a group of protesters interrupted a university of california board of regents meeting to demand the schools there for ties with the nation's nuclear weapons program. tsotsi most people watching on news are through the week with the kevin owens and the top stories for us and he called for choosing new york and chicago to face response from police to the nation wide body makes it just push. the date the occupy wall street movement and support have crossed the world with tens of thousands letting loose their anger against wealthy banks and bank it. under the new stories for most of the week ukraine's former prime minister feels the strong arm of the law helping set since the seventy is for peace of some to cry a nation shouted democracy it seems the noose is tightening still further on it

faces even more charges. and syria's president promises to make protesters demonstrably comes to change them ot call the elections as the number killed in the civil conflict rises not three thousand. next also investigates how the land your home sits on might actually be your own especially if that a riches to be had any. 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 cild laura amos was one of the earliest and loudest voices. as everyone in this room probably knows my ground water has been contaminated with methane williamsport yes 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 whale is drilled next to your residence near your residence within the legal setbacks and there's a perceived or real impact on the property billion we don't address. in two thousand and one gas wells were drilled using the fracking technique a mere five hundred feet from the amas home. underground the drilling breached their water well causing their drinking water to fill with gray sediment and fit is like soda pop. or colorado oil and gas conservation commission tested the water well and found methane but said it was safe but they warned the amas is to keep a window open so the methane gas wouldn't build up and cause an explosion in their home they amos's stop drinking the water but continue 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 edited 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 camera corp. 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 the trampoline in spite of the well explosion and fire my sister has

stage in her house surrounded by her children and grandchildren. this kind of helps me gives me a little more steadiness and so i can grab something you know they were doing ok as long as there were eggs and that weren't there and i was just working well and you still go out with smells and that i just couldn't be outside it wasn't in the house but then they brought in the temporary rig because they were having problems with one of the holes i think and then the smells started up again as they were doing fracking and all there was right over here we had one back there behind us we had two on the side here they're all working. flaring with gas and i have much more so after the fire whatever was there or just burned and came right at me you know it was like somebody had his. chemicals on me finally i couldn't

stand it anymore and monday and my husband took me to the emergency room at the hospital to get down. part of my grandkids and one great. yeah they've been pretty sick they've had colds as girls if. in fact. liam's 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 in a particular state always where you see the highest percentage a possible health effect it's always skin irritation irritation was during sinuses as coughing and then this effect called sensitizing itchy skin furnace and 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 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 him in a straight or a christie todd whitman to exempt hydraulic fracking from a 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 reported

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 investigation of my complaints . and several months into the. congress took the report from e.p.a. saying that fracking is not present a risk. along with other information and exempted hydraulic fracking from regulation on the safe drinking water act that lays you and i as the american public in this position we cannot know what the industry injects in our life when it is exempt from being reported.

down the colorado river about nine miles to the west of silt is the town of rifle. fully. employed thoughtfully. this is only needed one was. this is before. the problems before with the rifle this is right in that three when you married like a hundred years. it's been no worse fifteen years i'm fifty four says fifty nine sister is to. return to tradition it's a picture. in one thousand nine hundred three christened steve moore boldly 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. one thousand nine hundred ninety five they bought their dream house a fixer upper in a rural neighborhood outside rifle well. place and we've plenty says they did. 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. or even trying. crisper get in the shower. her skin turned bright red i think. it hurt her skin it was it was burning fire she was well steve began to develop

symptoms as well i feel dizzy. i get well the nose is chris's 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 particular tarry tumor and she developed a rare neurological speech impairment but i think i think i both said both a new. face has i've had several patients who have. been . having symptoms since the time that they were exposed to world gas exploration near their homes these are all people in a small cost for. last year e.p.a. got 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've. myself in 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 im innocent stands for a risk to public drinking water source and the e.p.a. was going to take over the investigation however soon as we got back to our political point the supervisors they canceled that investigation so e.p.a. did not investigate a legitimate complaints from citizens and are focused on it. if you live in or in a rural residential area and you're in a low lying area your house was in the low lying area they could accumulate these gases when they come off the tank battery and so forth you may be breathing those for twelve hours a day and one of the concerns of the agency with respect to one of the gas industry

is how much volatile organic carbon 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 e.p.a. and e.p.a. brought in some infrared cameras. and turned them towards these oil and gas facilities under infrared light. the boat or getting commissions were visible. they look like a. mirage. and so one could see in this in pretty great camera the amount of both 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 oily stuff the stuff which is quite those materials rapparee very correctly all those are potentially toxic but we don't know to what extent. many of them are dangerous ethylene for instance is converted in humans to ethylene oxide and ethylene oxide is of course senator besides the drilling in their immediate neighborhood christene stever 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 will near the more bodies 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 to burn clogged gas well the gas companies told everybody not to drink the water and they actually start delivering water to us then they came back and told us that your water safe to drink so we started drinking water again. 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 and it was ordered through your skin good dose of the volatile organic compounds from the shower water will be several times the dose you would have gotten from the drinking water after we started thinking that was

not right but a glass of water that overnight there was like 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 the place and it was it was valued at four hundred forty thousand dollars and when this 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. on the part of people who live in the path of drilling. you. will. see 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 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. as it is in another area. all in 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 an agency of the interior department they had authorized more than fifteen hundred new gas wells on the roan plateau one of the last pristine areas in garfield county we just started

with a very modest request a 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 improved response there's 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 secretary. request the governor has made of him. in the summer of two thousand. and in 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 but the bureau found the protests to be without merit and issued to leases anyway our goal is ciro incidents and zero impact on the environment and that. were not there obviously.

we do have injuries we do have still. but we're trying to prevent and we do the best we can sign in marking charles laughton across the road and where i mean you know that's not how it's not in our dangerous it's natural gas from out an oil or oil spills of natural gas from a market interest. 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 when 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 it takes so long to do the testing. because this is what you traditionally test 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 as the energy bill that was passed by the 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 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 very tired. of these may have zero desire to. solve or they are. still thirty forty one maybe one of the most significant things that we accomplished in this legislative session it reorganized 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 but to be mindful of the impact is the number of ruling out the case this time as a member of the pack for flights five as well. half of the state of colorado or more since above the gas barriers known. 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 of this state i hope the people of state look at the fact that today we have to fight bells in wells have been drilled that's just in the northwestern area and if you look down the

road fifteen years and you've got completing sixty thousand wells sixty thousand volts put in said. williams but after we actually declined to participate in your project. here but feel like. you like to know that. we transfer. did you know it radio. over. there if you care for it i don't know if you were the best ever erica thank you for you. 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 ninety nine hundred hundreds of

thousands of new wells have 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. technologies available for industry to comply with all these mines and to conduct their business in a much cleaner maybe 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 the new technology to capture the escaping guesses and videos seize but also to do something with that word. when they capture these has to substances i can also

capture more of their saleable product we need data and we need data on animals we need data on humans we need a gate on the population and that requires again money a plan you know and doing. this for one or two lives and let this serve the country through alternative energy we all use energy we all know we need energy there lot 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 in the polls and to hold the whaling as industry and the same standards as other industries if the industry way fifteen years down the road there need answering some very hard questions to a jury and to a number of plaintiffs saying you know when it was so inexpensive that put some of

these pollution control equipment and practices on your operation why when you knew that there were sicknesses why didn't you do it. susanka a good time to stand up. in cars and follow. do fun to be stand. in the car come up.

with you where. to come to get. this in front of the scums for. love. how to use a. nice night good sun to reach out. beyond the confidence to when you come. inside. with us on. this.

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