technology innovation all the developments around russia we. talk about here where there are. these are the top stories voices of concern over civil violence scream. as loud as the formula one car is due to race around its tracks but they are still left and heard by those two bodies three pairs of within syria. moves to quarantining flammable euro zone from the global economy as allegations pounced on popular and to union sentiment. and china is trying his luck in getting a slice of the arctic and its premier wen jiabao embarks on a tour of europe. next week and our report on a drilling boom in america's rocky mountains where locals have found out they don't

own what's under their land and seen derrick's rising on their doorsteps. 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 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 whale is drilled next to your residence near your residence within the legal setbacks and there's a perceived or real impact on your property value we don't address that 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 is like soda pop. a colorado oil and gas conservation commission tested the war 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 out and cause an explosion in their home if they amos's stop 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 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 canada corp. aeration 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. as girl ran a trampoline in spite of her well explosion and fire. his stage in her house surrounded by her children and grandchildren. was kinda 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

a while and 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 the holes i think and then the smells started up again because they were doing a fracking and it all blows 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 and i have much more after the fire whatever was there or 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 i mean the margins here at the hospital if you get down. i had probably one grandkids and one great. yeah they've been pretty sick they've had colds asthma girls act like i'm

faction. lambs 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 of possible health effects it's always in irritation irritation blistering sinuses as coughing and then this cold sensitizing itchy skin 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 childish 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 as vice president he was pressuring him in the street of the 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 that he'd be 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 or regulated. 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 that congress took the report from e.p.a.

saying that fracking did not present a risk along with other information and exempted i dryly cracking from regulation on the safe drinking water act that least you and i as the american public in this position we cannot know what the industry injects in our lineup we it is exempt from being reported. down the colorado river about nine miles to the west of silt is the town of rifle.

everyone thought. this is one of the one was. this is before. the problems are before with the right this is the right and the three i want to marry like a hundred years. it's been there were thirteen years i'm fifty four she's fifty nine says. there's not a traditional return. in the one nine hundred ninety three chris and steve a bold he 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 crews. in nineteen ninety five a bought their dream house a fixer upper in a rural neighborhood outside rifle with a widow with a place and we planned 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 and everything changed. crisper get in the shower. her skim turned bright red i think is not is it her or her skin was it was growing on fire she was well steve began to develop symptoms as well i feel dizzy. i give her the nose as chris is 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 thought i think i'll go through all the say you. first have 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 right. 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 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 that could accumulate the gases when they come off the tank battery and so forth you may be reading knows 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 or 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. brought in some infrared cameras. and turned them towards these oil and gas facilities and under infrared light. the whole targeting commissions were visible. they looked like a. mirage. and so one could see in this intricate web 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 oily stuff to stuff which is quite those materials about 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 the ethylene oxide and ethylene oxide is of course senator besides the drilling in their immediate neighborhood chris and steve are drunk cleave 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 them apologies 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 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 and a dose of the valborg at a compound from the shower water will be several times that those you would have gotten from drinking water after we started thinking. that a glass of water sit overnight and there was little oil. in just a ration chris and steve moved to grand junction colorado abandoning their home and a place that had been there during. you know.

four hundred forty thousand dollars we walked away from. 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 of families who formally complained about the drilling and they have moved away. some were afraid some were sick 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. and all the people that occupy the houses now are people that work for the worlds.

there's a growing resistance on the part of people who live in the path of dreaming. 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 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 desire to protect the land and their citizens. in june of two thousand and seven 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 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 and. true the response is 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 why i'm going to push very hard with secretary kempthorne if i may ask him to grant the governor the request the governor has made of him. in the summer of two thousand and 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 was leased nearly fifteen thousand citizens sent protest letters but the bureau found the protests to be without merit and issued the leases anyway our goal is to row incidents and zero impact on the environment and. we're not there obviously. we do have injuries we do have stills. but we try and prevent them which in the past we can sign in our game 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 coming out in

a while or all scales of the natural gas not from an archangel. today's hearing will examine loopholes and several 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 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 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 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 ray has whom i are coming to you know you want to honor winner. 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 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 drilling applications time as the number of the impact

complaints climb as well. as. half of the state of colorado or more sense about the gas bearings known 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 just the wealthy people estate. a fact that today we have a 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 but after respectfully declined to participate in your project. so here about

it feel like. you'd like to know that. we transfer. you know it radio. over repoint are cursed with this if you care for it i don't know if you wish you the best year ever and thank you larry. 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 and drills 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 has to substances they can also capture more of their saleable product we need data and we need data on animals we need data on humans we need data on the population and that requires again money

a plan you know and doing. this for the north who lives in this does 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 what's most important is for congress to close these loopholes and to hold the oil and gas industry at the same standards as other industries if the industry way fifteen years down the road 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 these pollution control equipment and practices on your operation why when you knew that there were sicknesses why didn't you do it.

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a. nice night good son to reach out. to young no confidence you got. in touch. with us on. this.

culture is that so much pride on a job that you go into something much there's that taliban bad guy insane or a murderous right wing fanatic this is what a norwegian court must determine in the wake of last year's massacre of seventy seven people. will go to the. science technology innovation hall the list of elements from around russia we've got the future coverage. get off sometimes you see a story and it seems so horrifying you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.