...continued

For the time being, however, the EPA study wasn’t about fracturing, and it wasn’t about opposing the development of a natural resource that could help secure the nation’s energy future. The agency was simply responding to a community in need of help, a public health issue that needed attention.

“These are not people who complain,” said Oberley. “The oil and gas industry has been out there since the mid-seventies, and they’ve coexisted with them. So, it’s not that they were having a problem with the industry. They were having a problem with their wells being contaminated.”

It took 10 months for the EPA to send its team to Pavillion. But in February 2009, Luke Chavez arrived at Louis Meeks’ house on Powerline Road to have a look for himself. It was a frigid day, snowless but blustery. They walked the property together, through the leafless apple trees. Chavez was bundled up, with a camera and notebook in hand. Meeks wasn’t. No matter what the weather, he always seemed to wear the same thing: jeans, suspenders, a flannel shirt over his thick shoulders, and a straw cowboy hat covering his mop of grey hair.

At a steel feed trough, Meeks turned on the hose that was connected to his problem well. The water shot out strong, splashing against the base of the bin and creating a froth of small bubbles. On the surface, Chavez could see the sheen, a subtle oil slick. Meeks filed a mason jar and held it to the sun, it was murky. Grasping it like a football in his calloused, working man’s hands, he shook it, then opened the lid and sniffed the bottle. Curling his nose and turning aside, he offered the jar to Chavez to smell for himself. Chavez recoiled.

“It was what they said it was,” he said. “I was like, yeah, that’s definitely worth at least doing some analysis.”

Chavez, a stout, gregarious guy who is prone to understatement and comes across more as a chatty neighbor than a federal investigator, knew a thing or two about the gas patch and about farming, as well. He grew up on a farm in New Mexico’s San Juan basin, where some of the nation’s most intensive drilling takes place. There were two wells on his father’s property, and Chavez saved for college by working as a roustabout on a drilling rig. He identified with the alfalfa and the hay, and he understood the local residents’ instinctive distrust of the government. He worked hard to build a rapport.

But Chavez also understood that while gas drilling seemed to be the predominant industrial activity in the area, and thereby a likely cause of the contamination, that didn’t mean a thing without systematic research. Was fertilizer used nearby? Did Meeks overhaul truck engines and spill diesel on the property? There was already known water contamination from several old waste pits in the area, and EnCana had a cleanup program under way, maybe the pollution Meeks and the others were finding in their water came from those sources.

“We try to brainstorm what else it could be,” Chavez says. “A lot of times reality is crazier than even your imagining.”

In March 2009, six weeks after President Obama’s inauguration and four years after Meeks first had trouble with his water, a team from the EPA’s Superfund program began collecting 39 water samples from properties around the Pavillion area. It was the first formal investigation into complaints of water pollution in Pavillion after many years of letter writing and phone calls and visits to the governor’s office and even a couple of lawsuits. Across the mountains in Pinedale, Oberley had also continued to collect water samples from the aquifer underneath the Anticline drilling fields where he’d found the benzene the year before and was carefully assembling a broader body of data. The EPA scientists preferred to keep a low profile and dodge the political canon fire that was bound to be returned from any perceived assault on the oil and gas industry. But, in effect, the EPA had begun its first robust scientific examination of the environmental effects of natural gas drilling on the nation’s water supply.

By this time, complaints about water contamination in drilling areas had become a national issue.

New Mexico state officials had released a report detailing that contaminants from oil and gas waste pits, the same kinds of dirt ditches that surround Pavillion and other drilling byproducts had leaked into groundwater in more than 700 cases. Colorado regulators had tallied more than 300 similar cases not just the conspicuous well blow-ups in Silt but also an underground leak of fracturing fluids that seeped out of a cliff side and formed a 200-foot toxic icefall. A hospital nurse in Colorado had nearly died of organ failure after treating a rig worker who had spilled fracturing fluids on his clothing.

Louis Meeks felt validated, but also sad, as he read the news. Accounts of contamination seemed to be tracking the drilling boom as it swept across the country, from the Barnett Shale in Texas to the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and New York.

In Louisiana, 16 cattle dropped dead after drinking fracturing fluids from a puddle in a field. In Ohio, a house exploded, nearly killing the elderly couple who lived there, after hydraulic fracturing exploited a crack in the cement casing of a nearby gas well, allowing methane to seep underground and fill the couple’s basement. In Pennsylvania, news emerged that a couple and their 17-month-old grandson had been killed after a similar accident in 2004. Like the earliest complaints in Wyoming, the news media didn’t connect that tragedy with drilling until it became clear that similar problems were happening across the state.

Worst, to Meeks, was what seemed to be unfolding in Dimock, PA. First, an elderly woman’s water well blew up on New Year’s Day. Then her neighbors began complaining of milky, methane-rich water just like Meeks had. Then another landowner was able to light his tap water on fire. Soon at least 13 households in that one small town had severe water problems that state regulators said were caused by casing and cementing problems at wells drilled by Texas-based Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation. Within a few years of the drilling boom hitting Pennsylvania, regulators had counted more than 50 cases where methane and other contaminants had exploded out of wells or leaked underground into drinking water supplies.

In New York, which was bracing for a similar onslaught of drilling, residents began holding protests to keep hydraulic fracturing out of New York City’s watershed, the county’s largest unfiltered municipal water supply, serving 9 million people. The state began a multiyear comprehensive environmental analysis of the new fracturing technology, and an upstate congressman, Maurice Hinchey, brought the issue to Washington. Along with Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette and Colorado Congressman Jared Polis, Hinchey proposed the FRAC Act, a bill that would undo hydraulic fracturing’s exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act and require oil and gas companies to disclose the names of the chemicals in the fracturing solutions they used.

In the face of this tornado of worry, the drilling industry remained steadfast in its insistence that fracturing and all the drilling processes related to it were completely safe. They continued to spend tens of millions of dollars lobbying against regulation and peppered websites and publications with pro-gas advertisements. Industry trade groups pointed out that drilling development brings jobs and economic bounty to ailing communities and painted critics as unpatriotic heretics working against U.S. energy independence. They drew support from local businesses and residents whose communities needed the money and needed the jobs.

The industry also continued repeating a stubborn claim that by this time seemed almost absurd to Meeks, given the mounting evidence to the contrary: “As far as frack fluids getting into water there’s never been a proven case of that happening,” says EnCana’s Doug Hock. “There has never been a documented case.”

The industry’s claim was repeated before Congress, in court and to anyone else who asked. It was part of the reason the EPA hesitated to dig further.

The ambiguous identity of the fluids also clouded the issue. States and environmental groups had identified more than 600 chemical compounds that could be used in drilling and fracturing, but they weren’t confident the list was complete or accurate. When a regulator suspects fracturing may have led to contamination, Fuller says, they simply have to go out and test the water for fracturing chemicals. “If they don’t find them, then the source of the problem is elsewhere,” he said.

Joyel Dhieux, an EPA environmental scientist, agrees. But, like Oberley, she says the industry’s logic is backward. First the EPA needs to know the names of the chemicals. Then it can examine contaminated water for fracking chemicals. “If you don't know what's in it I don't think it’s possible.”

Adding insult, the industry continued to suggest that the troubling stories emerging across the country, including from Louis Meeks, are “anecdotal,” implying that no science or investigation has ever verified the contamination as true.

The dearth of hard science on the matter, however, cut both ways. In a spring 2009 conference call with reporters, American Petroleum Institute senior policy adviser Richard Ranger an industry expert who has spoken frequently on the fracturing issue was asked to produce evidence that fracturing is without environmental risk.

“Have there been any recent studies done on the safety of this?” a reporter asked.

“I’m just not sure that that study is out there,” Ranger replied.

“To be clear, we are saying this is a totally safe technology but we can’t point to any recent studies that say this is a safe technology?” a reporter pressed.

“Or that says it is unsafe,” Ranger replied.
Contamination Confirmed

Late that summer Meeks was told that the EPA was ready to reveal its first findings. On August 11, 2009, eager to finally hear what was in his water, Meeks got in his red 1994 Nissan pickup and drove the five miles to Pavillion’s community center, a corrugated steel building with bare walls and poured-concrete floors at the end of one of the two roads that cut through town. He had been anticipating the meeting for six months.

Along with 80-some other residents, some who had driven from as far as Riverton, 26 miles away, Meeks took a seat on one of the wooden benches that were lined up facing a folding table and a projection screen, eager to hear the preliminary findings from the EPA’s first round of water testing.

With the room quiet and tense, Luke Chavez, the EPA Superfund investigator, started off tentatively. He was shy and non-committal. But he proceeded to make headlines.