Repeal exemption for gas drilling
This is a copy of a letter to the Oneonta Daily Star that was published on February 13, 2009. It is reprinted with the permission of the author.
I am responding to Dick Downey’s guest commentary on horizontal gas drilling published on Jan 17. This way of thinking is a huge mistake.
Watchdogs have great value to society, but they must have the law on their side.
Unfortunately, the laws protecting our water have been compromised. In 2004, the EPA stripped the protections of the Clean Water Act from all aspects of horizontal drilling. In September, H.R. 7231 was introduced by Diana DeGette, co-sponsored by John Salazar and Maurice Hinchey, and would have repealed the exemption for hydraulic fracturing to the Safe Drinking Water Act. This repeal would have given watchdogs some teeth.
Until this repeal can come up for a vote, there is not protection for our drinking water.
This is bound to come up for review again in the 111th Congress. Please let your congressmen know that we need to protect our drinking water supply. We are very fortunate to have great drinking water, and we should all work to keep it safe and clean.
Mike Mitchell
Otego
6 responses so far
Mike,
I’m glad of your interest, but your letter expresses a very common misunderstanding. The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) applies to municipal, industrial, and institutional water supplies. It DOES NOT apply to private springs and wells.
Therefore, if you live in rural America, either in upstate NY, or
elsewhere, H.R. 7231 will do NOTHING to protect your water. This
bill is being supported by people who want to protect the water
supplies of cities, and extract gas from rural areas.
I agree that municipal water supplies need protection, but so do the wells of homeowners. If Congress won’t help us, then the NYS Department of Health has to champion a comprehensive law to protect individual springs and wells from hydrofracking.
Anne Marie Garti
Brian replies:
Anne Marie, thanks for that great comment. I wasn’t aware of that, and it’s a good thing to keep in mind.
I’m not so sure that Hinchey has that kind of devious ulterior motive, but I’ll bet the gas companies and some others have every intent to pervert laws like that for their own purposes, and we should all be aware of it.
I live in rural Texas and H.R. 7231 WILL help us greatly.
H.R. 7231 will require oil and gas companies to reveal the chemicals they use in the hydraulic fracture process. Right now they are not required to reveal that information. We don’t even know what chemicals to test for!
H.R. 7231 is extremely important to protect our water no matter if you use municipal water or a private well!
Please ask your city council, groundwater conservation district, county commissioners, environmental organizations and any other organizations you can think of to draft a resolution to support H.R. 7231.
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Dear TXSharon,
I am sympathetic to your plight. But, as I’m sure you know, the oil and gas industry is exempt from lots of environmental laws. This bill simply does not go far enough. The industry is targeting over half the states and we need to protect everyone from these dangers.
You may not know that NYS is currently updating its environmental rules and has stated that it will be requiring the identification of the chemicals used in fracking.
Meanwhile, let’s band together to protect everyones air, soil, and water by repealing ALL of the exemptions that have been granted to the oil and gas industry. While we’re at it, let’s make them pay taxes too.
Anne Marie
We need HR 7231, a similar change to the Safe Drinking Water Act, action at the state level to force disclosure of what chemicals are used in the fracking process, a legislated responsibility for managing ground water and surface water as the public resource (necessity) it is, and state and local plans to respond to inevitable water contamination crises.
When the states (I live in Pennsylvania) require disclosure of ALL chemicals used in the process, the developers will threaten to leave and take their money with them (as they’ve done in other states). It will become a local level war between those who stand to profit financially from exploration and those who recognize that without clean water we’re all screwed.
But once contamination hits a sizeable town water supply, effecting — oh, say — twenty thousand people, causing an overnight catastrophe, maybe then we’ll get sensible action. We may even make the national news (which seems completely oblivious to the topic, though it seems like it would make excellent television), all the major networks arriving to film tank trucks of water entering town to throngs of parched inhabitants, mobbing the trucks after going three days without water. It sounds farfetched, but we are only one misplaced well drilling away from depriving tens of thousands of people of drinking water. How’s it go? Four seconds without blood, four minutes without air, four days without water . . . .
Yes. This is critical.
I think that HR 7231 was not passed and has been dropped am i wrong?
When you go to this link:http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-7231
it basically says this did not become law:
“This bill never became law. This bill was proposed in a previous session of Congress. Sessions of Congress last two years, and at the end of each session all proposed bills and resolutions that haven’t passed are cleared from the books. Members often reintroduce bills that did not come up for debate under a new number in the next session.”
Does anyone know if it is going to be reintroduced? Salazar who is now Secretary of the Interior was a co-sponsor of HR 7231.
Thanks, a very concerned citizen