In a statement released Monday, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, called the PSR report “alarming,” and said it “confirms what hundreds of scientific studies and thousands of pages of data have already shown over the last decade: fracking is inherently hazardous to the health and safety of people and communities in proximity to it, and it should be banned entirely.”Īs PSR notes, PFAS-highly potent toxins that accumulate in the body and persist in the environment-pose a threat to human and environmental well-being. “The EPA identified serious health risks associated with chemicals proposed for use in oil and gas extraction, and yet allowed those chemicals to be used commercially with very lax regulation,” Dusty Horwitt, a researcher at PSR, told the newspaper. Those tests were not mandatory and there is no indication that they were carried out.
26, 2011, EPA scientists pointed to preliminary evidence that, under some conditions, the chemicals could “degrade in the environment” into substances akin to PFOA, a kind of PFAS chemical, and could “persist in the environment” and “be toxic to people, wild mammals, and birds.” The EPA scientists recommended additional testing. In a consent order issued for the three chemicals on Oct. “It’s very disturbing to see the extent to which critical information about these chemicals is shielded from public view,” Barbara Gottlieb, PSR’s Environment & Health Program director, said Monday in a press release. “The lack of transparency about fracking chemicals puts human health at risk.”
#E.P.A. APPROVED DECADE AGO NEW FILES FULL#
While the Times noted that the newly released documents constitute some of the earliest evidence of the possible presence of PFAS in fracking fluids, PSR’s report warns that “the lack of full disclosure of chemicals used in oil and gas operations raises the potential that PFAS could have been used even more extensively than records indicate, both geographically and in other stages of the oil and gas extraction process, such as drilling, that precede the underground injections known as fracking.”īREAKING: Our new study turned up evidence that highly toxic, cancer-causing chemicals called PFAS were used for fracking at 1,200+ oil and gas wells across the country. The EPA’s approval in 2011 of three new compounds for use in oil and gas drilling or fracking that can eventually break down into PFAS, also called “forever chemicals,” was not publicized until Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) obtained internal records from the agency through a Freedom of Information Act request, the New York Times reported Monday after reviewing the files.Īccording to PSR’s new report, Fracking with “Forever Chemicals, “ oil and gas companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others engaged in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have since 2012 pumped toxic chemicals that can form PFAS into more than 1,200 wells in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming. The water caused lead to be released from old pipes and into kitchen taps, bathrooms and water heaters.Between 20, fossil fuel corporations injected potentially carcinogenic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or chemicals that can degrade into PFAS, into the ground while fracking for oil and gas, after former President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency approved their use despite agency scientists’ concerns about toxicity. Starting in April 2014, Flint pulled water from the Flint River for 18 months without treating it to reduce corrosion. “But this is far from the case.”Īn appeal in the middle of things fits “only where the quick resolution of a clean question of law could meaningfully speed up the litigation,” Levy said Wednesday.
#E.P.A. APPROVED DECADE AGO NEW FILES SERIES#
“The United States characterizes this complex case as one of merely a series of discrete, clean legal questions - questions it says are all independently controlling, wrongly decided, and subject to reasonable disagreement,” the judge said. Levy said more work must be done by lawyers to develop the case. Now, two years later, she said she won’t put the case on hold to allow the government to appeal that decision to a higher court. District Judge Judith Levy ruled in 2020 that Flint residents could sue the EPA. DETROIT (AP) - A judge blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from appealing a key ruling in a long-running lawsuit claiming negligence by the federal government in Flint’s lead-contaminated water in 2014-15.
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