November 29th, 2011

by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, Nov. 29, 2011, 11:14 a.m.

A deal to sell a controversial central Wyoming natural gas field has fallen apart amidst allegations that drilling there has caused water pollution.

Texas-based Legacy Resources backed out of a $45 million deal to buy the field near Pavillion, Wyom., from EnCana last week, soon after the Environmental Protection Agency said it had detected cancer-causing benzene at 50 times the level safe for humans and other carcinogenic pollutants during its latest round of sampling.

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August 5th, 2010

Residents who live along the Kalamazoo River in Michigan have filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Enbridge, Inc., the company responsible for last week’s spill of more than 800,000 gallons of oil into the river, the result of a ruptured pipe. Already, unsafe levels of benzene have been found in the wake of the spill. The volatile compound can cause headaches, rashes, and stomach distress.

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January 25th, 2010

(From ProPublica, which originally posted this piece, which was co-published with Politico, on Dec. 27, 2009.)

For more than a decade the energy industry has steadfastly argued before courts, Congress and the public that the federal law protecting drinking water should not be applied to hydraulic fracturing [2], the industrial process that is essential to extracting the nation’s vast natural gas reserves. In 2005 Congress, persuaded, passed a law prohibiting such regulation.

Now an important part of that argument — that most of the millions of gallons of toxic chemicals that drillers inject underground are removed for safe disposal, and are not permanently discarded inside the earth — does not apply to drilling in many of the nation’s booming new gas fields.

Three company spokesmen and a regulatory official said in separate interviews with ProPublica that as much as 85 percent of the fluids used during hydraulic fracturing is being left underground after wells are drilled in the Marcellus Shale, the massive gas deposit that stretches from New York to Tennessee.

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May 1st, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

We hear every day about dangerous chemicals in household products that are linked to cancer, infertility, autism and other diseases – yet many Americans may not realize just how many of these harmful substances they’ve actually ingested in the course of everyday living.

The answer? About 48. That’s according a study by the Environmental Working Group and Rachel’s Network, in which five leading minority women environmentalists from different parts of the country volunteered to have their blood tested for toxins. The results, say EWG experts, show that regulation of chemicals in the U.S. is weak and “antiquated” and needs a major overhaul.

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