welcome back here with r.t. here's a look at the top stories ukraine's next prime minister is guilty of abusing her authority while signing gas deals with russia found you go pasta country to lose nearly two hundred million dollars in a green the energy contracts and misty heavy police presence crowds gathered outside the court building awaiting the announcement of her sentence. in boston and a wall street protests turned violent as police reportedly beat war veterans during a peaceful demonstration this comes as people across the u.s. join the movement against bankers big business and government. the fusion of

a new global voice as asia's two biggest giants russia and china building union to challenge the political domination of the western world. class of akio holds the fate of the eurozone bailout and its home with the government both threatening to veto the new fund for data laden european economies. have alliance and next on our t. our special report from the rocky mountains and the locals battle against an energy company drilling for natural gas in their backyard. in two thousand and four some residents in garfield county began to complain that they were getting sick as a result of the drilling activities in their neighborhoods. a young woman from sils laura amos was one of the earliest and loudest voices. as everyone in this room probably knows my groundwater has been contaminated with methane williamsport gets

a lot of people in this room with contamination and pollution issues so who then is responsible to me for that that loss of my welfare if it's not you the gas commission if a will is drilled next year residence near your residence within the legal setbacks and there's a perceived or real impact on the property value we don't address. in two thousand and one gas wells were drilled using the fracking technique a mere five hundred feet from the amos home. underground the drilling breached their water well causing their drinking water to fill with gray sediment and fit is like soda. the colorado oil and gas conservation commission tested the water well and found methane. said it was safe but they warned the amos's to keep a window open so the methane gas wouldn't build up and cause an explosion in their

home they amos's stopped drinking the water but continued to bathe and that she later found out that a chemical that had been used in the two thousand and one fracking has been linked to adrenal gland tumors. when she went to end canada they denied using it on that well or any other months later the oil and gas commission admittedly that it had been used after all. after years of mounting medical bills devalued property and diminishing options laura agreed to a monetary settlement with and connor corp. the company responsible for her problems. this settlement stipulated she stopped telling her story publicly which is why she was not interviewed for this film many family stories like hers will never be told because of company settlements that require silence.

let's go over on the trampoline instead of her relic splosion and fire de hoffmeister his stage in her house surrounded by her children and grandchildren. this kind of helps me gives me a little more study medicine so i can grab something you know they were doing ok as long as the regs on that weren't there and i was just working. you still go out with smells and that i just couldn't go outside it wasn't. but then they brought in the temporary rig because they're having problems with one of the holes i think and then that's now it's all started up in here as they were doing a fracking board was right over here we had one back fair behind us we had two on the side here they're all working you know. flaring with gas and i have

much more of it all after the fire whatever was there are just burned and came right at me you know it was like somebody had just dumped chemicals on me finally i couldn't stand it anymore and monday my husband took me to the american saver on hospital for a good. party one grandkids and i'm very. happy. yeah they've been pretty sick they've had colds as my girls. like infection. renames as much really bad he's on four different medicines. basically we found that if you were to take all of the chemicals that are used and if you take your state always where you see the highest percentage of possible health effects it's always in irritation irritation and blistering sinuses as coughing and then this effect called sensitizing and she's good in

he still lives on dry hollow road shortly after this interview these son and daughter in law and their four children moved out of the state when they moved there respiratory problems disappeared. in two thousand and four the bush cheney administration's environmental protection agency asserted that fracturing does not threaten drinking water this was childish way a thirty year e.p.a. environmental engineer weston wilson acting under protected whistleblower status the former chairman c.e.o. of halliburton pick cheney within a few months of coming into office as vice president he was pressuring the administrators of a.p. christie todd whitman to exempt hydraulic fracking from safe drinking water act regulations my own point of view as a technician i just thought a very i'm arming the e.p.a.

technically had described how toxic these materials are toxic at the point of injection and still come out with a summary that says they don't need to be reported a regular. and that led me in the fall of zero four to object on technical grounds then the inspector general of e.p.a. again investigation of my complaints. and several months into the. congress took the report from e.p.a. saying that fracking that not present a wrist. along with other information and exempted hydraulic fracking from regulation on the safe drinking water act that least you and i as the american public in this position we cannot know but the industry injects in our land when it is exempt from being reported.

down the colorado river about nine miles to the west of silt is the town of rifle. out then own thoughts. this is only needed one was. this is before. any problems before with the right this is right and that really when you marry like a hundred years. it's been the worst fifteen years i'm fifty four she's fifty nine sister. so march. there's.

a tradition. in one nine hundred ninety three chris and steve goldie decided to leave california to move to colorado we both got laid off from our work because we both volunteered to be laid off because we wanted to get out of california move to colorado where it was beautiful and clean air and clean water they found themselves in garfield county looking for a new home there's chris. in nineteen ninety five they bought their dream house a fixer upper in a rural neighborhood outside rifle well a.j. we go with a place and we plan to stay there. it was shortly after chris and steve moved in the drilling rigs began to appear on some of their neighbors land and in the surrounding hills and everything changed. crisper get in the shower.

her skin turned bright red i think it was ninety six it hurt her skin it was it was burning on fire she was well steve began to develop symptoms as well i feel dizzy. i give her the nose is priss health began to deteriorate rapidly she began losing her sight had severe headaches and had pain in her hands and feet there were two surgeries to remove it and she would tarry tumor and she developed a rare neurological speech impairment but i think i think i'll go through all this a. phase her i've had several patients who have. been . having symptoms since the time they were exposed that were in gas exploration near their homes these are all people in

a small cluster around rifle blast here. several citizens requests from garfield county and the citizens were saying. gosh my drinking water might be contaminated by this practice or the air we breathe might be affecting e.p.a. can you look into it e.p.a. should of. myself and another staff person we had prepared the letters and we were we were ready to write to the colorado oil and gas commission that we felt that this practice cause imminent substantial risk to public drinking water source and that e.p.a. was going to take over the investigation however soon as we got back to our political point supervisors they canceled that investigation so e.p.a. did not investigate legitimate complaints from citizens and garfield county. if you live in a rural residential area and you were in a low lying area your house was in a low lying area that could accumulate these gases when they come off the tank

battery and so forth you may be reading those for twelve hours a day and one of the concerns of the agency with respect to the oil and gas industry is how much both organic carbon and how much volatile gases come from the industry especially from storage of oil or storage of gas. last summer in an effort to track down how much volatile organic carbon was coming from the oil and gas industry a unique study was undertaken by uva and e.p.a. in some infrared cameras. turned them towards these oil and gas facilities and under infrared light. the volatile organic commissions were visible. they look pretty. moraz. and so one could see in this one for a great camera the amount of volatile organic carbon coming off these storage tanks

. every well is thrilled into a straight and it has organic chemicals that oil is a mixture of these very heavy or again ics but it's a range from these kind of greasy very heavy oil we stuffed stuff which is quite those materials or at very very quickly all those are potentially toxic but we don't know to what extent. many of them are dangerous ethylene for instance is converted to humans ethylene oxide and ethylene oxide is of course senator besides the drilling in their immediate neighborhood chris and steve are you directly downwind to what was becoming a major drilling field exposing them to even higher levels of airborne toxins. another source of possible exposure was

a waste water treatment facility located across the river from their home. in one nine hundred ninety seven as christmas symptoms were getting worse and water well knew the most baldies was blown out and contaminated by drilling. according to state records on september fifteenth one thousand nine hundred ninety seven barrett resources lost well control while drilling the burned clogged gas well the gas company told everybody not to drink the water and they actually started delivering water to us then they came back and told us that your water safe to drink so we started drinking the water again. when the exposure is through a water pathway people are usually given an alternate drinking water supply you don't think of it but there are a lot of sources of water vapor in the house your dishwasher every time you flush the toilet and you breathe it in. through your skin or

a dose of the volatile organic compounds from the shower water will be several times that those you would have gotten from drinking water and we started to think that was not right but a glass of water left said overnight there was a little oil slick. in desperation chris and steve moved to grand junction colorado abandoning their home and a place that had been their dream. just. you know what it. was valued at four hundred forty thousand dollars and we just walked away from it. there are no official statistics tracking people who have moved away because of the effects of gas and oil development but in the two colorado communities profiled in this film the impact has been profound. there is a record of at least nine dry hollow families who formally complained about the drilling and they have moved away. some were afraid some were sick

all were exhausted by their fight with the industry. chris and steve have seen the same thing in their neighborhood in rifle i think almost all of our neighbors. and all people that occupy their houses now are people who work for the world. and. there's a growing. on the part of people who live in the path of. saying

that living with this development has affected our lives in nearly every way imaginable with other recourse some landowners have become activists. i think there's no question that people are getting sick from the environmental effects of oil and gas exploration production throughout the united states and what's striking is when you ask them what their symptoms are it's the same one area. that is in another area of. the oil and gas states like new mexico and colorado are caught between intense pressure from the federal government to lease more land for drilling and the desire to protect the land in their citizens. in june of two thousand and seven newly elected colorado governor bill ritter is faced with a critical confrontation with the bureau of land management and agency of the

interior department they had authorized more than fifteen hundred new gas wells on the rhone plateau one of the last pristine areas in garfield county we just started with a very modest request one hundred twenty days for a new administration and we were turned down and we don't think twenty four days is enough for us to be able to really have a thoughtful and. too much that we don't know for us to be able to really respond in a very short amount of time so that's very hard to. request because it was made. in the summer of two thousand. in an eight in spite of protests from governor ritter and colorado legislators the bureau of land management went ahead with the federal auction of leases on the rhone plateau. the entire top of the plateau fifty five thousand acres it was leased nearly

fifteen thousand citizens sent protest letters to the bureau found the protests to be without merit and issued elise's anyway our goal was ciro incidents and zero impact on the environment glamour. were not there obviously. we do have injuries we do have fails. but we try to prevent them in the past so we can study market interest and often across the road anywhere i mean you know that's not how it's not a more dangerous as natural gas out in a while or all scales of natural gas and oil from them are dangerous. today's hearing will examine loopholes and federal health and environmental protections that are exploited by the oil and gas industry as children we all learned about basic fairness and we know that it's not just not fair would someone gets to play by different rules than the rest of us but as we will learn today there is one set

of environmental rules for the oil and gas industry and a different set of rules for the rest of america the federal government's got to be involved in that this isn't something that the states can do definitely because this chemical testing is expensive states don't have the money would you think it would be hard to find these chemicals if you waited for years to sample them definitely yes why does it you know why take so long to do the testing. because this isn't what you traditionally just for are we not doing enough basic research into this area we are not there slipping through our safety net truly. there have been many attempts to create more balance between the interests of industry and those of surface owners. q. in part to the activism of landowners in colorado a new mexico new legislation was passed in both states giving landowners some new

rights but for industry it is still essentially business as usual the pace of new drilling continues to accelerate unabated attempts at regulatory change at the federal level have not been as successful the energy bill was passed that house of representatives in two thousand and seven did include additional protections for surface areas when the oil and gas is owned by the federal government. that those provisions unfortunately did not make it into law. in the spring of two thousand and seven governor bill ritter signed one of the new colorado bills it changed the makeup of the state commission that regulates the industry the ceremony was attended by some of the residents of garfield county island boy some. of these may have been mired you know you. saw her. house go

thirty forty one maybe one of the most significant things that we accomplished in this legislative session to reorganize the current oil and gas lots of fish commission we believe it brings the predator ballots to the commission so that's not dominated by any one interest group but we're going to be responsible as we move forward but to be mindful of the impact is the number of drilling efficacious time as the number of effect complaints climb as well as. half of the state of colorado or more sensibly gas bearings and on. and so this is an issue that will be with us for many many years to come in the decisions that we make today are going to define. how this will all transpire over the next twenty years. i hope that people of the state i hope the

people listening look at the fact that today we have close to five thousand wells have been drilled that's just in the northwestern area and if you look down the road fifteen years and you've got contemplating sixty thousand wells sixty thousand volts what is said to. williams is going to have to respectfully declined to participate in your project. struggle to i'm still here but you feel like i'd like to know that. we transfer all. video and radio contact over to the point across to them at this particular point i don't do wish you the best in your endeavors and thank you for your consideration. as in the rocky mountains the growth of domestic drilling is beginning to impact

people and places across america in ways never imagined oil companies are seeking new leases in thirty two states since nineteen ninety hundreds of thousands of new wells have been drilled and the pace of development is accel orating. incredibly drilling is now planned in the new york city watershed which provides drinking water to millions. but some feel it doesn't have to be this way. technology is available for industry to comply with all these laws and to conduct their business in a much cleaner way it's often affordable and it's often profitable. we can make them do it better the trumpets now in the industry are so high that there's no reason why they can't start using some new technology develop

a new technology to capture the escaping guesses of v.o.c. but also to do something with that water. when they capture these hazardous substances they can also capture more of their saleable product we need. and we need alamos we need data on humans we need data on the population and that requires again money a plan you know and doing. this work on alternatives in this does serve the country through alternative energy we all use energy we all know we need energy there was better ways we could do energy and i'd like to see as we move towards a clean energy future what's most important is for. congress to close these loopholes and to hold the oil and gas industry in the same standards as other industries if the industry waits fifteen years down the road you're going to be

answering some very hard questions to a jury and to a number of plaintiffs saying you know when it was so inexpensive to put some of the these pollution control equipment and practices on your operation why when you knew that there were sicknesses you know why didn't you do it.

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