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For two Alaska villages, walruses remain essential. As sea ice disappears, can it last? (Part 1 of a series)
Thinning sea ice puts walruses nearly out of reach. The federal government may list walruses as an endangered species. And ivory bans elsewhere are making it hard for walrus-tusk carvers to sell their art.
First in a series.
SAVOONGA — No one can quite believe this and yet they saw it coming.
Around St. Lawrence Island in the middle of the Bering Sea, a place closer to Russia than the U.S. mainland, the sea ice arrived later this year and went out earlier than anyone can remember. With it went the walruses that fill freezers and drying racks and provide ivory tusks for dozens of carvers.
"This year it's worse. Unusual. The ice moved out in April," said Larry Kava, 76, a tribal and cultural leader in Savoonga, an island village 164 miles west of Nome.
The people of the island are feeling pressure like never before, and it's coming from three directions all at once. Thinning sea ice puts walruses nearly out of reach. The federal government may list walruses as an endangered species. Ivory bans elsewhere that are rooted in concerns for elephants are making it hard for walrus-tusk carvers to sell their art, a vital source of money in a cash-starved place.
Nowhere do people rely on walruses more than on Alaska's St. Lawrence Island. The other day in old town Savoonga, Harriet Penayah, age 84, stewed a walrus for her extended family. Nearby, Roy Waghiyi half-cooked some walrus meat and blubber with skin on his Coleman stove for a late lunch.
"Most of the time, I eat this," he said.
Delbert Pungowiyi, president of the Native Village of Savoonga, said the survival of the people of St. Lawrence Island depends on the walrus and its ivory. Pungowiyi, 57, who heads the tribal organization that most refer to simply as the IRA, for Indian Reorganization Act, talks of lives intertwined with walrus since "time immemorial."
Villages that decades ago created quotas to preserve walruses now risk losing them over circumstances beyond their control.
"The total loss of our identity is on the line," he said.
Spectacular seas
The sea still provides most of the food for the island's two villages, Savoonga and Gambell, home to about 1,400 people combined.
"Walrus capital of the world," says a sign on the Verlin Noongwook Memorial water plant in Savoonga.
Here, a community celebration or a corporation meeting may take place largely in St. Lawrence Island Yupik, a dialect distinct from the Central Yup'ik of Southwest Alaska. Kids know it too — if their parents speak it at home. Internet connections are slow and expensive here, so most people aren't glued to smartphones. Children double and triple up on four-wheelers — Hondas, everyone calls them, no matter the make — for trips to open gym at the school or the village store.
They hunt walrus because even with the high cost of bullets and gas, it still beats the local price of a frozen T-bone steak, $18.69 a pound. Plus, it's nutritious and familiar food.
In the past 10 years, Gambell and Savoonga accounted for 85 percent of all the walruses taken in Alaska, according to federal numbers.
So far this year, residents said they were thankful for the few brought in and eager for more.
Prime hunting time for walruses used to be each May when the mass of drifting pack ice went out. Hunters could launch skiffs into open leads and the Bering Sea. Giant ice floes bigger than most village buildings provided walrus resting grounds and hunting grounds too.
Walrus hunting went into June and even July some years. Now thick pack ice doesn't have time to form and the thin new ice doesn't last. Walrus season sputters to a close before some hunters get going.
Chasing the ice
A walrus, or, in Yupik, ayveq, is an immense, blubbery, whiskered beast. Bulls keep growing until age 15 or 16 and can reach 4,000 pounds, heavier than a small SUV, with tusks more than 3 feet long. Females are smaller and prized for smoother hides and tusks compared to males, which tend to rough one another up.
This year hunters went out from Savoonga's shore starting in March. By early April, they were fixated on the sea, the wind and the ice. They checked online weather reports. They watched waves. They talked to one another.
Kava, who no longer hunts, remembered how his father would predict weather a week ahead by reading the skies.
"I try but the skies don't work now," he said.
A hunting window opened around the second week of April when winds quieted and walruses were within 15 miles of shore — for a few quick days.
Carl Pelowook Jr. had already gotten a bowhead whale from the south side of the island. Now he was looking for walrus to the north for food to share with crews, their families, women, elders, whoever is in need of meat. It's hard work that he loves.
Along the Savoonga shore, wooden skeletons of walrus-skin boats rest on racks. These days everyone has switched from traditional skin boats to 18-foot-long Lund skiffs. They are safer, faster and easier to maneuver and maintain.
On the evening of April 13, the wind finally calmed.
On the water that night, his front man watched for walrus and seal — and dangerous ice floes — ready to raise a signaling arm. No one tried to talk over the 40-horsepower motor.
Everyone wants to ‘eat good’
At the kitchen table a few days after the hunt, his father, Carl Sr., listened to him tell the story and prompted him to share the signals with which hunters communicate.
Point to the feet for maklak, or bearded seal, the animal whose skin becomes the soles of the winter boots known as mukluks, the son said. Gesture with cupped hands from the face on down, like where tusks would be, and that meant walruses were ahead.
Pelowook, 37, and his team pulled up to big ice floes. They scouted with binoculars and spotted a small herd of males on the ice. Crewmembers aimed 30-caliber rifles. On this trip, they got three, plus a bearded seal.
Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, only Alaska Natives from coastal communities can hunt walrus. Under federal law, they can get the animals year-round with no limit, as long as they don't waste meat.
To conserve walruses, Savoonga and Gambell tribes long had have their own limits in place, now six adults per boat per trip in Savoonga and four in Gambell. Calves are unlimited. Split open, hung on racks and fermented for months, they are a sought-after delicacy in spring when walruses migrate past at calving time.
"We call them birthday food," Carl Sr. said.
Hunters from the island take almost all parts: livers, hearts, kidneys, red meat, intestines, flippers, the skin with blubber attached known as coak or, in Yupik, manguna.
On the ice, Pelowook's crew butchered the walruses. They chopped off the tusks and left the heads, which can weigh 100 pounds.
The skiff seemed small for the Bering Sea but if open leads close up, hunters must be able to pull boats across pack ice, Pelowook said. With plastic on the keel, his boat slides easily.
Fifteen miles out, sea ice kept the water flat and became azigutaq, shelter from the wind. But the hunters had to cross miles of open sea in the open skiff. The boat rode heavy with walrus and men.
"We got walrus and we're on our way in," Pelowook texted, using a satellite communication device.
On VHF radio, his crew announced that anyone who wanted walrus should come to his boat on the beach. He filled eight gunnysacks. Good crewmembers must be treated well, he said. Everyone got choice meat and fat, organs and flippers. Crewmembers got tusks too.
"Other people want to eat good as me, so I share them," Pelowook said.
The first night after the hunt, his family ate fried walrus liver, like they always do when they have it fresh. His favorite is the skin and blubber. Some serve walrus meat with Korean kimchi and other vegetables. Some like it in a stew with onions and potatoes.
Pelowook almost always comes home with food, be it birds or seal, walrus or whale, said Carl Sr., 73, who no longer hunts. His joints are wrecked from years of hefting walruses.
As Pelowook told the story, his 6-year-old daughter Winter came inside asking about the Honda. His twins, who are 7, are a bit picky but Winter loves Native foods.
"She likes anything I like, even raw," he said.
An east-side hunt
A week later, the ice pack was 50 or more miles out, hours away by small boat.
Richmond Toolie and two other men started their walrus trip on land. On April 20, they loaded up snowmachines and sleds with gas cans and grub, warm clothes and coveralls, then drove 90 winding miles across slushy snow to the island's eastern edge. There, they had a camp and skiff to launch to the closest ice.
An earlier hunting party had done the same but got nothing.
Many hunters can't afford gas, at $4.65 a gallon in Savoonga, for such a journey, elders said.
Toolie's niece, Delainie, 8, was one of few people not looking forward to fresh walrus.
"They are too stinky," she said, playing outside as the men geared up.
What does she like to eat?
"Chicken and even chocolate pudding."
A few days later, Toolie's group came home with three walruses to share. Some would go to those who couldn't hunt.
"Whenever seen, if you have the opportunity to catch one, you'll get one," Pelowook said.
Ivory at issue
Just about every man on the island is an ivory carver or has a brother who is, and some women are too. When a newcomer arrives, word flies through the village.
"Want to buy any carvings?" they ask. Some give a specific reason they hope to sell a carved ivory whale or halibut, a tiny bird or walrus: money for gasoline to hunt, food for the baby, heating fuel.
Others have direct lines to galleries and collectors. Many sell through Maruskiya's of Nome, a gift shop and wholesaler.
A web of conflicting and complex laws on ivory deters some potential buyers, said Andrew James, whose family owns the business. Some countries and even states have banned imports of ivory from any species.
"Without clarity, you are constantly on edge," James said. Maruskiya's stopped going to one promising Native American art show held each February near San Francisco, in part because of California's ivory ban, he said.
"When they come from out of country, like Germany, Australia and other places that have banned ivory, all they can do is look," said Felix Wongittilin, a 30-year-old in Savoonga who has been carving more than half his life.
It is legal under federal and state law for Alaska Natives to harvest, buy and carve walrus ivory as well as ancient ivory found from extinct mammoths.
Ivory from African elephants is the concern. The United States last year strengthened existing rules into a near-total ban of elephant ivory. Even where walrus ivory is legal, international travelers may need an expensive, time-intensive permit to transport it.
Carvers are not slowing down, yet.
Ben Pungowiyi, a teacher aide in Savoonga, pulled from his pocket an exquisite ivory walrus that he carved. His work is on the cover of the art book "Savoonga Ivory Carvers."
One accomplished carver, Savoonga's Edwin Noongwook, 41, works in ivory, whale bone and sometimes stone. One recent day, he sat outside the small house he is building in Savoonga, drilling details into a large bone sculpture of a mother holding a baby.
With walrus hunting so challenging, it's hard to get enough ivory, he said. And with restrictions against ivory, it's also hard to find customers.
"People are afraid to buy it," he said.
Wongittilin's carving studio takes up a corner of the front room of his family's small home in the village. Ivory dust covers the floor. His tools and work fill every nook.
Carving is work to Wongittilin, who says he doesn't make much at it. He was running out of heating fuel and didn't have gas for his cooker.
"If I had a permanent job, I would never carve," he said.
‘People of the walrus’
Roy Waghiyi, 60, said his extended family would normally eat 10 walruses a year, but he doesn't expect that many this year.
"Luckily we have other sources of food, not just walrus," Waghiyi said. "Luckily we have reindeer, birds, seals."
His brother gave him some of the first-caught walrus, which he stored in a box in a cold arctic entry. He didn't have a refrigerator or regular stove. As he quick-boiled meat and blubber on his Coleman stove in the entryway, he brought out a piece of fresh whale baleen and sliced off some of the soft, white gum tissue at the base to chew.
Plenty of walruses are on ice floes in the sea, though hard to reach, he said.
"The walrus are resilient," Waghiyi said.
He tore a piece of cardboard for a simple serving tray. The walrus was half-done, still red and tender, the way many like it. It tasted soft, oily and like the sea. With a sprinkle of seasoned salt, the meat was something to savor.
In mid-May, a few hunters were out again. Some were bringing home walrus, Pungowiyi said.
"They had more choice on the mainland," the tribal leader said. "Whereas we are on the island. We are the people of the walrus."
Alaska Dispatch News reporter Lisa Demer and visual journalist Marc Lester recently spent a week on St. Lawrence Island. This is the first in a series of articles about life in Savoonga and Gambell. Next: Pacific walruses were nearly wiped out a century ago. Now they face a new threat.
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Perth ramps up groundwater replenishment scheme to drought-proof city.
Perth is pumping recycled water into the underground aquifers that provide its drinking water supply as part of a strategy to drought-proof the city against climate change.
Perth is pumping recycled water into the underground aquifers that provide its drinking water supply as part of a strategy to drought-proof the city against climate change.
The Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) on Monday approved an application for the Western Australian water authority to double the capacity of its groundwater replenishment scheme, bringing the amount of recycled water pumped into the Gnangara Mound every year to 28 gigalitres.
The most recent proposal would see the Water Corporation build a 12.8km pipeline from a proposed recycled water plant at Beenyup in the northern suburbs to two different aquifer points, where it will be pumped into Leederville and Yarragadee aquifers.
About 14 gigalitres of wastewater per year would be processed and treated to potable standard at the new Beenyup recycled water facility, before being pumped into the aquifers. The same amount of water will extracted from those aquifers every year to be treated again and used as drinking water.
Murdoch University professor of desalination and water treatment, Wendell Ela, said pumping recycled water into the underground system rather than using it directly once it was treated to a potable standard, reduced “the yuk factor”.
“That’s inevitable and it’s not a bad thing because any time we talk about water we should be interested in the water we are getting and the quality we are getting,” Ela told Guardian Australia.
Ela said the aquifer also provided a “very large, very cheap storage tank,” which allowed the water corporation to replenish groundwater at a steady rate but only withdraw water when necessary.
“You want it to essentially be a net zero balance,” he said.
The Water Corporation spokeswoman Clare Lugar said the groundwater replenishment scheme was part of a long-term plan to secure water supplies in response to climate change.
Lugar said the proposal ticked two of the organisation’s three strategies for water security, the third being encouraging people to use less water.
“Groundwater replenishment ticks two of these boxes - increases water recycling and developing a new source,” she said. “It is a climate-independent source of water, and the new plant at Beenyup will have the capacity to supply the same amount of water used by 100,000 homes each year.”
The scheme is part of a project to make Perth’s water supply “climate independent” by 2022. Without intervention, Perth is projected to have a supply gap of 70 gigalitres a year over the next 10 years, the EPA report said.
By 2060, one fifth of Perth’s water supply is expected to be replenished groundwater.
Construction on the project begins in July.
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US EPA asked the public which regulations to gut — and got an earful about leaving them alone.
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency put out a call for comments about what regulations are in need of repeal, replacement or modification.
By Brady Dennis May 16 at 2:45 PM
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency put out a call for comments about what regulations are in need of repeal, replacement or modification. The effort stemmed from an executive order issued by President Trump earlier this year instructing agencies to reexamine regulations that “eliminate jobs, or inhibit job creation” and/or “impose costs that exceed benefits.”
More than 55,100 responses rolled in by the time the comment period closed on Monday — but they were full of Americans sharing their experiences of growing up with dirty air and water, and with pleas for the agency not to undo safeguards that could return the country to more a more polluted era.
“Know your history or you’ll be doomed to repeat it,” one person wrote. “Environmental regulations came about for a reason. There is scientific reasoning behind the need for it. It is not a conspiracy to harm corporations. It’s an attempt to make the people’s lives better.”
“Have we failed to learn from history, and forgotten the harm done to our air, water, and wetlands?” wrote Karen Sonnessa from New York. “If anything, regulations need to be more stringent. I remember the days of smog, pollution, and rivers spontaneously combusting. EPA is for the people.”
Some respondents made moral and religious arguments.
“Reducing our dependency on fossil fuels and limiting the effects of climate change is one of the greatest moral challenges of our time,” the Rev. John D. Paarlberg wrote, defending the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, an effort to regulate carbon emissions from power plants that the Trump administration has vowed to roll back. “For the sake of the most vulnerable among us, for the sake of future generations, for the sake of the planet, please do not undermine the Clean Power Plan and other critical environmental protections.”
Some folks resorted to all caps.
“Regulations are PROTECTIONS. Please enforce all existing clean air and water protections and consider creating more,” wrote Kristine Anstine.
“So here are my thoughts on doing away with existing EPA regulations, or doing away with the EPA itself: ARE YOU BLOODY CRAZY?????” wrote another.
One commenter simply wrote the word “No” over and over, 1,665 times.
[EPA halts inquiry into oil and gas industry emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas]
The thousands of comments echoed those at a three-hour “virtual listening session” that the EPA held earlier this month, in which a litany of callers — some representing environmental groups, others who identified themselves as concerned citizens — urged the agency not to jettison protections for clean water and clean air in the name of reducing burdens on corporations.
Both the call-in session and the written comments included some input from those who argued that some EPA regulations are unnecessary or overly restrictive.
A paper mill operator in Washington state said rules lowering the allowed amount of a harmful chemical into rivers endangered his company, according to an Associated Press account of the call, which also noted that a municipal water plant manager asked that the agency start accepting required reports electronically, rather than by fax.
The written comments also include submissions from business leaders and industry groups, suggesting technical changes to certain rules or asking EPA to streamline reporting requirements. The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, for instance, urged the EPA to make changes to the way it implements the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and the development of biofuels. The Renewable Fuels Association wrote about regulations it argued “are stifling growth in ethanol production and demand, inhibiting job creation, imposing unnecessary costs on both industry and consumers, and preventing renewable fuels from reaching their full potential.”
But the vast majority of comments, thousands upon thousands, echoed the sentiments of Jeff Baker, an investment strategist in Huntsville, Ala.
“I’m well aware that excessive regulation can impose an undue burden on businesses both small and large. However, what is less discussed these days are the economic and societal costs already avoided and prevented by current rules,” he wrote.
“I implore you, as defenders of our nation’s health and security, to avoid shortsighted steps that might create prosperity for a few in the short term, at the expense of the many in the long term. The importance of clean air and water supplies, and of sustainable sources of energy and industrial raw materials, cannot be overemphasized in this day and age. These things are not, as many would claim, in conflict with mankind’s economic prosperity, quality of life, and freedom; rather, they are critically important to them, and integrally tied to them over a long enough timeline.”
The EPA has been among the main targets of the Trump administration, which has proposed cutting the agency’s budget by 31 percent. Trump and the EPA’s new leader, former Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, also have taken aim at Obama-era environmental regulations that they have called unnecessary, overly burdensome or unlawful. Among them: the Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the United States rule, which sought to define what waterways the federal government could regulate.
Pruitt himself also has shown an inclination to revisit existing regulations at the request of industry. The EPA agreed to reopen a review of the fuel economy standards that car companies must meet in the coming years, based on a request earlier this year from the nation’s automakers. In March, the agency announced it was withdrawing a request that operators of existing oil and gas wells provide extensive information about their equipment and its emissions of methane, citing a letter sent by the attorneys general of several conservative and oil-producing states that the request was burdensome and costly. And Pruitt recently refused to ban a commonly used pesticide that the Obama administration had sought to outlaw based on mounting concerns about its risks to human health.
So what will come of the 55,000 comments that the agency received about its regulatory reforms?
The agency said the findings will be given to a task force that has been assembled. The group is required to submit a progress report to Pruitt about regulations it has identified in need of altering or replacing altogether.
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The Ethiopian boomtown that welcomes water firms but leaves locals thirsty.
Business in the Sululta district of Ethiopia’s Oromia region is burgeoning. So why, despite abundant rainfall, does half the population have no access to fresh water?
Towards the end of the day at the Abyssinia Springs bottled water factory near Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, workers hose down the car park liberally. Outside the gates, residents of the Sululta area trudge along the road with empty yellow jerrycans that they will fill from muddy wells and water points.
Over the past decade, the town in Oromia region has attracted plenty of investment. A Chinese tannery, steel mills, water factories and hotels have sprung up.
The boom has also lured workers for the building sites that litter the district with piles of rubble, electric cables, and eucalyptus tree trunks used for scaffolding.
Officials appointed last year amid a wave of unrest admit that they do not know the exact size of Sululta’s population. The local government has failed to keep up with the town’s chaotic growth over the past decade, which has contributed to anti-government sentiment.
Further protests by the Oromo people, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group – whose discontent is rooted in claims of injustice and ethnic marginalisation, as well as maladministration – could undermine official efforts to rectify the situation, not least those by the head of the water bureau, Messay Tadesse.
Although investing in water infrastructure is challenging for a poor country, funding is not the problem in relatively wealthy Sululta, according to Messay. Instead, he believes corrupt management of the land rush, a lack of demand on investors to protect the environment, and the government’s inadequate planning and data collection have contributed to the crisis.
“When the public burned the investments down, it was not that they wanted to damage them. It was our problem in managing them,” says Messay.
Initially peaceful, the protests that began in Oromia in November 2015 evolved into the angry ransacking of government offices and businesses after security forces used lethal force to disperse crowds. Human rights groups estimate that up to 600 people were killed across the country.
Since then, Ethiopia’s multi-ethnic ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which controls all the legislative seats in a de facto one-party state, has embarked on what it calls a process of “deep reform” to try to address governance failings.
For years, government officials and their development partners have claimed that funds were spent efficiently on public services for the estimated 103 million people in Africa’s second-most populous nation, citing improvements in socioeconomic indicators such as maternal mortality and access to potable water.
In 2014 – the latest year for which data is available – the Ethiopian government received $3.6 bn (£3bn) in aid, while the government budget was $9bn, which included donor funding. Most cash for regional governments comes from federal transfers.
There’s water everywhere. The only problem is the government’s willingness
However, the impressive statistics rattled off at development conferences are of little comfort to low-income workers in Sululta, who say they feel ignored by a government that has licensed more than five plants for bottled water while failing to dig enough wells or build pipes to houses. According to WaterAid, 42 million Ethiopians lack access to safe water.
Worku Deme, 40, who delivers cement blocks around Sululta, says the community wrote to government offices two years ago asking for action on water supply. But nothing has changed, he says, beyond the faces of the administrators who ask people to be patient.
“There is no one to care about us,” says Deme, as a woman walks past with a jerrycan strapped to her back.
The situation is especially galling for Sululta because the town is situated in the highlands, where rainfall is abundant for about four months of the year.
The national government, which likes to describe Ethiopia as the “water tower of Africa”, is investing heavily in hydropower, including the continent’s largest dam, in the Nile basin. However, past failures to tap water resources in the rain-deprived east of the country contributed to a fifth of the population needing aid during a drought that began in 2015, killing livestock and causing crops to wither.
In Suluta, there has been investment in boreholes and pumps, but mostly by the private sector. Abyssinia Springs, in which Nestlé Waters bought a majority stake last year, pumps 50,000 litres an hour, which means its capacity is more than half that of the local government.
“There’s water everywhere. The only problem is the government’s willingness,” says a manager at another company, Classy Water, who did not give his name.
Many non-water businesses have dug their own wells.
According to Getachew Teklemariam, a former government economic planner, there has been a lack of water infrastructure planning that takes into account demographic and economic changes across Ethiopia. Instead, development has been piecemeal and household water supply numbers are sometimes inflated by officials for political gain. “With a lack of insight into the reality on the ground, most efforts at improving infrastructure have been uncoordinated and wasteful,” he says.
In January 2016, the government shelved its “integrated development plan” to expand Addis Ababa into surrounding Oromia areas following protests and criticism that the plan would pave the way for more evictions of Oromo farmers.
Today, locals in Sululta travel on public transport to queue for water at a tap built by the Sudanese-owned Nile Petroleum, or pay others to do so. At the end of the town, which mostly lies along one main road, residents collect water from a faucet provided by China-Africa Overseas Leather Products. But the tannery has been accused of polluting water supplies, and in January 2016 protesters invaded the premises. Last month, it was a base for about 50 Ethiopian soldiers monitoring the security situation.
Messay, a mechanical engineer who has worked in the public water sector for a decade, says the government has erred by placing only minimal demands on investors in its eagerness to create jobs: “They [the leather company] drop their waste downstream. It is killing the farmers’ cattle, it’s making the fertility of the soil deplete.” Managers from the firm did not respond to requests for comment.
Messay appears committed to solving the water problem but realistic. He is critical of property investors from the capital who, he claims, seized plots illegally, and of the “corrupt” land administrators who facilitated the town’s chaotic growth. “You expect them to be more responsible, as they are from a big city,” says Messay of the investors.
Turkish contractors are digging a borehole to increase the water supply, which Messay believes might be meeting half the demand.
Nestlé Waters says it wants to help and is funding Addis Ababa University experts to study the environmental and socio-economic situation of the area. The study might feed into another “integrated” plan and possibly an effort to turn Sululta into an “eco city”. But Messay is sceptical as to whether the corporation’s public interest is genuine, noting that there were similar noises from Abyssinia Springs when the water plant was built about seven years ago.
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DEQ fines pipeline company $1M for 2015 oil spill near Glendive.
An oil pipeline company will pay Montana $1 million for a 2015 spill that leached 31,000 gallons into the Yellowstone River and contaminated Glendive's water supply.
An oil pipeline company will pay Montana $1 million for a 2015 spill that leached 31,000 gallons into the Yellowstone River and contaminated Glendive's water supply.
The Montana Department of Environmental Quality announced the civil penalty against Bridger Pipeline LLC on Thursday. The penalty followed a public comment period.
The penalty will be paid as $200,000 to the state's general fund and at least $800,000 on approved "supplemental environmental projects" aimed at reducing pollution, benefiting public health and restoring the environment, according to the DEQ.
"Our next step will be to work on the proposal related to the SEP," said Wendy Owen, spokeswoman for True Oil, which operates Bridger Pipeline, "and we will be providing that to the state."
On around Jan. 17, 2015, the pipeline split at a weld and oil began spilling into the Yellowstone, just upstream from Glendive. Around the same time, residents of the town began reporting a bad taste and smell from drinking water. The community switched to bottled sources.
Benzene, a carcinogen, was detected in the drinking water at a level three times the limit for long-term exposure risk, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Oil was detected in fish captured near the leak site.
Ice covering the river made recovery and containment difficult, at times halting the effort. Much of the oil traveled downstream under the ice, according to the DEQ. Oil sheens were reported as far away as Williston, North Dakota. Crews recovered less than 10 percent of the oil.
The busted line was the responsibility of Bridger Pipeline LLC, which is one of many companies operated by True Oil out of Casper, Wyoming. The business had a history of 30 spills and a number of fines by the time of the Glendive incident.
Prior to the penalty on Thursday, Bridger Pipeline paid for spill response, cleanup and site management work by the DEQ, according to department spokeswoman Jeni Flatow. To date, the company has paid $80,000 toward those costs, she said.
The company also paid as much as $100,000 for monitoring equipment at Glendive's water treatment plant, according to Mayor Jerry Jimison.
“As far as the city of Glendive is concerned, our water plant is back up and functioning flawlessly," he said. "We are happy with the final result here in Glendive.”
A separate environmental assessment will continue, which could lead to more fines for Bridger Pipeline. In October, the Montana Department of Justice announced it would seek compensation for damages caused in the spill.
That effort includes the DOJ's Natural Resource Damage Program and the U.S. Department of the Interior. It's still in the planning stages to determine the scope of the assessment, said Beau Downing, environmental science specialist at the justice department.
The assessment will determine what should be paid for the spill's damage to the ecosystem. It's different from the DEQ penalty announced Thursday, which deals with remediation projects for the future.
"The Natural Resource Damage Program functions differently," Downing said. "There are resources held in trust by the governor of the state of Montana."
That includes plant, animal and environmental resources, he said. There is no timeline for its completion.
The same assessment was completed in a separate incident last year, when state and federal officials announced a $12 million penalty against ExxonMobil Corp.
In 2011, Exxon's Silvertip Pipeline leaked 63,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River near Laurel. The penalty will go toward environmental restoration.
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Web of resources continues to aid NC communities in Matthew’s wake.
Recovery from the flooding due to Hurricane Matthew is slow for some, but it's moving along.
January 26, 2017 by Thomas Goldsmith Leave a Comment
Recovery from the flooding due to Hurricane Matthew is slow for some, but it's moving along.
By Thomas Goldsmith and Rose Hoban
The effort to restore health and welfare in North Carolina counties hit by the devastation of Hurricane Matthew continues to require across-the-board assistance.
In December the state legislature appropriated $200 million in emergency funds. Since the storm, the feds have poured in $82 million in Small Business Administration home loans alone, while faith organizations, other nonprofits and businesses also continue to pitch in.
According to the General Assembly’s disaster relief bill, nearly half of North Carolina’s counties suffered some damage in the wake of the Oct. 8 hurricane. Some 88,000 homes were damaged to the tune of more than $967 million. More than two-thirds of the damage will not be covered by FEMA or private insurance, legislators said.
A client gets advice from staffers at the FEMA-State Disaster Recovery Center in Robeson County in January. Photo credit: Thomas Goldsmith
But, on the ground, discovering which sources can distribute money or other aid in the wake of a disaster can be a complicated task.
More than three months after the storm, Billy Hammond, the mayor of the hard-hit Columbus County town of Fair Bluff, said he was still waiting to hear if help was on its way from the state, from FEMA, from anyone beyond the N.C. Baptist Men’s organization, which had helped some residents strip flood-damaged houses.
“We haven’t heard nothing,” Hammond said. “We’re hoping to hear something anytime.
“We’ve got many needs. What we need is to get the businesses back open so we can get some revenue in the community.”
After a lull during the transition between two governors, money from the legislature’s Disaster Recovery Act of 2016 is starting to flow to counties and municipalities, $66.2 million of it to match FEMA and other federal funds. Among the bill’s additional allocations, with some money included for Western North Carolina areas affected by wildfires:
$10 million to the State Emergency Response and Disaster Relief Fund,
$10 million to the Department of Environmental Quality for infrastructure and cleanup needs and
$20 million to the Golden Leaf Foundation to pay local governments to build or repair infrastructure outside the 100-year floodplain, so that homes can be developed there.
“It does take time”
As Hammond noted, Hurricane Matthew flooded out Fair Bluff’s main street and initially closed all of its businesses. Mike Sprayberry, director of the state Division of Emergency Management, pointed out that government resources don’t assist all victims of catastrophic storms at the same level.
UPDATE:
Governor Roy Cooper announced Thursday the state has received more than $198 million in additional federal dolalrs to help families and communities recover from Hurricane Matthew.
Nearly $159 million of the grant funds are specifically earmarked for Robeson, Cumberland, Edgecombe and Wayne counties, which were among the state’s hardest-hit areas during Hurricane Matthew.
The remaining approximately $39 million will go to address disaster recovery in the other 46 disaster-declared counties in North Carolina.
“There’s some expectation that a business, being a for-profit, will have insurance, much like a homeowner,” Sprayberry said. He said that state and federal dollars can supplement what insurance doesn’t cover.
But public entities, like towns and counties, often have to wait.
“To repair a road or a drainage system or a water plant, those are public structures and they are maintained by some governmental jurisdiction, so they are eligible for grants,” Sprayberry said. “Road repair and repair of water system, that involves a reimbursement system, so it does take time.”
Across the region, since the storm and into recent days, government was joined by nonprofits such as the the North Carolina Baptist Men’s disaster relief effort. Members didn’t rely on government funding, but mostly used donated and purchased materials as they helped families repair damaged homes.
“As far as our entire response to Hurricane Matthew, we have spent 18,500 volunteer days,” said Gaylon Moss, disaster relief coordinator for the Baptist Men.
In Elizabethtown in Bladen County last week, FEMA provided counselors on insurance, damage mitigation and benefits, all working from a room in the town library.
At Eddie White’s State Farm insurance agency in Elizabethtown, on the private-sector side, office manager Becky Kelly said she often works with FEMA as she greets people from storm-damaged homes in Bladen and surrounding counties.
Want to see a FEMA counselor?
WHERE: 911 Communications Center at 107 Underwood St., Elizabethtown
WHEN: 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Jan. 23-27
“We first express our concerns and make sure everybody’s OK,” Kelly said. “I recommend that they check with FEMA, where a lot of times they can qualify for an SBA loan.”
At first, FEMA agents were asking homeowners for proof that they didn’t have flood insurance that would cover their losses. Then the Disaster Recovery Center got so busy — 6,800 visits at the center that’s one county over in Lumberton — that staffers just called insurance agencies like White’s to check.
Wooden pews damaged by Hurricane Matthew wait for disposal outside Lumberton’s Smith Chapel Bible Church of God, one of many buildings in the region undergoing extensive renovation. Photo credit: Thomas Goldsmith
Waters from Matthew irreparably damaged homes belonging to three of the agency’s clients, Kelly said.
“They had to move out,” she said. “You could see the stress in the people’s faces. Thankfully they had somewhere to go.”
FEMA pays for shelter for some
Matthew was the third storm to take a swipe at the Bertie county seat of Windsor this year, following Julia and Hermine, Mayor James Hoggard said. But the town is bouncing back, even if it’s taking a while.
“The attitude of our people has been just great,” Hoggard said, noting that homeowners seem to be having an easier time than business people in getting assistance.
“They allocated $5 million across the state for small businesses,” he said. “We could spend about $2 million in this little bitty town alone.”
Many residents of the 49 North Carolina counties that qualified for disaster relief after Matthew did not have relatives or friends with space to put them up. That’s where government assistance continued to come into play.
Partners Vinston McMillan, 56, and Barbara Campbell, 53, left the FEMA center in Lumberton last week with “no complaints” about the temporary help they’re getting from the government agency, assistance that’s allowing them to stay in a nearby motel.
Like thousands of Lumberton residents, they lost their home — in their case a rented apartment near West Fifth Street — to the rising waters of the Lumbee River after Hurricane Matthew.
Smith Chapel Bible Church of God, like many buildings and homes in Lumberton, is requiring extensive renovation following damage from the nearby Lumbee River in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. Photo credit: Thomas Goldsmith
“We’re used to getting flooded,” McMillan said. “But this time it just kept on rising and kept on rising and kept on rising.”
Both said they’ve experienced depression and continuing respiratory problems since they were evacuated Oct. 9. They hope to return to an apartment and eventually to buy a home.
Mold endangers community church
Less tangible resources that Robeson County residents may need for recovery were also in the process of repair, a trip through previously flooded areas showed.
Not far from where McMillan and Campbell lived off West Fifth, a crew was stripping the insides of Smith Chapel Bible Church of God down to its framing and foundation. Workers at the site said that mold had infested the sheetrock and other material in the church. Only a colorful mural on a wall opposite the entrance gave a sense of the building’s former welcome to its congregation.
Wooden pews that the storm had soaked sat in rows outside the church waiting to be discarded. No one from the church was at the site when a reporter visited and the church’s phone has been disconnected.
WHAT CAN FEMA DO?
Those affected by natural disasters may “be eligible for grants for temporary housing and home repairs, and for other serious disaster-related needs, such as medical and dental expenses or funeral and burial costs,” according to FEMA.
The agency may also refer clients to the U.S. Small Business Administration.
“These loans cover losses not fully compensated by insurance or other recoveries and do not duplicate benefits of other agencies or organizations,” the agency’s website says.
FEMA spokesman Mike Wade noted that clients had to register for aid even if they had signed up with the Red Cross or a local church organization. Registration also made them eligible for SBA loans.
“FEMA’s goal is that we want them to stay in their home if at all possible,” Wade said. “We may provide them money for immediate repairs to make their home safe, sanitary and secure. What that means is that if they have water, electricity and the house can be secured and is safe for them to live in with minimal repairs, that’s all we provide. We cannot make a person whole again; we cannot bring their property back to the way it was before.
“That’s why we rely on SBA as our partner. That will help people with their long-term recovery needs through a low-interest loan.”
For more information call FEMA at 800-621-3362
Filed Under: Environmental Health, Featured, Public Health, Rural Health
Tagged With: Bladen County, Columbus County, Division of Emergency Management, Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, Hurricane Matthew, NC Baptist on Mission, NC General Assembly, Small Business Administration
About Thomas Goldsmith
Thomas Goldsmith worked in daily newspapers for 33 years before joining North Carolina Health News as a reporter in June 2016. A native of North Carolina who attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he got his start in journalism at the Tennessean in Nashville in 1983, leaving the post of assistant managing editor in 2003 to take a variety of positions at the News & Observer through May 2016.
During his tenure at the News & Observer, he reported on aging issues in North Carolina, winning awards from Friends of Residents in Long Term Care, the North Carolina Council on Aging and the regional Area Agency on Aging for this work. At North Carolina Health News, he has continued to cover aging while concentrating on rural health issues.
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Salting the Earth: The environmental impact of oil and gas wastewater spills.
Researchers are beginning to assess the potential impacts of wastewater releases on the health of humans and the environment. “We know very little about the cumulative effects of these releases on the environment.”
Salting the Earth: The Environmental Impact of Oil and Gas Wastewater Spills
Background image: © Phongphan/Shutterstock
Lindsey Konkel is a New Jersey–based freelance science journalist. In June 2016 she traveled to North Dakota’s Prairie Pothole Region on a fellowship from the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources. There she visited an active brine spill cleanup site and met with tribal members of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation.
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For five days in July 2014, a broken pipe spilled more than 1 million gallons of wastewater produced by unconventional oil drilling1 into a steep ravine filled with natural springs and beaver dams on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.2 The briny spill cut a brown swath across the North Dakota landscape, soaking into the soil and killing all vegetation in its path before it seeped into Bear Den Bay on Lake Sakakawea. This reservoir on the Missouri River is where the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation gets its drinking water.3
Tribal leaders say the spill never reached the drinking water plant intake.2 However, for tribe members on the reservation it raised questions about the potential health impacts of leaks and spills of drilling wastewater—questions that are echoed by environmental health researchers who are calling for a closer look at the waste stream produced by oil and gas extraction.4
By some estimates, as much as 5% of all oil and gas wastewater produced in the United States is accidentally or illegally released into the environment.5 There are many potential pathways for this waste to enter surface and ground water, including spills from pipelines or tanker trucks carrying the waste, leakage from wastewater storage ponds or tanks at well pads or disposal facilities, and migration of subsurface fluids through failed well casings.6
Between 2009 and 2014 more than 21,000 individual spills involving over 175 million gallons of wastewater were reported in the 11 main oil- and gas-producing states of Alaska, California, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.7 In North Dakota alone, well operators have reported nearly 4,000 spills to the state since 2007.1
Researchers are now beginning to assess the potential impacts of these wastewater releases on the health of humans and the environment. “We know very little about the cumulative effects of these releases on the environment,” says Isabelle Cozzarelli, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
The Nature of the Waste
A wealth of wastewater is produced by both conventional wells (those drilled in highly permeable rock formations) and unconventional wells (those that use hydraulic fracturing to extract oil and gas). And the dramatic increase of fracking in places like North Dakota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in the past decade has led to a rise in the total volume of wastewater produced. In North Dakota’s Bakken shale alone, wastewater volumes more than doubled during the first few years of the fracking boom, from roughly 1.1 million gallons in 2008 to more than 2.9 million gallons in 2012.8
It takes a lot of water to frack a well. A single shale well may use 2–8 million gallons over its lifetime, depending on geological characteristics of the particular “play,” or formation, involved.8 Large volumes of fracking fluids are injected underground at high pressure. These fluids consist largely of water combined with sand or some other type of solid particle, called a proppant. The force of the injection causes fractures and fissures in low-permeability rock formations that allow trapped oil and gas to escape, and the proppant holds the fractures open.
About 1–2% of fracking fluid is a proprietary chemical mixture that performs a number of important functions in the fracking process, from increasing the viscosity of the fluid to keeping the mixture free of bacteria that could foul well passages.9,10 These chemicals include known or suspected endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, and other toxicants.11 The chemical mixture varies from well to well, and wastewater from a single well typically contains only a small fraction of the more than 1,000 known fracking chemicals.10 Much of the injected mixture resurfaces within the first 2 weeks after pressure is released on the well.12 This so-called flowback tends to look a lot like the fracking fluid mixture.
Acidizing techniques to facilitate oil and gas extraction use a similar mix of chemicals but at higher concentrations, in the range of 6–18%.13 While relatively uncommon, acidizing has recently gained popularity in more arid regions, such as California, where water is scarce.
Another component of the wastewater, known as produced water, occurs naturally in the rock formation and is liberated during conventional and unconventional drilling. Produced water will continue to emerge with oil and gas throughout the life of the well, and in fracked wells will pick up fracking chemicals as it flows to the surface. Produced water represents the single largest waste product associated with the oil and gas industry5,14—roughly 2.3 billion gallons each day.15
Over time, the chemistry of the produced water shifts, with no two produced waters being quite the same. Produced water may still contain small amounts of fracking chemicals.9 It will also typically contain a number of potentially toxic agents that occur naturally in the rock formation, which can include radioactive isotopes, organic compounds (such as benzene), ions (such as bromide, calcium, and chloride), and metals (such as cadmium, lead, and mercury).10 These naturally occurring constituents create concerns about safe disposal of produced water. “The [produced] water that comes up a well is potentially more harmful than the fluid used to frack it,” says Nicole Deziel, an exposure scientist at Yale University.
Sodium chloride can be a major component of produced water, which is often referred to as brine. But the salt content varies greatly from one geological formation to another and even between wells drilled in the same formation. Salinity can range from levels typical of drinking water to several times saltier than seawater.16
In most regions, affordable methods for treating and recycling fracking wastewater have not yet been developed,17 and in June 2016 the EPA finalized a rule that prevents unconventional oil and gas operators from delivering their wastewater to municipal sewage treatment plants.18 That is why almost all fracking wastewater is discarded offsite in injection wells.6 These wells are drilled into porous geologic formations such as sandstone or limestone. They may vary in depth—the defining characteristic typically is that the wells are sunk into rock formations that are isolated from drinking water sources.19 Nationwide there are more than 180,000 injection wells that allow oil and gas waste.20
However, lower-salinity water may be treated and used to irrigate farm fields or water livestock, and brines from some parts of the country can also have considerable economic value. For instance, one company with operations in Oklahoma, Texas, Kentucky, and Montana uses proprietary technology to recover iodine from fracking wastewater.21 However, nationwide, most drilling wastewater is discarded in deep injection wells.22 (Although not the subject of this story, these wells themselves may be a cause for concern—according to the USGS, deep injection of wastewater is responsible for increased earthquake activity in the central United States.23)
Assessing Exposure, Toxicity, and Risk
One of the biggest challenges in designing health risk assessments of unconventional oil and gas development may be the lack of a complete and prioritized list of chemicals on which to focus, says Deziel. “We don’t know which pollutants have the highest probability of exposure or health impact,” she says.
In 2011 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began conducting research to better understand potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water sources. A draft of the final report from the study, which was released for peer review in June 2015, included a list of 1,173 chemicals that are associated with hydraulic fracturing.10 The agency compiled toxicity values for cancer and noncancer effects in a publicly available draft database24 using governmental and intergovernmental toxicity assessments to support future risk assessments of these chemicals.
Researchers have found significant gaps in the oral toxicity data for the chemicals on the EPA list. A recent analysis showed that only 8% of the 1,076 chemicals listed as being used in fracking fluids and 62% of the 134 chemicals documented in flowback and produced water had sufficient toxicological data to calculate chronic oral toxicity values.9 These are values that estimate the amount of a chemical that can be ingested daily without appreciable risk of health effects.
Drilling-related wastewater spills and leaks have been shown to increase concentrations of methane and other markers of fracking-related contamination in local water supplies, as well as metals in drinking water, and salinity, radionuclides, and total dissolved solids downstream of discharges.25,26,27 However, these studies did not necessarily include measurements of chemicals that may be very harmful at very low concentrations, says Deziel. “We need more exposure studies measuring these types of compounds. We don’t have enough data to know whether less-toxic compounds like methane are good markers for the more complex mix of other hydraulic fracturing–related compounds,” she says.
Nevertheless, a growing body of epidemiological research has reported associations between proximity to drilling operations and adverse outcomes such as decreased semen quality and an increased risk of miscarriage, birth defects, preterm birth, low birth rate, and prostate cancer.28,29,30 Most studies of human populations have focused on residential proximity to drill sites as a proxy for exposure to drilling-associated chemicals. But studies like these are just a starting point, because they cannot provide insight into which pollutants or factors might be driving an association. They also cannot rule out the possibility that any given association is due to factors unrelated to oil and gas extraction.
The next step, Deziel says, is to begin collecting blood and urine from people who live near drilling operations and look to see if the chemicals measured in those biospecimens are also found in residential air and water samples. And in order to do these assessments, scientists need to know what they are looking for.
Deziel and colleagues devised a screening approach to evaluate more than 1,000 chemicals identified in fracking fluids or wastewater to prioritize those with potential human health impacts.27 They came up with a priority list of 67 chemicals based on known or suspected reproductive and developmental toxicity. Some of the chemicals singled out include arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, benzene, toluene, and dibutyl phthalate. Having this prioritized list will help other researchers know what contaminants to look for when devising future field studies.
Tracking Contamination in the Environment
In the Bakken Shale, most wastewater moves by pipeline to injection wells within 10 miles of a drill pad, according to industry representatives who asked not to be named. In parts of the country where drilling infrastructure coexists alongside human development, such as the Marcellus region, wastewater must often travel further for disposal.6 In Pennsylvania, for instance, drilling activity overwhelms local capacity for disposal in injection wells, so wastewater may be trucked to sites in Ohio or West Virginia.6
Because most drilling wastewater is transported to offsite facilities, evaluating water and health impacts associated with hydraulic fracturing will mean not only looking near wells in areas with a lot of drilling, but also following the waste stream. Susan Nagel is a reproductive health scientist at the University of Missouri. In her research into the potential endocrine-disrupting effects of chemicals used in fracking, Nagel started by looking at sites where wastewater spills had occurred. “We thought those samples would be more concentrated with chemicals of interest,” she says.
Nagel and colleagues collected ground and surface water samples from sites in drilling-dense Garfield County, Colorado, where wastewater spills had occurred 2 months to 6 years earlier.12 Water sampled in areas with more well pads and a previous spill had higher levels of estrogenic, antiestrogenic, androgenic, or antiandrogenic activity in human cell lines than water samples taken from reference sites with limited drilling activity nearby. Yet in these sites and others, it is impossible to conclusively link the differences in water quality to oil and gas operations, because baseline environmental analyses have not been performed in most areas prior to drilling.12
It is possible that even in the absence of obvious spills or accidents, activities such as underground wastewater injection may have potential environmental impacts, according to Nagel. In a later study, she and colleagues including USGS geomicrobiologist Denise Akob collected surface water samples near an injection well site as well as up- and downstream from it. In assays with mammalian and yeast cells, the samples exhibited endocrine activity above levels known to cause adverse health effects for aquatic organisms. Chemical constituents of the water were consistent with wastewater from fracking operations, the researchers reported.17
Other studies examined the effects of exposing pregnant mice to mixtures of chemicals simulating real-world fracking wastewater. The animals drank water with 1 of 4 different concentrations of these mixtures, the 2 lowest of which were comparable to concentrations reported in drinking water near drilling sites. Reproductive effects were seen in pups at all exposures levels. Male pups showed signs of hormonal disruption including lower sperm counts, increased testis weight, and increased blood testosterone levels,31 while females showed reduced levels of prolactin, follicle-stimulating hormone, and luteinizing hormone.32
Ecological Effects
While some researchers are studying potential human health impacts associated with unconventional oil and gas activities and produced waters, others are asking questions about ecological effects.
Akob and other USGS researchers recently quantified key biogeochemical changes associated with produced water disposal at the same West Virginia facility where Nagel’s group found signs of endocrine activity. They found that sediments collected downstream of the disposal facility were enriched with radioactive radium isotopes and contained less diverse microbial communities than upstream locations.6 “Microorganisms are really the base of the food chain, so they’re an important indicator of how ecology has shifted,” says Akob.
The study was part of a larger USGS program33 to characterize the broad ecological impacts of wastewater from all energy resources, not just fracking.22,34 “We’re trying to understand the long-term effects of these wastewater releases on the environment and develop a set of tools that others can use to analyze environmental impacts at different locations,” says Cozzarelli, the USGS hydrologist.
Most companies are very responsive in cleaning up reported spills, says Kory Richardson, refuge manager at Lostwood National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern North Dakota. Yet Richardson and other land managers are concerned about the cumulative effects on ecosystems. “No one’s out there monitoring for spills. Many of them get reported only when someone notices,” says Richardson.
Researchers at the USGS Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in North Dakota are trying to better understand how to track spill contamination across the state. The oil boom there overlaps an ecologically sensitive region of mixed-grass prairie and shallow wetlands called the Prairie Pothole Region.
A major concern with oil and gas development is the release of chloride-rich produced water into these wetland ecosystems.35 Too much salt can harm soil health. The high salinity often associated with drilling wastewater spills will kill most plant life and clog the small pores in clay soils, reducing the soil’s permeability so new plants cannot take root. “This creates a salt slick, what looks like a brown layer of asphalt across the surface,” says Kerry Sublette, a chemical engineer at the University of Tulsa.
“You can go to the North Dakota state database and see where these spills are occurring and how they are dealt with on a site-to-site basis, but we want to know about the big-picture impacts on the landscape,” says Max Post van der Burg, a USGS ecologist. Post van der Burg and colleagues tested a landscape-scale modeling approach to examine potential chloride contamination in wetlands and patterns of oil and gas development.35 They found that higher chloride concentrations in a wetland are associated with higher numbers of wells nearby, although, as in human studies, they can’t say with certainty that contamination from wastewater spills and leaks caused the variation in chloride levels.
Remediating Spills
Brine spill remediation historically has focused on restoring surface soils by reversing the effects of excess salts—mainly sodium chloride. This may involve washing the salt out of the soil and countering the effects of clay dispersal with a calcium additive, or removing and replacing the contaminated soil, according to Sublette.
But excavating yards of soil can be ecologically disruptive, and rinsing the soil may force brine contamination deeper into groundwater. At one North Dakota spill site, remediation experts are piloting a new in situ technique to extract and remove salts from the ground without having to remove the soil itself.36 They are using an electrokinetic process called electromigration to separate salt molecules at the site.37 The process involved creating a 10-foot-deep electrical field beneath the wetland by burying 24 hexagonal bundles of electrodes to run a low-voltage current through the soil.
Chloride and sodium ions migrate toward opposite charges. “The electrical potential pulls the ions horizontally into collection wells rather than allowing them to migrate vertically into groundwater,” says Chris Athmer, an environmental scientist with Terran Corporation, the consulting firm running the project.
Athmer says the passive process, with its minimal landscape footprint, takes up to 18 months to complete, depending on a site’s size and other factors. He believes electrokinetic remediation may be a good alternative to traditional remediation techniques for environmentally sensitive areas such as wetlands or areas where it is especially important to protect a groundwater source.
It is the first time electrokinetic remediation has been used to clean up a brine spill site in the United States. The process, says Athmer, was modeled off of a similar technique called electroosmosis, which has been used successfully in Kentucky, Ohio, and Wisconsin to clean soil of industrial solvents, such as trichloroethylene.37
High levels of salinity associated with brine spills stress soil microbial communities, says Athmer. Changes in soil pH and temperature from the electrokinetic technique may impact soil microbes, too, although Athmer notes that changes in pH and temperature would be limited to within a few centimeters of the electrodes. He says these changes would be present only during the treatment and would likely reverse once sodium and chloride ions are removed from the soil. “Microbial communities typically thrive anywhere conditions are suitable for growth,” Athmer says. “Once near-background levels are achieved and site conditions are restored, microbial populations are expected to recover as well.”
While he cannot yet comment on the success of the pilot project, which is still ongoing, Athmer says the process is working as expected. “It is removing and is going to continue removing a lot of mass,” he says. If successful, the project could help to refine industry best practices for brine spill remediation.
“Of course the best solution is prevention,” says John Pichtel, a soil scientist at Ball State University in Indiana. “But that’s easier said than done.”
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