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In Clark, a small northern Wyoming town, benzene was detected in an aquifer after a well blowout. In central Colorado, near the town of Silt, a water well exploded, sending its cap shooting off into the sky. A few miles away, methane gas was found bubbling up out of a placid eddy in a tributary to the Colorado River; then high levels of benzene were detected. It was difficult to say what led to each of these accidents the latter two of which were also connected to EnCana wells, but drilling and the close proximity of hydraulic fracturing operations was a common thread.

Even in Pavillion, it turned out, Meeks wasn’t the only one with problems. Central Wyoming is a private place, where pride stifles complaints and the miles of space between homes are emblematic of the privacy between people. So, it wasn’t until Meeks’ wife, Donna, a bookkeeper at the Fremont County School District, was chatting with co-worker Rhonda Locker that she learned that the Lockers had also lost their clean water. Rhonda was battling illnesses that she and her husband suspected were caused by contamination. The gas drilling company Tom Brown had paid to have a water-filtration system installed in the Lockers’ house years ago, before Tom Brown was bought by EnCana.

Although the Lockers lived just a short way down the road from the Meeks, the two families had never spoken about their problems. “We weren’t real open about our concerns,” Jeff Locker said. “It’s kind of like talking about your medical conditions.”

Even as a pattern began to emerge, state and federal environment regulators viewed these cases as extraordinary exceptions. If they were addressed at all, they were taken on as isolated problems, not symptoms of a larger threat. Regulators in different states rarely compared notes, and anecdotal stories were confined to local press reports and never thoroughly investigated. The dots were not connected.

Not, that is, until a problem began to emerge 90 miles west of Louis Meeks’ home, in Sublette County, Wyoming, a wind-raked, sparsely populated valley with a deeply buried dome of gas-rich sandstone known as the Pinedale Anticline. In 1999 there had been fewer than 35 producing wells in the Pinedale drilling field, which had hitherto seen little activity aside from ranchers running cattle and the nearby crossing of the Oregon Trail. By 2008, there were more than 1,100, and EnCana, Shell, BP and other companies were lining up to participate in the drilling of 4,400 more Sublette County wells on the ocean of sagebrush.

Much of the land in Sublette County is owned by the federal government, which meant that the Environmental Protection Agency, not just state regulators, was charged with conducting an environmental review before drilling is allowed. As part of that review, in 2007 EPA hydrologists sampled a pristine drinking water aquifer that underlay the region. What they found was a show-stopper: frighteningly high levels of benzene, a known carcinogen, in 88 separate samples stretching across 28 miles.

“It was like, holy shit, this is huge,” said Greg Oberley, a groundwater specialist at the EPA’s Region 8 headquarters in Denver. “You’ve got benzene in a usable aquifer and nobody is able to verbalize well, using factual information, how the benzene got there. Nobody understood what caused this.”

One thing was clear: There was little industrial activity in the Pinedale area other than drilling, and few other potential causes for the pollution.

In the past, water contamination in drilling fields had been blamed on outdated practices, the messy mistakes of the 1950s. But drilling in Pinedale was relatively new. In this modern field, any contamination linked to drilling also had to be linked to contemporary practices.

For perhaps the first time, federal officials charged with watching over the nation’s drinking water in the oil and gas fields were alarmed. “I had to change my paradigm on how the industry was operating,” Oberley said. “That’s kind of where I said, ‘This needs a better look.’ ”

Oberley was among a small group of EPA scientists, mostly based out of the Denver offices, who wanted to begin fresh research into what was causing water pollution near drilling fields. The biggest question, of course, was whether drilling posed a significant threat to water resources.

The stakes were potentially high. Policy makers and even prominent environmental groups like the Sierra Club were championing natural gas as a viable new energy supply, because it burns 50 percent cleaner than coal at the power plant and because it offers the opportunity to make headway against climate change.

If the EPA’s scientists concluded that modern drilling did indeed endanger water on a large scale, and the rate of drilling in the United States continued to skyrocket in regions that relied heavily on aquifers and were concerned about water shortages, then research from Wyoming could have broad implications. Much of the Dust Belt, from the Dakotas down to Texas, relies on groundwater aquifers for water, as do many other rural areas across the United States. Fifteen percent of Americans rely on private wells, the kind Louis Meeks drilled in his yard, for their water. Not that the enormous underground reservoirs were likely to become polluted all at once, they contain way too much water, but the sheer size of the population dependent on groundwater illustrated the risks. These resources are not routinely tested for pollutants from drilling or any other industry, and there are no federal regulations to ensure that they remain safe to drink.

Contaminants could also affect surface water supplies.

The Colorado River, which supplies drinking water to one in 12 Americans, is fed from the drainage that runs through the Pinedale Anticline and is vulnerable to pollution from gas development not just in Wyoming, but throughout the most intensive drilling regions in western Colorado and Utah.

As drilling activity moved east, to cramped and populated areas, the water resources that could potentially be at risk grew even larger. Between Pennsylvania's Delaware and Susquehanna River basins and the Catskill watershed in New York, an area that lies in the heart of the eagerly sought Marcellus Shale gas deposits, drinking water is supplied to New York City , Philadelphia, Baltimore and Trenton, NJ, another 5 percent of the U.S. population. Add those segments together, and a significant percentage of the U.S. water supply, not to mention at least 15 percent of the country's agriculture — could potentially be affected if it turns out that drilling for natural gas leads to significant pollution over a long period of time.

“Are the problems we’re seeing an anomaly? Or is the current regime with new fields and new practices compromising ground water quality on a wide-spread, wide scale basis?” asked one senior EPA staff person, who declined to be named because the issue is so politically charged. “That’s a question that we really don’t have answers to. We have anecdotal reports. The weight of evidence, it’s adding up.”

To chisel into these issues, Oberley knew the studies he wanted to do would have to be done deliberately, objectively and would take a long time. After all, the EPA’s de facto policy had been to allow most of the new drilling that was taking place.

“For EPA to walk into industry’s offices and say, ‘You need to change this,’ we have to have some pretty good data to back that up,” Oberley said. “Because they’re not going to respond to innuendo or insinuation that there’s a problem.”
Obstacles to Research

It wasn’t at all clear that the EPA had the budget, the political fortitude or the impetus to pursue the thorough study that Oberley and other scientists thought was needed.

The agency had looked, briefly, at hydraulic fracturing before. In 2004 it published a report examining how it affected water supplies in a type of geologic formation, called coalbed methane, which is different from the rocks being drilled in most of the nation’s new gas fields. The report detailed numerous concerns about the potential for dangerous fluids to migrate underground. But then, in an abrupt turn, it concluded that hydraulic fracturing “poses little or no threat” and “does not justify additional study.” The one exception, it found, was when diesel fuel was used in fracturing fluids. But the industry insisted that it was discontinuing that practice.

The EPA’s findings were criticized in some scientific circles at the time, and by an EPA whistleblower, Wes Wilson, for bending to Bush administration dictates and ignoring scientific methods for analyzing contamination complaints.

Wilson, a recently retired environmental engineer who spent 36 years overseeing oil and gas industry impacts in the Rocky Mountain Region for the EPA, called it “a bogus study” because it relied on a peer committee with industry ties, excluded the agency’s own best experts and failed to follow its own protocol.

The study included complaints from a handful of people with water problems, but the EPA never tested their water or investigated their cases, instead trusting answers it received from a series of questions sent to state regulators. The final version of the study was reviewed by a peer board that included former oil and gas industry employees from BP, Halliburton and other energy companies. Documents ProPublica obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that the agency even negotiated a side agreement with Halliburton, exchanging a promise of leniency toward oilfield service companies for a gentleman’s agreement to stop using diesel fuel in fracturing.

Oil-state politicians had been trying for years to win an exemption for hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the 1974 law that regulates the injection of waste and chemicals underground, and the EPA’s 2004 report was used to justify that effort. The next year, President George W. Bush’s landmark energy legislation, the 2005 Energy Policy Act, included a provision that specifically prohibited the EPA from regulating fracturing under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Regulation would now fall to each individual state, many of which had underfunded departments, looser standards and more limited manpower than the federal government.

There was at least subtle pressure on the EPA scientists to go along with what the administration wanted, according to the EPA’s assistant administrator for water at the time.

“The administration did not want us to take a formal position of opposition to the exemption,” says Ben Grumbles, the EPA’s former assistant administrator for water, who is now president of the Clean Water America alliance. “I know EPA was stating concerns about the overly broad language [in the study]. We never construed it as a clean bill of health.”

The energy industry began parading the EPA’s 2004 report around like a hard-won trophy, as proof that water contamination couldn’t be linked to the drilling process. “It shows there is no need for concern,” said Doug Hock, the EnCana spokesman. Case closed: Fracturing was safe, and the “Halliburton Loophole,” as the exemption came to be called, effectively tied the hands of anyone in the EPA with an inclination to consider what fracturing might be doing to the environment in the gas patch.

“That door was nailed shut,” says Oberley. “We absolutely do not look at fracking as an injection activity under the Safe Drinking Water Act. It’s not done.”