A new study led by researchers at Yale University says that living closer to an active natural gas well, including hydraulic fracking wells, could lead to an increase in skin and respiratory conditions.
In a paper published Sept. 10 in the peer-reviewed Environmental Health Perspectives, a journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the team detailed results from surveys with 492 people in 180 randomly selected households with ground-fed wells in an area of active natural gas drilling in Washington County, Penn.
“Washington County is essentially the first location where the Marcellus Shale [formation] gas wells were initially dug and … fracked with the unconventional technology,” says Ilya Slizovskiy, a co-author of the paper and native Pennsylvanian. “The first wells were [drilled] in as early as 2005 or 2006. … The fracking that has been happening there, just natural gas in general, is something that’s been going on for a very long time compared to other places. We figured if we are going to be sampling and working with a population there, that’s the population that’s probably been the most closely exposed and probably exposed for the longest time.”
Those surveyed for the study were not asked about fracking, only to report health symptoms related to heart, gastrointestinal, neurological, skin and respiratory symptoms. Analysis of the surveys showed residents living less than a kilometer from a gas well reported more upper respiratory and skin symptoms over the past year than did residents living more than two kilometers from a well. There was no difference in reports of other health symptoms.
The majority of the content for the Yale study’s survey was taken from other tested and widely employed health surveys, such as the Center for Disease Control’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
In addition to the respondents being randomly selected and not asked about fracking, lead author Peter Rabinowitz says that even the individuals conducting the survey didn’t know where the nearest gas well was.
“To the extent of a survey where you ask people about their health, we tried to do the best possible job of conducting a study like that without bias, and there is no doubt it’s an epidemiological study, it’s a study of association — it’s not causation,” says Rabinowitz.
Indeed, the report concludes, “While these results should be viewed as hypothesis generating, and the population studied was limited to households with a ground fed water supply, proximity of natural gas wells may be associated with the prevalence of health symptoms including dermal and respiratory conditions in residents living near natural gas extraction activities. Further study of these associations, including the role of specific air and water exposures, is warranted.”
Slizovskiy and Rabinowitz say from their understanding, this study is the first systematic public health study, and the largest in terms of the number of people, to look at reported health symptoms of people living in close proximity to natural gas wells.
The team says the impetus for their study was the lack of research on the environmental and public health impact of unconventional gas extraction activities that occur near residential areas.
In 2013, The Wall Street Journal analyzed well location and census data for more than 700 counties in 11 heavily drilled states, including Colorado. Their analysis found at least 15.3 million Americans living within a mile of a well that had been drilled since 2000.
A Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission report from Sept. 2 reports there are more than 52,500 active wells in the state, with 87 percent of those wells located in six counties. Weld County alone has more than 21,500 wells. The next most heavily drilled county is Garfield, with just under 11,000 wells.
Doug Flanders, a spokesperson for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, said in an email that he had “not reviewed the Pennsylvania study to be able to comment,” but referred Boulder Weekly to a blog piece by Katie Brown, a spokesperson for Energy In Depth. Energy In Depth is a program of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, which represents natural gas and oil producers.
In her blog, Brown says the Yale study “misses the mark” and criticizes the study as being funded by “anti-fracking” groups The Heinz Endowments and the Claneil Foundation.
“The Yale researchers say that health impacts must be due to water or air contamination from fracking but the Pennsylvania [Department of Environmental Protection] just released a list of instances where wells could have been impacted, and there wasn’t a single instance in Washington County where the study was conducted,” Brown wrote in an email to BW.
Indeed, in the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection listing of contamination cases released on Aug. 23, Washington County was not one of the 22 counties where Department of Environmental Protection determined that a private water supply was affected by oil and gas activities.
However, according to an Aug. 6 article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, leaks from fracking waste water from three storage impoundments in Washington County contaminated soil and groundwater and prompted the state to issue a violation notice at one site and order additional testing and monitoring at another site.
Donald Gennuso, township manager for Washington County, told the Post-Gazette that at no time were the township board or its residents notified of the potential contamination. Approximately 50 residents, most of whom use private wells, were sent letters when the township did learn of the contamination, urging citizens to have their water tested immediately and inform the Department of Environmental Protection if their well water developed a bad taste.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has been criticized for failing to provide state residents with adequate information on fracking-related contamination. In April, documents were filed in a Pennsylvania Superior Court case chal lenging the constitutionality of the state’s oil and gas law. The documents cited the Department of Environmental Protection’s practice of shunning violation notices, fines or formal determinations of contamination when a shale gas company was able to reach a private settlement with a well owner.
Colorado state oil and gas regulators have similarly been criticized, notably in a 2011 investigation by The Denver Post, for failing to impose fines for spills.
The Yale research adds to a growing body of similarly “hypothesis generating” work suggesting fracking may have serious implications for human health. In January, University of Missouri researchers published data showing greater levels of hormone-disrupting chemicals in water located near fracking sites than in areas without drilling. The researchers collected samples from several sites in Garfield County, Colo. where fracking fluids had been spilled.
Again, this work highlighted a correlation, but could not definitively say that it was fracking fluid that caused the higher levels of hormone-disrupting chemicals.
Rabinowitz says that this lack of research definitively linking fracking to human health risks is due, at least in part, to the complexity of the research.
“First of all I think the exact nature of which contaminants to worry about the most and the roots of the exposure, from how they get from the fracking activities to people, is still not totally clear,” Rabinowitz says. “When you’ve got those ideas you can really do more definitive studies. For instance, I would say our finding that there are increased upper respiratory symptoms in people living very close to gas wells indicates to me that there could be something airborne going on, and it just makes you want to focus somewhat more on air contaminants and which ones could be causing that, and then you can have a much more focused study looking at that particular question.”
Rabinowitz says that these irritant symptoms — a cough or a rash — are reasonable findings.
“We feel it’s a plausible result that needs to be followed up with more objective studies, with things that rely on physician or healthcare worker diagnosis, or measurement of substances in the blood or other measurements that go beyond what a self report is,” says Rabinowitz. “We feel that it indicates that we need to keep investigating this issue. It’s hard to just dismiss when people, without being prompted, are complaining more of their health close to natural gas wells.”
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