Evizda

There are more than 6,000 active gas wells in Pennsylvania. And every week, those drilling sites generate scores of complaints from the state’s residents, including many about terrible odors and contaminated water.

How the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection handles those complaints has worsened the already raw and angry divide between fearful residents and the state regulators charged with overseeing the burgeoning gas drilling industry.

For instance, the agency’s own manual for dealing with complaints is explicit about what to do if someone reports concerns about a noxious odor, but is not at that very moment experiencing the smell: “DO NOT REGISTER THE COMPLAINT.”

When a resident does report a real-time alarm about the air quality in or around their home, the agency typically has two weeks to conduct an investigation. If no odor is detected when investigators arrive on the scene, the case is closed.

“The time that it takes them to respond is something people are concerned about,” said Matt Walker, a community outreach director for the Clean Air Council in Pennsylvania, an environmental advocacy organization. Waiting a few days to two weeks to respond to odor complaints, he said, is “way too long.”

George Jugovic, who served as a regional director for the DEP until 2012, agrees. Jugovic said the department is only set up to respond quickly to potential emergencies.

“It’s a problem,” said Jugovic, who since leaving the department has served as counsel to a local environmental group.

Rebecca Roter said she experienced the problem first hand last year. On a cool April evening in 2013, Roter said she was cooking dinner in her Susquehanna County home when a “nauseating” smell overwhelmed her. Roter said she walked out to her front porch, pulled her gray hoodie over her nose and mouth and quickly drove her car to the site of a nearby gas well being fracked.

Roter said she saw plumes of dust rising into the air. That evening, Roter said she wrote to the DEP, recounting the events of the day and requesting that they send out a field agent to follow up. Four days later, the agency sent out an investigator.

The DEP later notified Roter in writing that the investigator had found “nothing out of line” and that it had concluded that “the operation appeared to be conducted as per standard procedure.”

Roter said she is convinced the investigator simply didn’t detect any smell when he responded 96 hours after her report. The odor has recurred repeatedly in the months since, she said, and she has no idea how alarmed to be.

The concerns of residents like Roter are not likely to be eased by a study published today in Reviews on Environmental Health, a peer reviewed journal. The study, researchers say, confirms what they have long suspected about natural gas operations — that emission levels from these sites spike drastically over short periods of time, making it hard to assess the true threat to people’s health.

Researchers at the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project collected real-time readings of particulate matter — soot, dust and chemicals — in 14 homes in Washington County, a heavily drilled part of the state. They found repeated episodes during which measures of contaminated dust rose sharply, to dangerous levels in the course of a day.

David Brown, the lead researcher on the study, said that a person in such circumstances could get what amounted to a full day’s exposure in half an hour.

The American Petroleum Institute did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association declined to comment on the Environmental Health Project’s study but said that the oil and gas industry is “heavily regulated” and that the association’s member companies “strive to comply with numerous federal and state air quality related rules, regulations, and reporting requirements.”

Still, residents like Roter, who has over 20 gas wells within a mile of her house, fear that the exposure to contaminants could quickly add up. It’s one of the reasons, she says, she is frustrated by the DEP’s response to her complaints.

DEP spokeswoman Lisa Kasianowitz defended the department’s performance on complaint investigations.

“DEP has been prompt and responsive in regards to air quality concerns surrounding the natural gas industry,” she said in response to questions from ProPublica. She added that the department had recently toughened oversight of the industry, and that oil and gas companies were no longer exempt from complying with basic permitting requirements.

Kasianowitz provided ProPublica with some recent statistics on complaints and inspections, and she promised to make department’s officials available to be interviewed. Later, after ProPublica filed a freedom of information request seeking more detailed information on dozens of the department’s investigations, Kasianowitz said the officials could not be interviewed.

The information provided by the DEP shows that between 2011 and 2014, the department received over 2,000 complaints about oil and natural gas operations. Water quality issues featured prominently in the list of complaints. The DEP also registered 110 of the complaints as odor issues.

In Southwestern Pennsylvania, a corner of the state that has seen extensive fracking operations, there were 617 registered complaints over those years, including 47 involving troubling odors.

In one-third of the cases that were investigated, inspectors reported that no odors were detected at the time of inspection and closed the case. Inspectors typically visited residents within a week of filing the complaint.

In only a handful of cases did the inspectors detect odors during their visit and follow up by citing the company involved. The citations, known as a Notice of Violation, required the operators to correct the problem, but did not carry fines.

ProPublica’s request for more details on the investigations and violations is still pending.

John Quigley, a former director of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, said the need for greater transparency in the oversight of the fracking industry was real and urgent.

***

In 2007, Pennsylvania produced close to 10 billion cubic feet of gas from the Marcellus formation. By 2012, that number had grown to over two trillion cubic feet. With this dramatic increase in gas production, concerns about environmental pollution and public health have risen sharply and the DEP has become a target for anger among worried residents.