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Even if the deep rock layers can seal chemicals from the aquifers above the well, he says, the well itself creates an opening where fluids and gas can be pushed through, especially under the thousands-of-pounds-per-square-inch pressure from fracturing.

Henry’s not a scientist, and he’s never tracked exactly where his fracture fluids end up. But he firmly believes that fluids can travel outside the well. “Over time they will migrate to the surface,” he said. “Fracturing jobs make that more possible because of the excessive pressures.”

Other Wyoming gasfield workers have reiterated Meeks’ accounts of problems he witnessed as a rig hand. Although the hole in the seal created by the gas well is supposed to be filled with cement, especially near the surface, where wells often run straight through aquifer layers, they say cement jobs are inconsistent.

“It is common knowledge that the lower layers are full of irregularities,” said Patrick Jacobson, a rig worker who manages drilling-fluid pumps on gas rigs. The concrete can crack as it dries and expands, Jacobson says, or it can slip into cavities eroded by the turbidity of the injected drilling fluids or into large natural gaps or cracks in the earth, never filling the well annulus at all. Although fracturing is not supposed to take place until the cement integrity is confirmed and it has had time to dry, rig workers often rush on to the next stage right away. “I think anybody who works in the oil fields, if they tell you the truth, would tell you the same thing,” Jacobson said.

EnCana’s Hock said the company is meticulous about casing its wells to the proper levels, and about fixing the casing when something goes wrong. “No exceptions have ever been made to that practice,” he said. He said the company allows 12 to 24 hours for the cement to dry before any well is fractured.

As Meeks continued collecting records, he focused hard on cementing records. Based on his own experience and on what he had gathered, he still suspected that faulty cementing might be the root cause of his water problem. Using well construction records he painstakingly culled from public files in state drilling offices, he examined documents showing how far down the cement was run on wells near his property. Wyoming drilling regulations, the default law for that area — require cementing to be at least 150 feet below the deepest permitted water wells nearby. Engineers that Meeks hired to examine the records found that cement on the 24-2 well was run only to 562 feet, and the 14-2 was cased to 599 feet. Others were run to as little as 400 feet. The EPA says that water wells in the area are drilled to 750 feet, sometimes deeper.

The contamination of his water well, he began to think, could have been prevented if the drillers had made different choices about how to build the wells near his home.

But when Meeks looked at the broader laws governing drilling in Wyoming and elsewhere to see how the problems might have been detected before they reached his water, he found that few states explicitly required the sort of well pressure monitoring or cement testing that ensure the fluids stay where they are supposed to. There were, simply, few public records documenting the effectiveness of the cement in gas wells or the frequency and success of hydraulic fracturing jobs.

It had been three years since Meeks began his quest, and the more he learned, the more he felt trapped at a dead end. Even with the help of Thomas and with the circumstantial evidence they had gathered and the questions that were now being asked nationally, Meeks still had no scientific evidence connecting his clouded water with gas drilling.

He’d made hundreds of phone calls and written dozens of letters to his governor and to Congress. But no one seemed ready to do anything for this stubborn man in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.

For the first time, he and Donna began to seriously consider selling the ranch. All the efforts to fix his water were failing, and his settlement with EnCana was falling apart. He knew they would eventually take away the cistern of fresh water.

It was a painful turning point. “It’s a place that he bought and struggled to pay for with his VA loan and worked for 30 years to build into a place that he wanted,” says his son, Louis Jr. “It has crumbled.”

But selling proved to be impossible. In January 2006, Meeks’ property was appraised at $239,000. But in May 2008, Jane Rainwater, a local realtor, sent Meeks a coldly worded letter saying his place was essentially worthless and she could not list his property. “Since the problem was well documented … and since no generally-accepted reason for the blowout has been agreed upon,” she wrote, “buyers may feel reluctant to purchase a property with this stigma.”

Not sure where to turn next, Meeks pored through the original environmental impact statement conducted for drilling near Pavillion. The document contained the names of scientists who had commented on the potential risks to water supplies. In what would turn out to be a lucky coincidence, he fixated on one.

“I saw Greg Oberley’s name in there,” Meeks said. “So I said, ‘well, I’m going to call him.’ ”
An Investigation Begins

On May 14, 2008, at Greg Oberley’s invitation, Louis Meeks drove six hours to Denver to tell his story to EPA officials in person. With him was a small entourage: Jeff Locker, Meeks’ neighbor down the road; John Fenton, another neighbor; and Deb Thomas, from Northern Wyoming. They had recently formed the Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens and had begun organizing a political and advocacy campaign around the pollution fears.

The group gathered in the agency’s regional headquarters, an airy glass building a few blocks from Coors Field and the historic Union Station. From these offices the EPA oversees Colorado, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Utah and Montana states that account for a large portion of the oil and gas drilling in the United States. EPA representatives from many of the region’s divisional offices; water, air quality, Superfund, National Environmental Policy Act compliance, were there, as well as representatives from the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality.

Thomas opened with a PowerPoint presentation about documented problems in Clark, WY, a small town just outside of Yellowstone National Park. In August 2006 a gas well had blown out, leading to the temporary evacuation of 25 homes and contaminating groundwater aquifers and soil in the area. Benzene was detected in at least one person’s drinking-water supply.

One by one, the others followed with their personal stories. John Fenton described how his mother, and six months later his wife, had both lost their sense of smell. The county assessor told him that his property had also lost half its value because of the water concerns. Jeff Locker described his wife’s health problems, including intense neuropathic nerve damage.

“She would scream in pain, like someone was running knives through the bones in her shins,” Jeff Locker says about Rhonda’s condition. “Then it worked through her spine, and now it will start and move up through her whole body. She just turns grey when it happens.” Rhonda had been to the best doctors in the West, including the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Ariz., and no one could diagnose her problem.

Meeks recounted the research he had done, the doors he had knocked on and the eventual coalescing of his neighbors. What had begun as one man’s lonely quest for environmental justice had turned into a community fighting together. Now here he was, backed by a chorus of voices begging the federal government to step in and help protect them. The state regulators, each speaker told the EPA, had failed them. They needed the federal government to do something.

“You could tell that people were frustrated, scared,” said Luke Chavez, an EPA Superfund investigator who attended the meeting. Chavez had heard stories like this before, and in most cases they turned out to be nothing. So, he was skeptical. But still, the emotional presentation tugged at him and the others in the room. “You take what you hear with a grain of salt. But I went back and said, ‘OK, so, can we at least get some information for these people?’ ”

Moved by the stories they had heard, Chavez, Oberley and others at the meeting persuaded their bosses to at least let them find out whether Pavillion’s water was safe to drink. The agency found some money in its Superfund cleanup program to pay for the project, and Chavez was assigned to help lead it.

But by then fracturing had become a flashpoint for political controversy, and the EPA proceeded with caution. While Oberley and others were concerned about the stories they heard, they didn’t consider their Pavillion research to be an investigation into hydraulic fracturing. In fact, they weren’t ready to draw conclusions that the contamination had anything to do with drilling at all.

“Hydrofracking is a risk activity,” says Oberley. “But so is drilling, so is pit location, so are all these other things. So, I’ve got a lot of things I want to look at.”

There was a theme, however, linking each of those concerns to the fracturing chemicals. The chemicals are a substantial part of the hazardous water from underground that is dumped into waste pits from drilling. It’s the fracturing pressure that can exploit a weakness in the well casing. It’s the fracturing process that puts the chemicals underground in the first place, where, if they stay in the cracked rock thousands of feet below, they may leak out somewhere higher in the system.

When these aspects of the drilling cycle are including, fracturing becomes about much more than the moment of high-pressure injection. But that’s not how the industry tends to see it.

The industry’s definition boiled down to lawyerly semantics. It meant that fracturing couldn’t be blamed unless the high pressure inside the well at the moment it was fractured directly caused the contamination. “Hydraulic fracturing related contamination would result if the hydraulic fracturing stimulation is the sole cause of the well integrity to fail,” explained Lee Fuller, the lobbyist for the Independent Petroleum Association of America. According to Fuller’s definition, fracturing would not be the cause if the fracturing fluids were spilled on the surface, or if the fracking waste was improperly disposed of, or even if the cement casing in a well split apart after the enormous pressure of fracking, as has happened in several of the most egregious incidents.

An EPA fracturing expert, Nathan Wiser, put it this way when considering the drilling industry’s limited definition of what constitutes hydraulic fracturing: “You can certainly characterize fracturing as an event that happens on a Tuesday,” he said. “It’s a singular event in that well’s life. But it can expose other weaknesses, and through the extra pressure that is exerted on the well at that time it sort of shakes loose that problem.”