wealthy british style. is about right on. the. market why not. come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on our cheek you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so horribly you think you understand it and then you blip something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you

thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. book. in two thousand and four some residents in garfield county began to complain if 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 granddaughter has been contaminated with methane claims for guests a lot of people in this room with contamination and pollution issues so who. and if

is responsible for the out that loss of my welfare it's not you the gas commission if a will is drilled next year residence or 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 sunder grounds the drilling breached their water well causing their drinking water to fill with gray sediment and face like. a 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 in it 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 that well or any other months later the oil and gas commission admittedly that had been used after all. after years of mounting medical bills devalued property and diminishing options laura agreed to a monetary settlement with and can a corporation and the company responsible for her problems. the 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 inspire you will explosion and fire. his stage in her house surrounded by her children and grandchildren. this kind of helps me gives me a little more steadiness until i can grab something you know they were doing ok as long as there were eggs on that weren't there and it was just a working well you still got smells on that and i just couldn't go outside it wasn't in the house but then they brought in a temporary rig because they were having problems with one of the holes i think and then the smells all started up again because they were doing a fracking and it all there was right over here we had one back there behind us we had q. on the side here they're all working you know. flaring with gas i have much more of it after the fire whatever it was they 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 and my husband took me to them urgency at the hospital to get down. pretty well grandkids and one great. oh. yeah they've been pretty sick they've had colds as girls just like infection. limbs as much really bad or different medicines basically we found that if you were to take all of the chemicals that are used in a particular state always where you see the highest percentage of possible health effects it's always in irritation irritation blistering sinuses as coughing and then this cold sensitizing skid. he still lives on dry hollow road shortly after the scene. view d's son and

daughter in law and their four children moved out of the state and 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 challenged by a thirty year e.p.a. environmental engineer weston wilson acting under protected whistleblower status the former chairman c.e.o. of halliburton cheney within a few months of coming into office and as vice president he was pressuring the administrator of a christie todd whitman to exempt hydraulic fracking from safe drinking water act regulations my own point of view as a technician i just thought it 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 imported a regular. and that led me in the fall of zero four to object on technical grounds then the inspector general of the day began an investigation of my complaints. and. several months into the. congress took the report from e.p.a. saying that fracking did not present a wrist along with other information and they exempted hydraulic fracking from regulation on the safe drinking water act that leaves you and i as american public in this position we cannot know. but the industry injects in our land we it is exempt from being reported.

down the colorado river about nine miles to the west of silt is the town of rifled . three. m. . this is only looted one was. this is before. any problems before with the rifle this is where the ninety three women are like one hundred years. it's been there was fifteen years i'm i'm fifty four she's fifty nine says james three she's changed so much. that it's just a touch of the traditional state actor. in one thousand nine hundred ninety three

chris and stephen baldwin 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 and move the 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 you know without a place and we plan to stay there forever. 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. everything terri. crisp would get in the shower. her skin turned bright red i think it was ninety six in her or her skin it was it

was growing on fire she was. 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 a tumor terri tumor and she developed a rare neurological speech impairment but i think i think i'll go through all this a. first i've had several patients who have. been . having symptoms since the time they were exposed to the oil and gas exploration near their homes these are all people in a small cost for. last year e.p.a. 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 affected 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 him in a substantial risk to public drinking water source and that e.p.a. was going to take over the investigation however as soon as we got that through our political appointee supervisors they cancelled 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 they could accumulate the gases when they come off the tank battery and so forth you need to be breathing 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 of volatile organic carbon and how much volatile gases come from the industry especially from storage of oil or stories 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 you can get an e.p.a. in some infrared cameras. turned them towards these oil and gas facilities under infrared light. the volatile organic commissions were visible. they look like a. mirage. and so one could see in this intricate red camera the amount of volatile organic carbon coming off these storage tanks. every well is drilled into

a strait and it has organic chemicals. oil is a mixture of these very heavy organics but it's a range from these kind of greasy very heavy oil we stuff the stuff which is quite those materials are operated 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 to ethylene oxide and actually not that is of course senator besides the drilling in their immediate neighborhood chris and steve are 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 a water well near the 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 water there. when the exposure is through the 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 it would go some of the volatile organic compounds from that the shower water will be several times that those you would have gotten from the drinking water from the start i think i'm

right but a glass of water left that overnight there was like a little oil. in desperation chris and steve moved to grand junction colorado abandoning their home and a place that had been their dream. you know. and it was 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. in the two colorado communities profiled in this film the impact has been profound. there is a record of at least nine dry hole 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 had seen the

same thing in their neighborhood in rifle i think almost all of our neighbors have moved away and all the people that occupy the houses now are people that work for the world. and. there's a growing. part of people who live in the path of drilling. say that living with this development has affected our lives in nearly every way imaginable with other recourse some landowners have become activists. and i think

there's no question that people are getting sick from the environmental effects of gas exploration and production throughout the united states and what's striking is when you ask them what their symptoms are it's the same in one area. it is in another area. of. 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 was faced with a critical confrontation with the bureau of land management and agency of the interior. 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 for. too much that we don't know for us to be able to really respond in a very short amount of time so. the governor has made of him. in the summer of two thousand. n n eight in spite of protests from governor ritter and colorado legislators the bureau of land management went ahead with a federal auction of leases on the rhone plateau. the entire top of the plateau fifty five thousand acres was leased nearly fifteen thousand citizens sent protest letters but the bureau found the protests to be without merit and issued

a leases anyway our goal is ciro incidents and zero impact on the environment down there. were not there obviously. we do have injuries we do have. what we try and prevent them and in the past we can sign a marking shows that often across the road and where i mean you know that's not how it's not a more dangerous as natural gas from out an oil or all scales or a natural gas not from an archangel. today's hearing will examine loopholes in 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 bored or 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. to impart to the activism of landowners in colorado when you mexico new legislation was passed and both states giving landowners some new rights vote 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 as the energy that was passed by the house of representatives in two thousand and seven did include additional protections for surface owners when the oil and gas is called 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 in change the makeup of the state commission that regulates the industry the ceremony was attended by some of the residents of garfield county i am wary. of these may have to fire to you know you it's an honor been around the. house bill thirty forty one maybe one of the most significant things that we accomplished in this

legislative session to reorganize the current oil and gas conservation commission we believe it brings a better balance to the commission so that's not dominated by any one interest group but we're going to be responsible as we move forward going to be mindful of the impact is the number of drilling applications time as number of the impact complaints climb as well. half of the state of colorado or more sense about the gas bearing zone. and so this is an issue that will be with us for many many years to come and the decisions that we make today are going to define. how this will all transpire over the next twenty years. i hope the people. i hope the people the state. 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 complicating sixty thousand wells sixty thousand volts what is said to. williams is going to have to respectfully decline to participate in your project. to build your bet you feel like i need to let you know that. we can transfer all. radio. packs over to the point i don't know about interest with them at this particular point i don't know if you wish you the best in your endeavors and thank you for your patience. as in the rocky mountains the growth of domestic drilling is beginning to impact people and places across america in ways never imagined how oil companies are

seeking new leases in thirty two states since ninety nine hundred hundreds of thousands of new wells and been drilled and the pace of development is excel 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 profits 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 gases the video sees but also to do

something with that water. when they capture these hazardous substances carry they can also capture more of their saleable product we need data and we need data animals we need data on humans when they go on the population and that requires again money a plan you know and doing. this for one or two minutes in a list 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 is move towards a clean energy future which most important is for. congress to close these loopholes and to hold the oil and gas industry in a scene standards as other industries if the industry waits fifteen years down the road where you need 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. some good sound. causes foam.

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