Judy Eckert holding water
contaminated with arsenic drawn from her private well 450ft from a fracking rig
in Pennsylvania, which she believes contaminated her water supply. Photo:
Public Herald via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND).
The Ecologist
By Oliver Tickell
25th April 2017
A new study in Pennsylvania, USA
shows that fracking is strongly related to increased mortality in young babies.
The effect is most pronounced in counties with many drinking water wells
indicating that contamination by 'produced water' from fracking is a likely
cause. Radioactive pollution with uranium, thorium and radium is a 'plausible
explanation' for the excess deaths.
A new study of Pennsylvania counties published today
in the Journal of Environmental Protection shows for the first time that
contamination from fracking kills babies.
The Marcellus shale area of Pennsylvania was one of
the first regions where novel gas drilling involving hydraulic fracturing of
sub-surface rock, now termed 'fracking', was carried out.
The epidemiological study by Christopher Busby and
Joseph Mangano examines early infant deaths 0-28 days before and after the
drilling of fracking wells, using official data from the US Centre for Disease
Control to compare the immediate post-fracking four year period 2007-2010 with
the pre-fracking four-year period 2003-2006.
Results showed a statistically significant 29% excess
risk of dying age 0-28 days in the ten heavily fracked counties of Pennsylvania
during the four-year period following the development of fracking gas wells.
Over the same period, the State rate declined by 2%. They conclude:
"There were about 50 more babies died in these 10
counties than would have been predicted if the rate had been the same over the
period as all of Pennsylvania, where the incidence rate fell over the same
period."
Radioactive water pollution to
blame?
The Marcellus shale beneath Pennsylvania was one of
the first areas where fracking began. Only 44 fracking wells were drilled
before 2007, while 2,864 were drilled in 2007-2010.
The cause of the excess mortality is not proven in the
study, however the authors point out that the fracking production process
releases naturally occurring radioactive materials from shale strata which then
contaminate groundwater.
These include radium, uranium, thorium and radon, an
intensely radioactive gas which decays into radioactive 'daughters' with a half
life of under four days. And as the authors write, fracking "involves the
explosive destruction of large volumes of underground gas and oil retaining
rocks and the pumping down of large amounts of what is termed 'produced water'
which initially contains various chemical and sand additives.
"This produced water and backflow returns to the
surface with a high load of dissolved and suspended solids including naturally
occurring radioactive elements ... The contaminated water has to be safely
disposed of but this is often associated with violations of legal disposal
constraints."
Baby mortality related to exposure
through water wells
In the five heavily-fracked counties in the northeast
part of the state (Susquehanna, Bradford, Wyoming, Lycoming and Tioga), the
number of deaths from 2003-2006 vs. 2007-2010 climbed from 36 to 60, a
statistically significant rate increase of 66%....
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