentration in parts of the perched aquifer,” said Camille Hueni, who’s overseeing the project for the Environmental Protection Agency.

One of the top goals of the cleanup is to keep contamination from reaching the Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies eight Plains states and is the Panhandle’s major source of water for municipal, industrial and agricultural use. The shallow aquifer, or groundwater, is perched as much as 200 feet above the Ogallala.

Workers at Pantex assemble and dismantle nuclear warheads for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. More than 12,000 plutonium pits, which serve as triggers for nuclear warheads, are stored at the plant. The soil there is contaminated by solvents, remnants of explosives and radiological elements, including depleted uranium and traces of plutonium, while the groundwater has solvents, remnants of high explosives, chromium and other chemicals from a shallow aquifer.

While the sources of the soil and groundwater contamination have been eliminated, the contamination itself remains.

Crews began pumping and treating the groundwater as early as 1995, said Tony Biggs, environmental programs director for B&W Pantex, which operates the site and helped do the review. The overall Pantex cleanup will continue with reports on progress issued every five years, he said.

The EPA and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality signed off on the first five-year review last fall.

“It’s an effective cleanup that we’re seeing, an effective remediation,” Biggs said.

Environmental officials have said the cleanup is estimated to cost around $135 million. Its effectiveness is tested by sampling water in an established network of monitoring wells to get what’s in the shallow aquifer to drinking water standards, Biggs said.

Reviews will be issued every five years until Pantex officials believe the remediation of soil and groundwater is complete, he said. At that time the plant will submit a final report for review by federal and state regulators, Biggs said.

George Rice, an independent hydrologist who is familiar with Pantex and its contaminants and looked over the review, said Hueni’s assertion about dropping concentrations of contaminants could be misleading.

“If the concentration’s down just because the plume of (the explosive) RDX is spreading, you’re just diluting it. That’s not that good,” said Rice, who’s from San Antonio.

The review states that one monitoring well has shown higher than expected concentrations of RDX and chromium. A new monitoring well has been installed to better delineate the contaminants’ plume boundaries as well as to get a better idea of how groundwater flows in the area.

Traces of contamination have been found in the Ogallala, but repeated samplings turned up no additional contamination.

Biggs said the work to clean up water in the groundwater is vital.

“If we did nothing, the potential is there” for the Ogallala to become contaminated, he said. “That’s why we need to remediate it.”

The EPA and the NNSA in 2008 issued a formal decision that spelled out specific actions for groundwater and soil cleanup. Texas environmental officials concurred with the decision.

The actions include two facilities that pump and treat contaminated groundwater and two bioremediation systems that pump emulsified soybean oil into the groundwater to sustain bacteria that breaks down contaminants.

Contaminated soils have been fenced off and ditch liners and vegetative covering have been placed on landfills.

Before the plant became the nation’s only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility in 1951, waste management practices led to the release of chemicals and radionuclides to the environment, specifically in soil and the shallow groundwater.

Source:  SF Gate

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

”Light at end of the tunnel,” but no timeline for water

Elk River Cleanup in Progress

Introductory Note

by Gene Franks

The leading water news story for early January 2014 has been the chemical spill into the Elk River in West Virginia. The interesting part is how much is not known about the chemical in question.  Other than its name,  4-methylcyclohexane methanol,  a. k. a. Crude MCHM,  and that it is used in coal processing, information has been hard to find.

I did not expect to find it in the EPA’s contaminant list, since chemicals that the EPA studies and maintains standards for are only a tiny handful of the literally thousands of thousands of chemicals in use. For every chemical that the EPA monitors, there are thousands that we have never heard of. Nor is it surprising that information about treatment–how to remove it from water–seems to be non-existent.  It takes months to years to establish standards for water treatment.  

We know from a Wikipedia report that the water supplier believed at the outset that they could contain the chemical encroachment with their carbon filtration system and that their carbon filters were in fact removing the chemical, but they soon learned that their carbon filter (designed for day to day treatment, not chemical overloads) , “. . . could no longer handle the large amount of contamination in the water and the chemical began flowing through the carbon filter . . . .”  It was only after the carbon filter at the treatment plant were overwhelmed that plant operators decided to report the problem.

The lesson, of course, is that with this as with most chemical contaminants filter carbon is the first line of defense.

Lesson #2 is that this chemical was discovered rather quickly by the water supplier and by consumers because it has a powerful and distinctive odor.  Had it been a  tasteless, odorless liquid, it would not likely have been detected.  To think that the water supplier for Charleston was repeatedly running water quality tests looking for Crude MCHM would be more than naive.  As one writer described our water motitoring system, “Most of the time,  no one is looking for most of the chemicals.”  To verify, call your municipal water supplier and ask for their monitoring schedule for 4-methylcyclohexane methanol.

Lesson #3: Point of use or “final barrier” water treatment in the home makes sense. Having a high quality carbon filter or, better, a reverse osmosis drinking water system under your sink provides excellent protection against unexpected chemicals, whether you can smell them or not.

Four days after a coal-processing chemical leaked into the Elk River, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s administration and West Virginia American Water Company were once again unable to give a firm timeline for when water service would be restored to 300,000 residents in the Kanawha Valley.

A nine-county area of West Virginia is still under a “state of emergency,” with tap water not to be used for anything but flushing toilets and fighting fires, but test results “are trending in the right direction,” Tomblin said at a news conference Sunday night.

“I believe that we are at a point where we can say that we see light at the end of the tunnel,” Tomblin said.

Jeff McIntyre, president of West Virginia American, said that he no longer believes they are “several days” from starting to lift the “do not use” order, but that the ban would not be lifted Sunday.

The leak affects the water system in parts of nine counties. All schools will be closed on

Monday in four of those counties: Kanawha, Boone, Lincoln, Putnam. Select schools will be closed in Cabell and Clay counties.

State Superintendent Jim Phares said that he would be sending instructions to county superintendents on how to flush their water systems and clean any equipment and appliances that were in contact with contaminated water. He said county personnel would begin that process on Monday.

All government offices and the legislature will be open Monday, Tomblin said.

State officials said that test results are improving, but the water system still needs significant flushing.

Gen. James Hoyer said that National Guard teams directing the sampling of water at the treatment plant met their goal of not seeing any results with chemical concentrations of more than 1 part per million of the leaked chemical, “Crude MCHM,” for 24 hours.

Laura Jordan, spokeswoman for the water company, said Sunday night that flushing of the utility’s distribution system had begun. But, residents still needed to wait until instructed to begin cleaning out their home piping and appliances.

State officials have said that a federal team from the Centers for Disease Control and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry came up with the 1-part-per-million figure as a safe level, in the absence of any drinking water standards or health-based standards for the chemical.

But there is little health data available for the material, and government officials have declined to provide much detail about how they calculated the 1-part-per-million number.

When asked for more details on Sunday, Department of Health and Human Resources Secretary Karen Bowling said only that, “We felt very confident in the federal system.”

Information about Crude MCHM has been difficult to come by, and Freedom Industries — the company that was storing the chemical along the banks of the Elk River — hasn’t been helpful in divulging information either.

“I think that perhaps they could have been a bit more forthcoming and offered their assistance on what problems this particular chemical could have caused,” Tomblin said.

When asked why officials didn’t know such material was stored so close to the region’s water intake, Director of Homeland Security Jimmy Gianato said it was a matter of the material being stored there that kept Freedom Industries off their radar. The company filed its “Tier 2” forms with the state and county last February, making them aware of what it stored and how much was kept there.

“The chemical that is involved here is not listed as an extremely hazardous or toxic substance, so it’s not subject to a lot of the regulatory requirements that other products are,” Gianato said.

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection didn’t regularly inspect those tanks, because the facility is used for storage, not processing, according to Secretary Randy Huffman.

“It’s not a process facility,” Huffman told reporters. “[Freedom Industries] simply brought the materials in and they stored them in the tanks, then they shipped them out. There are no processes, no water discharges. There are no air discharges, so there is not a water permit at this time.”

State officials continued to decline to give out much information about exactly how residents should flush out their home systems once the water company’s distribution system is deemed clear.

Bowling said those protocols would be provided “when the timing is right,” and Tomblin cautioned residents not to try to move things too quickly.

“Please don’t jump ahead,” the governor said. “That green light has not been given yet.”

McIntrye said he could not provide definitive information about whether any of the chemical would cling to the insides of home piping, water tanks or appliances.

“I wish I could speak to that with some

authority,” McIntrye said. “This is a highly soluble compound . . . The information I have is, ‘I don’t believe.’ It’s an opinion, and it’s the best I can offer.”

Once water is found acceptable for normal use, flushing can begin — zone by zone — to not strain the system.

“We need to get samples at different points within the zones to verify that the water we’re putting out at the treatment plant is completely through that zone, and then we will be able to lift that order for that zone,” McIntyre said.

The zones where flushing would begin first include downtown Charleston, the East End Kanawha City, South Charleston, the West Side and North Charleston. Those areas include four major hospitals.

An Internet based mapping system is being created for customers to search their home or business address to see what zone they are in and if they should begin flushing. It will be available at www.westvirginiaamwater.com, but it is not yet live. A 24-hour hotline is also being established, officials announced.

Ten people have been hospitalized at area hospitals with symptoms consistent with chemical exposure, Bowling said.

An additional 169 people have been treated at hospitals and released. There have been 1,045 calls to the West Virginia Poison Center concerning human exposure and 65 calls concerning animal exposure. Bowling said that the number of people calling poison control has begun to decline.

The chemical leaked out of a one-inch opening in a 35,000 gallon tank. A retaining wall surrounding the tank, supposed to serve as a failsafe, was scheduled for $1 million in repairs.

The company didn’t report the chemical spill until nearly an hour after DEP officials were already on site, and nearly four hours after citizens began complaining about the licorice odor that the leak caused. Huffman said the company has been cooperative in remediation efforts along the river.

Tanks that held Crude MCHM at the facility are being cleaned and will soon be cut apart, DEP official Mike Dorsey said. Booms continue to be in the river in order to catch the chemical as it leaches from soil.

“There will be quite a bit of work off into the future after this emergency is over, and that will involve removing tanks, removing concrete and replacing materials that are on the site with better material,” Dorsey said.

Dorsey said he is confident the flow of Crude MCHM has been stopped from the tank, but he said it’s not known how much remains in the soil.

“I suspect it’s going to leach out of that riverbank for some time,” Dorsey said. “We will maintain booms and dikes that are boosted pads in there to keep the stuff up and keep it from going into the river.”

Article Source: West Virginia Gazette-Mail.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Study shows alarming decline in Bellingham Bay marine life

 by John  Stark

Creatures that live on the bottom of Bellingham Bay are showing clear signs of stress that is probably linked to toxic pollution.

So says a new report from the Washington Department of Ecology, relying on extensive survey of bay sediments and the creatures that live in them. The survey tests found “unusually low” numbers of clams, snails, sea stars, crabs, shrimp and other sea life, according to an Ecology press release. The surveys also found that organisms least sensitive to pollutants were the most abundant, while the most sensitive organisms were scarce.

“This is a strong indicator that the sediment quality in the bay is declining,” said Valerie Partridge, lead author of the Ecology report.

The survey involved samples of the top inch of sediment at 30 locations in the bay. The sediment samples were checked for chemical content, toxicity, and population of marine life. About two-thirds of the samples had some degree of toxicity, Partridge said.

The tests were conducted in 2010. When the population of clams, snails, crabs, shrimp and brittle stars were compared to a 1997 survey, those populations showed measurable declines. But similar problems already were evident in a 2006 survey, leading researchers to conclude that conditions may have changed between 1997 and 2006.

Partridge said it is by no means clear what is causing the problems for marine life in the bay.

“We can’t rule out natural cycles or large-scale oceanographic processes, nor can we rule out human-caused changes,” Partridge said in an email. “One thing of concern is that we have noticed increased amounts of area with adversely affected benthos (marine life) in other bays and geographic regions of the Salish Sea, albeit not as extreme as in Bellingham Bay.”

Wendy Steffensen, North Sound baykeeper with RE Sources for Sustainable Communities of Bellingham, said the test results indicate the need for still more study. She noted that marine life populations are damaged all across the bay, including areas where contamination appears to be minimal.

“It’s a mystery that really deserves more investigation,” Steffensen said. “Something bigger is going on.”

That “something bigger” could be changes in water temperature and acidity resulting from climate factors not related to things that Bellingham residents have dumped in the bay for the last hundred-plus years, Steffensen said. But the data from Ecology’s study also reveals chemicals in the sediments that were put there by people.

That includes metals, industrial chemicals, antihistamine, the diuretic drug triamterene, and triclocarban, an antibacterial chemical found in some hand soaps.

“Cleanup and water treatment standards probably are not sufficient because we are still seeing toxicity,” Steffensen said.

Steffensen said everyone can do their part by thinking before they dump anything down the drain, and by avoiding lawn chemicals and fertilizers that wash into the bay when it rains. Stormwater runoff also carries oil and other pollutants from cars into the bay. If people reduce driving, they are reducing bay pollution.

“Stormwater is the biggest carrier of pollutants that we know of,” Steffensen said.

The study also may demonstrate the need for even more intense – and costly – efforts to clean up industrial pollution in and around a redeveloping waterfront.

“Part of it comes down to willpower,” Steffensen said. “Do people care enough to make sure that the bay is healthy? It also comes down to political willpower and funding. … Our waters are life-sustaining. It’s where our fish come from.”

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Latin American rivers among most polluted in the world, says new study

Experts are warning of a possible public health and environmental crisis after it was revealed that rivers in Latin America are some of the most polluted in the world

Republicans have implemented some of the most notable US environmental laws, even if one of the most successful, the Clean Water Act of 1972, was initially vetoed by Richard Nixon. At the time, two thirds of America’s rivers were considered polluted, with raw sewage pouring into many of them and Ohio’s Cuyahoga River famously catching fire.

Editor’s Note:  One of the most significant and effective pieces of legislation ever enacted in the United States was the Clean Water Act of 1972. Americans today complain of the restrictive actions of the EPA, the organization created by the Act, and recent legislation has cut back on the agency’s authority, but the fact is that the Clean Water Act has performed miracles in the cleanup of America’s water.

It has been pointed out the the EPA is the victim of its own success.  Because most have forgotten how bad things were prior to the Clean Water Act, we complain of excessive regulation which is blamed for holding businesses back.   At the time of the enactment, public support was so strong in support of federal enforcement of water protection that a bipartisan Congress easily over-rode President Nixon’s veto of the Act. When you hear today’s politicians whining about over-regulation, ask yourself if you would really rather go back to the time when American rivers were receiving untreated sewerage and chemical wastes from 2/3 of the nations cities and factories and rivers were actually catching fire.

Below is the transcript of an interview with Republican William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and a long-time advocate for clean water.  The interview is conducted by Ashley Ahearn.  If you prefer, you can listed to the interview by using this link:   stream/download .  –Hardly Waite.

AHEARN: He was the first Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency back when it was created under the Nixon administration. He’s had a long career in law, business and politics. And now he lives in Seattle, where I sat down with him in his office.

RUCKELSHAUS: Thanks for being here.

AHEARN: Take me back to the time of the creation of the Clean Water Act – what was the feeling at the time that made the EPA and made the Clean Water Act necessary?

RUCKELSHAUS: Well the sentiment was an explosion of public concern about the environment. It was caused by a number of factors, Rachel Carson’s book which was written in 1962, had a cumulative effect that was quite pronounced in the country at the time. We had flammable rivers, you already mentioned the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.

We had people in Denver wanting to see the mountains and people in Los Angeles wanting to see one another and it was a terrible time. I remember the first time I moved to Washington and the air was brown as I’d go to work in the morning. There was no industry in Washington at the time, that was all automobile pollution. So, people not only heard and saw problems of pollution on television every night, they witnessed it on the way to work, so it really created a demand that something be done.

What people have forgotten is that the Clean Water Act was vetoed by President Nixon; that veto was overridden overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress by both parties, even though the election was just two weeks away, and President Nixon was just 20 points ahead of Senator McGovern, his opponent. At the time still, his own party overturned that veto overwhelmingly.

William Ruckelshaus

AHEARN: What was that like? What were your conversations like with Nixon?

RUCKELSHAUS: Oh, they were so wonderful.

AHEARN: (Laughs.)

RUCKELSHAUS: I had sent him a letter prior to his decision as to whether to sign or veto the bill spelling out why I thought he should sign it, why I was in support of it. His principal concern was that he had asked for five billion dollars to devote to the sewage treatment plant grant program at the federal level. And they’d put seven billion in the bill and that got him quite agitated – he thought that was too much money. So he vetoed it. And what the override of that veto really showed was the overwhelming public support that existed at that time for cleaning up the water and the air and handling all kinds of environmental problems.

AHEARN: I want to play some tape for you that might sound familiar – it’s from the NBC evening news archives from 1971:

[ARCHIVE TAPE: William Ruckelshaus, President Nixon’s head man on environment was on the stand today before Senator Muskie of Maine who has dwelled on this issue himself. They were taking about clean water. How long is it going to take? I’m going to have to acquire some kind of national deadlines in order to ensure there’s no inequality of treatment of this between regions – the states just don’t respond with equal speed. I think that’s right. Each industry and the states must be placed on a deadline. And it’s through this method that we can get uniform treatment across the country of putting everybody on the same deadline.]

AHEARN: That guy sounds familiar.

RUCKELSHAUS: He doesn’t sound familiar to me!

AHEARN: (Laughs).

RUCKELSHAUS: Muskie did.

AHEARN: That deadline you were talking about ended up being 1985. There was supposed to be “zero discharge of pollutants into navigable waters by 1985” is the quote. And, quote, “swimmable, fishable waterways by 1983.” Looking back on it, was that a reasonable deadline?

RUCKELSHAUS: No. It was not. Not anymore than the 1975 deadline for clean air throughout the country was reasonable. The Congress believed that setting deadlines, even if they were somewhat arbitrary and not likely to be achieved was necessary both to demonstrate the urgency of the need for the problem to be addressed, and at the same time maximize the pressure on the administrative branch to get moving to show improvement.

I can remember testifying in front of Senator Muskie that if we stopped doing everything that we were doing in the government we couldn’t achieve these deadlines. And the problem with them was not the sincerity with which they were being suggested by the Congress, the problem with it was you doomed an agency like EPA to failure before it starts because we can’t get there in that period of time.

It’s taken us hundreds of years to get where we are today in terms of pollution. You just simply can’t clean it up overnight. That was always capable of being portrayed as dragging your feet and not doing the right thing. In my view, it was just a statement of reality that we couldn’t do it in that period of time.

AHEARN: So, the Act passes, you’ve got this new power and the money to make the changes and build the infrastructure. What happens next, what’s going through your head?

RUCKELSHAUS: Well, it was a marvelous opportunity, in my view, to try to show the American people that their demand – their legitimate demand that something be done about a societal problem – would trigger the right kind of response from government and it was up to us at EPA to do the best job we could to respond to that legitimate concern, that was affecting public health and the environment.

We had less than a third of the cities in the countries providing adequate sewage treatment – in some cases, no sewage treatment. The sewage was just going directly into waterways and that was causing water borne diseases, it was causing all kinds of problems. We just had ignored it, essentially from the beginning, and this was a massive effort on the part of the federal government to deal with this problem.

AHEARN: What would have happened if we hadn’t had the Clean Water Act? What did it allow you to do?

RUCKELSHAUS: That’s a very good question. The way to measure progress is not just against where we were when we started versus where we are today, but where we were when we started and where we would be today had we done nothing. There are thousands of miles of waterways that are much cleaner today than they were 40 years ago as a result of the treatment being put in or discharges that were going in that have been corrected. And as I say, that doesn’t mean we’re home free, we’ve still go work to do and always will have. But we’re a lot better off today than we were 40 years ago.

AHEARN: What are you seeing now when you say there’s more work to do? What would be at the top of your list if you were in charge today?

RUCKELSHAUS: The biggest problem by far is what’s called non-point source pollution. The point sources are water discharged from sewage treatment plants or from major industrial facilities, and those were the things that got the most attention when we started because that was 85 percent of the problem. That’s what EPA estimated was true. The other kinds of problems are runoff from city streets, runoff from suburban lands, from farmlands, from rural lands, and those are so-called non-point source pollutions, it doesn’t all come from one single source. And the situation is just reversed today.

The EPA’s current estimates is that 85 percent of the problem is non-point source pollution. That’s a much harder problem to get at because it isn’t a single plant or a single city that’s discharging. You can put those cities, which we’ve done, and industrial facilities on permits. Permits spell out what they have to do to keep the water from being polluted from their discharge. They have self-reporting requirements if they violate any of the terms of the permit they can either be fined substantially or be put in jail if they violate on purpose the requirements of the permit itself.

So that problem is largely under social control. I’m not saying that it’s gone, we still have to stay with it, but it’s largely under social control. The non-point source problem is all of the rest of us. That’s the ones that we’re all convinced we’re not doing any of this – this is all some terrible person or all some terrible industry or city that I have no control over. But getting people to manage their land in such a way, getting people to control their lives in such a way that they don’t contribute to this non-point source pollution problem is proving to be very difficult.

AHEARN: I want to talk politics here for a minute. It seems like in recent years, Congress has had a really hard time reaching any sort of bipartisan agreement on anything, really. Let alone environmental issues. But 40 years ago, when the Clean Water Act came into being, things looked different. Why is the environment a partisan issue now, and how do Republicans get back into the game of protecting the environment?

RUCKELSHAUS: Well, they’re not. Those Republicans in the House, in particular, though it’s probably true in the Senate as well, but the ones in the House have passed a lot of laws recently through the House, but not through the Senate, that would take authority away from EPA to regulate this kind of stuff, that would even abolish EPA in the case of some of those laws… are a result of people coming to believe that the regulatory system itself is imposing unfair burdens on industry, on the American people. So that when a Republican politician rails against the EPA for excessive regulation, they don’t get the same kind of feedback they would have gotten 40 years ago when these laws passed unanimously by their predecessors in Congress.

And when they asked EPA why are you doing what you’re doing, because the very body I’m testifying in front of told me to do this 40 years ago, it’s still in the law, you haven’t amended the law. If you don’t want me to enforce the law, then don’t put it in the law that I’m charged with implementing. And I’ve seen the current Congress say that any regulation that costs over 100 million dollars a year, we should review as to whether or not it should go out in the form in which it’s been promulgated.

Well, I’m going to be tempted to give them that authority and you go ahead and answer the questions from your constituents about the impact of doing this on their health, on their environment, and see how much you like making these kinds of decisions. They wouldn’t last six months under those conditions. Now, it will never happen, they’ll never get that kind of authority to go back, but the difference today from where we were 40 years ago is where public opinion is. If public opinion were as intolerant of what’s happening to our environment and our public health today as they were 40 years ago, you wouldn’t have a partisan split on this issue. There was almost unanimity that something be done about it.

AHEARN: So, what changed?

RUCKELSHAUS: I think a number of things changed. Maybe the most important thing is success. The EPA may well be a victim of its own success. We don’t see the same kinds of visible pollution problems today that we did. We don’t have flammable rivers anymore and we don’t have smog that’s so awful that you can’t even see one another. That was the situation back in the ’60s when the public’s concern began to express itself.

We still have problems today; they tend to be more invisible. They tend to be things that you can’t smell, touch and feel the way you could 40 years ago. And that just doesn’t get public attention. You’re also going through a terrible economic time right now. And the economy, whenever the economy deteriorates, support for the environment deteriorates as well.

AHEARN: You’re a grandfather, right?

RUCKELSHAUS: Right. 12 times!

AHEARN: Wow! So, if you…

RUCKELSHAUS: That’s part of the problem.

AHEARN: (Laughs.) So if you listen to this interview with your grandkids, or if your grandkids heard this interview, what would you want to tell them about the Clean Water Act and what it meant for you and your career?

RUCKELSHAUS: Well, what I’d want them to know is that their society, their government, can be responsive in a democracy to their legitimate demands. And that where problems are identified and the government is supported by the public and serious about dealing with them, significant progress can be made. So the government isn’t always the enemy, the government is sometimes a necessary institution for dealing with problems as widespread and gross as water pollution was, and it’s an example of our country having successfully grappled with a problem.

So, don’t, as you grow older and as you mature in your understanding of the choices that we have in society, necessarily rule out a governmental solution for a problem that you have. It’s not the best way to solve all of the problems by any means, but there are some problems that we’re in it together, just like our President has said. Some problems you can solve yourself, others you have to solve together – water pollution is right up there at the top.

AHEARN: Mr. Ruckelshaus, thanks for joining me.

RUCKELSHAUS: Sure Enough. Thank you.

AHEARN: Bill Ruckelshaus was the first Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency back when it was created under the Nixon Administration.

 The Cuyahoga River Today

Reference Source:  Living on Earth.

See also on this site,  Cuyahoga River Fire by Michael Rotman.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Fracking 101: Breaking down the most important part of today’s oil, gas drilling

by Sharon Dunn

 Editor’s Note:  A survey taken in 2013 showed that although the oil production practice called fracking has stirred up a storm of controversy in our country the majority of Americans have little or no idea of what the practice itself consists of.  We’re reprinting this article from The Greeley Tribune in an effort to remedy this ignorance. — Hardly Waite.

Fracking, the two- to three-day process of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas, is perhaps one of the most misunderstood drilling practices, becoming as bad of a word in some circles as a racial slur.

Entire countries have banned the process. Some Colorado towns have placed moratoriums to study it further.

Environmentalists storm capitals over it, demanding increased regulations, and oil and gas company employees and officials scratch their heads — they’ve been using the same process in oil and gas drilling for 60 years without widespread incidents.

“It’s a perplexing issue,” said Collin Richardson, vice president of operations for Mineral Resources Inc., who opened up

Huge pipes lead down a hill to provide water to a fracking site.

a company fracking job last fall to a student tour from the University of Northern Colorado. “People go to a light switch and expect energy to be there, but they don’t think about where it comes from. I don’t think most people understand that without hydraulic fracturing, we wouldn’t have natural gas to provide electricity to our homes or gas in our cars.

“There’s a gross misconception, and extreme environmentalist groups have been able to get ahold of people’s emotions and twist facts and present false evidence. That’s what it’s all about.”

A recent study by researchers at Oregon State, George Mason and Yale universities revealed that more than half of the 1,000-plus people surveyed across the nation had no idea what fracking was, and almost 60 percent had no opinion on it.

In recent years, combining hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling is what has allowed for the oil and gas revolution that many in the industry say will pull America away from the Middle East in terms of long-term resources and energy independence.

It’s important to understand that fracking is a small part of a much larger operation to get oil and gas from a mile below the surface into storage tanks for market.

Fracking takes about two to three days in what is roughly a 10- to 14-day process of drilling and completing a well.

“Fracking is one of the important parts of this,” said Leen Weijers, vice president of technology and sales for Liberty Oil Field Services, a private contractor that fracs wells for oil and gas exploration companies.

Fracking has always been a part of drilling. The new part of the process is horizontal drilling.

“People don’t equate drilling with fracking,” Richardson said. “I don’t think most people understand if you ban fracking, you effectively ban drilling.”

Starting a well

Companies start the drilling process on about a 3-acre pad of land, which allows for the many trucks that become part of an oil and gas drilling process.

The process begins with vertical drilling. A drilling rig is brought on site to drill the well, which will go to depths of up to 10,000 feet below the surface. This process can take from a week to 10 days, depending on the site.

Drilling stops initially below the water table so the well can be encased in cement to prevent anything from the well leaking into the water table. Once the casing is completed, a 7-inch drill bit will drill more than a mile to get to the formation in which to frac, usually the Niobrara or Codell formations, both stacked beneath several impermeable rock formations. Once the drill bit hits bottom, or the “pay zone,” the company will drill what is called the “bend,” which is the curve the well takes to get into the horizontal portion of the zone. The bend alone could take up to two days to drill.

Throughout the drilling process, drilling mud is pumped in to cool the drill bit and act as a means for the resulting debris to leave the well.

Up to twelve semi trucks all running together provide the horsepower to the wellhead for the fracking process.

The horizontal portion of the well then is drilled for an additional 4,000 feet to 10,000 feet, then encased in cement, with a 4-inch metal pipe in the center to allow for the oil and gas to flow to the surface. At this point, the well is just a hole drilled into the ground, with a cement barrier between the pipe, the formations and water table.

The rig is packed up and activity stops until fracking is scheduled. Sometimes it can wait for weeks before a fracking crew is able to get there. Sometimes it takes a couple of days.

Fracking

The actual fracking process uses a lot of machinery capable of driving the fluid down more than a mile, and a lot of science to calculate the exact mixtures of everything from chemicals and water and sand to the pressure it takes to crack tiny little fissures into rocks, more than a mile beneath the surface.

Sand, water and chemical additives are pumped into the well at high pressures, so as to crack the rock in different stages in the horizontal (parallel to the surface) portion of the well.

“To open fractures at bottom-hole pressures in the Niobrara, you probably need downhole pressures of 10,000 psi or so to open the rocks,” Weijers said.

The chemicals do not erode the rock to create the cracks or fracs — it’s the high pressure of the water that opens them up. The chemicals, such as guar gum, which also are in many foods we eat, are added to help the water to gel, allowing the sand an easier vehicle in which to move.

“When it’s thicker, it does a better job of carrying sand downhole,” Weijers said. “If you think about a handful of sand at a lake, and you put it in water, the sand will settle quickly to the bottom of the lake. We don’t want that to happen in factures.”

Those cracks, now held open by the tiny kernels of sand, release the trapped oil and gas inside, which flow back to the surface after the downward pressure from fluids is released from the well.

Soap ingredients also can be added to the gel to prevent bacterial growth in the well. If bacteria forms, it could release deadly gases.

“You put a lot worse stuff in your food, your yard, or your garden,” Richardson said. “A lot of the chemicals are used to clean your counters, and put in your make-up.”

Many involved in the process describe frac fluid as “slime,” like the stuff kids play with from the local toy store.

The Layout

To handle the sand, water, chemicals and production that comes out of the well during the fracking of the well (commonly called flowback), the site needs have the basics: Trucks, trucks and more trucks to carry the water, the sand, and the chemicals to mix them all together, and more truck horsepower to combine it all to shoot down through a pipe into an 8-inch hole in the ground.

To prep the area, several 500-barrel tanks for water storage or a massive, 40,000-barrel pool to store water is erected on the periphery of the site. Sand storage tanks arrive, then are filled. A typical frac job will utilize from 1.5 million to 6 million pounds of sand.

Iron trucks carry massive amounts of pipe that will be used to keep the well opened and separate from the well.

“When the rest of the crew arrives on location, they’ll typically rig up to the well head with a missile,” Weijers said.

The missile is a manifold around which most of the activity centers, to ultimately pump fracking fluid downhole. Crews will line on each side of the missile five to six semi trucks, which contain the horsepower to create enough pressure to pump the fluid downhole at the proper rate.

In addition to the horsepower trucks, there are sand trucks and trucks containing the chemical additives to thicken the water to keep the sand moving in the well.

A hydration truck, through which the chemicals are added to the water to “gel,” and a blender, which mixes that fluid with the sand, are nearby. All surround the missile in a horseshoe shape.

“The blender sends the mixture of sand water to the low-pressure side of the missile,” Weijers said. “From that missile, we have 10-12 connections to the individual horsepower units, which really pressurize the mixture of sand and fluids so the (missile) can send it (through its high-pressure side) downhole at pressures that can crack the rock open.”

That one process is good for one frac, or stage, at which the horizontal well is cracked from being hit at such high pressures.

A typical well can have 20 fracs, each necessitating this procedure of blending, pressurizing and cracking. A typical frac job can last up to 20 hours — one frac stage per hour — from start to finish.

At the open end, or the top of the horseshoe, is a data center, or a trailer containing about five to six people controlling the science of the job. There’s usually a representative or two from the oil and gas company, a frac job supervisor and an engineer to do the calculations.

“Typically, there’s an engineer who makes the readings of the pressure,” Weijers said. “There’s hundreds of parameters being tracked, all the chemicals, the proppant (sand) being pumped, pressures during the job. The engineer makes it possible to track that and do scientific calculations of the data.”

Here, employees track every aspect of the job, from pressures of the frac fluid to the diesel engine’s fuel gauges.

At various other open areas, there will be containers in which the used sand and production waters are placed into once they fulfill their purpose in the wells to be hauled off later for recycling, injection or disposal.

On jobs where crews utilize a large pool of water, the water is usually being heated to temperatures of about 70 degrees to provide the perfect chemical combination with the additives and sand.

At some point in the drilling and completion process, crews will build oil and gas storage tanks, vapor recovery units to control air emissions, and oil and gas separators for the eventual well production. All will be strategically located around the wellhead.

Completion

Once all the fracs are created, the downward pressure is removed from the well. Within a couple of days, the release of that pressure will reverse, allowing the oil and gas to flow from the rocks and up the well.

“At end of the frac job, the flow stream is reversed,” Wiejers said. “Instead of pumping things downhole, due to the pressure we created, we have almost no pressure at the surface, then the flow reverts and oil and gas and some of the water find their way back from downhole to the surface.”

All the equipment is removed from the site, leaving only the wellhead, the storage tanks, separators and emissions control. Production can last for years.

Source:  The Greeley Tribune.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Study Finds Variability In The Accuracy Of Methods Used To Measure Emerging Contaminants

Environmental Analysis: For chemicals from pharmaceuticals or personal care products, analysis methods may lead to inaccurate measurements or data that are not comparable between labs

How to Remove Arsenic from Water

There are many treatment strategies that can be used to reduce arsenic in water.  A Water Conditioning and Purification article (paper issue, Dec. 2013)  listed the following as effective arsenic treatments.  They are listed in alphbetical order, not order of effectiveness.

1. Activated Alumina

2. Coagulation-assisted filtration

3. Electrodeionization

4. Granular ferric hydroxide

5. Ion exchange

6. Lime softening

7. Nanofiltration

8. Reverse osmosis.

Of these, three are by far most commonly used for residential treatment: Activated Alumina, Granular Ferric Hydroxide, and Reverse Osmosis.

This is not to suggest that a home owner can simply get a reverse osmosis unit or an activated alumina filter and assume he has solved the arsenic problem.  Arsenic is potentially life-threatening and it should not be taken lightly.  Treating arsenic is actually fairly complicated, although the basics that you need to consider are these:

In water, arsenic exists as arsenite (As III)  or arsenate  (As V).  The most common is As(V).  Usually if water contains dissolved oxygen and the pH is 7 or above, As(III) will naturally be oxidized to As(V).

Common treatment methods like reverse osmosis, activated alumina, and ferric hydroxide filtration remove As V well but not As III.  Therefore, the usual practice is to use an oxidizer in front of the treatment process to assure that the Arsenic in the water exists as arsenate.   Of the commonly used oxidizers, chlorine, potassium permanganate and ozone work very well.  Also useful is filtration through Filox, which has proven to be an effective oxidizer for Arsenic.

More detailed information on  this topic can be found on the Pure Water Occasional website.

Our Top Ten Products 

by Gene Franks,   Pure Water Products

At near the end of 2013, I took a look to see what our best selling products at Pure Water Products were for the year. Some were predictable, some were surprises, and all point to a moral. I’ll tell you what our top ten sellers were first:

1. UV102. Pura UV Lamp #20. The top-selling product on the list was no surprise. This has been our best selling single item for a number of years. When Pure Water Products started in 1986, it didn’t cross my mind that I was getting into the light bulb business. We sell lots of Pura #20 UV lamps because it is the standard lamp for all Pura plastic whole house UV units, we’ve been selling Pura units since the early 1990s and have lots of customers who need annual replacements, and we have have an all-Pura website (http://www.purauv.com) that is the uncontested best source for Pura plastic units, parts, and information.

2. FC001, MatriKX CTO Plus carbon block filter cartridge, 9.75″ X 2.5″ size. This has for years been our favorite and our best selling filter cartridge. It’s the standard cartridge for our Model 77 countertop filter as well as our Black and White series reverse osmosis units and undersink filters.

3. DC006. WellPro 220 volt control module. This is a best seller we aren’t proud of. It’s a control module for a dry pellet chlorinator. We sell a lot of these because we make them available and most websites don’t, but also because it’s a part that fails often and has to be replaced. This isn’t a big profit item because we also have to handle lots of warranty replacements. The module has an 18-month warranty and a habit of dying before the warranty expires.

4. FC403. MatriKX CTO carbon block cartridge, 4.5″ X 20″ size. We sell lots of these because they’re the standard cartridge in our “compact whole house filters” and because they’re a popular “after market” replacement in Pura Big Boy ultraviolet units.

5. RO001. This is a product we’re really proud of, our Black and White undersink reverse osmosis unit. We build these RO units ourselves and customize them at customers’ requests.

6. FC453. 5-Micron Wound String Sediment cartridge, 4.5 ” X 20″ size. Standard in our compact whole house sediment units as well as Pura Big Boy units. People with high sediment well water go through lots of sediment cartridges.

7. RO200. This is the countertop version of our Black and White reverse osmosis unit. Another product that we build ourselves and modify according to the customer’s request.

8. UV013. The Pura UVBB-3. Pura’s 15 gallon per minute “Big Boy” triple whole house unit, with UV lamp, a sediment filter, and a carbon block filter.

9. DC008. Chlorine Pellets for WellPro dry pellet chlorinators.

10. UV007. Pura UV20-3. Pura’s 10 gallon per minute whole house UV unit, with 2.5″ X 20″ carbon block and sediment filters.

And now for the moral. From a business perspective:

1. What sells best are things that wear out and have to be replaced. Filter cartridges, UV lamps, and chlorine pellets are all things that are used up and have to be replaced.

2. Bad products may be more profitable than good products. This is an unfortunate fact. We’ve all heard of planned obsolescence. I bought a Bose radio a dozen years  ago and except for a few Radio Shack batteries for the remote control, I’ve never had any expense after the initial purchase. The purchase price seemed high for a radio, but it turned out to be a great bargain. Chlorinator modules, on the other hand, cost half as much as my Bose radio and often don’t last through the warranty period. The manufacturer keeps making bad ones because people keep buying them.  It’s a proprietary product–no one else makes one that will fit the chlorinator.

We don’t like this system, but we all seem to be caught in it.  And for General Electric one can see how it makes more sense to purchase very cheap offshore chlorinator modules than to make good ones (as they did a few years ago) that last and last and hardly every have to be replaced.