TESTIMONY BEFORE THE NYS ASSEMBLY ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION COMMITTEE October 6, 2011 My name is Bruce Ferguson and I represent Catskill Citizens

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1 1 TESTIMONY BEFORE THE NYS ASSEMBLY ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION COMMITTEE October 6, 2011 My name is Bruce Ferguson and I represent Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, an all-volunteer organization with over seven thousand members. UNEQUAL PROTECTION The revised Draft SGEIS is a cynical political deal masquerading as a science-based regulatory plan. Candidate Andrew Cuomo promised New Yorkers that their drinking water would be sacrosanct ; Governor Andrew Cuomo protects politically powerful urban centers and leaves rural New Yorkers to the tender mercies of out-of-state oil and gas corporations. If high-volume hydraulic fracturing goes forward as planned, unequal protection under the law will be the Cuomo legacy in New York State. The Draft protects some aquifers, some watersheds and some unfiltered water supplies; but not others. This discrimination is not scientifically determined; it s a political calculation: just how much collateral damage New Yorkers are willing to tolerate? The Draft justifies prohibiting surface activity in the New York City and Syracuse and New York City watersheds noting that: Unfiltered drinking water supplies have a heightened sensitivity to chemical discharges as there is no immediately available method to remove contaminants 1 It points to the risk of releases from chemicals, petroleum products and drilling fluids from the well pad as a result of tank ruptures, equipment or surface impoundment failures, overfills, vandalism, accidents (including vehicle collisions), ground fires, or improper operations.

2 2 Spilled, leaked or released fluids could flow to a surface water body. The intensive level of trucking activity associated with high volume hydraulic fracturing, including the transport of chemical and petroleum products, presents an additional risk of surface water contamination due to truck accidents and associated releases. 2 The Draft goes on to note that within these watersheds many of the roadways are in immediate proximity to tributaries. Such proximity increases the risk that chemical and petroleum spills would not, or could not, be effectively intercepted before entering the drinking water supply. 3 All of these risks are real, and all of them threaten New Yorkers who rely on water from outside the protected watersheds. I live in the portion of the Delaware Basin that lies outside the city watershed. The roadways here have the same proximity to streams and creeks as those within the watershed. Our surface water has the same risk of being contaminated with spilled, leaked or released fluids. And many, if not most of the people who live in this part of the basin also depend on unfiltered water supplies. Thirty-eight percent of Delaware Basin residents rely on domestic water wells that are almost certainly unfiltered; the rest depend on private or municipal systems that may draw some or all of their water from open reservoirs. Few if any of these water supplies are likely to have filtration systems capable removing the pollutants associated with gas drilling and slickwater fracturing. Despite facing identical risks, the Draft offers rural residents only modest setbacks from drinking water supplies - and the DEC offers no scientific evidence that these setbacks are adequate. Moreover, these setbacks are not regulations; they are permitting conditions that can be changed with little public or legislative oversight. One particularly egregious feature of these permitting conditions is that it allows homeowners to waive the 500 foot setback from private wells. This makes no sense at all. The purpose of the proposed setback is not to protect a particular individual; it s to protect public health and drinking water supplies. Would an individual who is

3 3 induced to waive the setback be required to obtain the permission of his or her children? Would he or she be required to obtain the permission of future unknown and unnamed occupants of the house? If individuals are permitted to opt out required setbacks from gas wells, they should also be permitted to opt out of wearing seat belts and motorcycle helmets, and opt out of obeying the laws that prohibit the consumption of crack cocaine. If anything, rural residents need more, not less protection, than their urban counterparts. Municipal water supplies are frequently tested; if contamination is found, agencies stand ready to mitigate the problem and take corrective actions. But what about the rural resident whose water well may become contaminated with an unknown, undetected chemical - odorless, colorless and toxic in parts per billion? Who will protect that New Yorker? The correct answer is Probably no one. Rural residents may suffer health effects related to contamination from fracking and no one may ever connect the illness with cause. It may sound cynical, but it s not inaccurate to say that this would probably suit the company responsible for the contamination to a T. After all, this is an industry that still insists that hydraulic fracturing has never contaminated drinking water despite solid evidence to the contrary 5 and despite the fact that it routinely supplies affected families with water buffaloes and bottled water, and frequently buys the silence of victims of contamination with non-disclosure agreements.6. The Cuomo Administration says it is prepared to permit shale gas extraction in 85% of the Marcellus Shale. How many New Yorkers who rely on unfiltered private water wells will be endangered by fracking? The Draft states that there are potentially tens to hundreds of thousands of private water supply wells in the State. 7 It doesn t provide a source for this guesstimate, and it s impossible to square this figure with a 2008 study by the NYS Department of Health that estimated that are 1.5 million private residential wells in existence in New York State. 8 I suggest that the DEC communicate with the DOH to determine exactly how many rural residents will be put at risk if second-class protections for rural residents are incorporated in final SGEIS.

4 4 FOLLOW THE MONEY New York s plan to permit high-volume hydraulic fracturing is a scandal in the making. And as we learned from an earlier scandal, if you want to understand what s happening, follow the money. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the oil and gas industry receives 41 billion dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies. 9 Just a fraction of that money is sufficient to buy a free pass from our politicians. Last year the industry spent $150 million lobbying national politicians, and the FRAC Act was never brought to a vote. 10 Industry lobbyists doled out $1.5 million in Albany, and New York has failed to enact a single piece of legislation regulating high-volume fracking? 11 Forty-one billion dollars in corporate welfare is only part of what the oil and gas industry picks from the pocket of the taxpayer; there are also the expenses associated with playing host to big oil and big gas. It has been estimated that the DEC will need to employ an additional 226 employees over the next five years and you can be sure that the taxpayers, not the industry, will foot the bill for this departmental build out. 12 A few months ago the state Department of Transportation estimated that it will cost up to 378 million dollars a year to reconstruct roads and bridges if shale gas extraction goes forward in New York. It also said There is no mechanism in place allowing State and local governments to absorb these additional transportation costs without major impacts to other programs and municipalities in the State. 13 The DEC has made no effort to determine what it cost to ameliorate the health impacts of fracking. Finally how much will the taxpayers have to shell out to clean up the inevitable environmental disasters that are part and parcel of high-volume fracking? Here s a clue: United States Geological Survey hydrologist William J. Kappel recently said that we can expect an environmental accident for one in one hundred wells, and we can expect a major environmental accident every three to four hundred wells. Tens of thousands of gas wells in New York may mean thousands of

5 5 environmental accidents and hundreds of major environmental accidental. So to all the New Yorkers who want to benefit from the prosperity that high-volume fracking will bring, I have one piece of advice: Get out your checkbook. 1. Draft SGEIS Regulatory and Programmatic Framework Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Enhancing the Protection of Municipal Drinking Water Supplies by Steven Winkley, New York Rural Water Association, April Ibid. 7. Draft SGEIS Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs of New York State, NYS Department of Health, P Does US need to give gas and oil companies $41 billion a year? By David Clayton, The Christian Science Monitor April 29, Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets: Expenditures of the Natural Gas Industry in New York to Influence Public Policy, Part II - Lobbying Expenditures, A Report by Common Cause/New York, April DEC: 226 new workers needed for fracking enforcement Pressconnects.com by Jon Campbell, September 13, Draft Discussion Paper Transportation Impacts of Potential Marcellus Shale Gas Development, New York State Department of Transportation, June, Page 3