even to those who keep it to distance. from moscow this is r t i'm the research show here your headlines at the un is set to one massive observer mission to syria it's a last ditch attempt to prevent an all out civil war and security council is expected to approve the deployment of three hundred monitors later on saturday. decision time in effect in france so after final appeals to voters are made by ten presidential hopefuls all eyeing up the top job though in a country driven by social divisions on record unemployment both will cast their choices on sunday with incumbent president nicolas sarkozy and populist socialist

leader for. the main contenders of this point. plus the chinese economic powerhouse sets its sights on the arctic as beijing weighs in for a slice of the untapped resources the chinese are premiers to ring europe right now to seal collaboration deals on exploring arctic resources. of the headlines now a special report it's all about a community of americans hoping to safeguard civil liberties and the health of the major big players the energy companies drill right under their very own fate. 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 cild amos was one of the earliest and loudest voices. as everyone in this room probably

knows my groundwater has been contaminated with methane. 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 the property value and 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 funder grounds the drilling breached their water well causing their drinking water to fill with gray sediment and fizz like soda pop. a 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 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 chewers. 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 can of course. 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.

let's go around the trampoline in spite of her well explosion and fire de hofmeister has stayed in her house surrounded by her children and grandchildren. this kind of helps me give me a little more steadiness until i can grab something you know they were doing ok as long as the regs on that weren't there and i was as a working well you still go out with smells and that i just couldn't go outside it wasn't. then they brought in a temporary rig because they're having problems with one of the holes i think and then less now it's all started up again as they were entering fracking and it all boils right over here we had one back there behind us we had two on the side here they're all working in. flaring with gas and i have much more you know

after the fire whatever was there just burned and came right at me you know it was like somebody had just dumped chemicals on me finally i couldn't stand anymore and monday my husband took me into the emergency room at the hospital and he did yeah. i had twenty one grandkids and i'm very. happy. yeah they've been pretty sick they've had colds as girls. infection rooms 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 been irritation and irritation and blistering sinuses as coughing and then this effect will sensitizing and she's good skin

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 cheney within a few months of coming into office and as vice president he was pressuring him in a straight of u.p.a. christie todd whitman to exempt hydraulic fracking from safe drinking water regulation my own point of view as

a technician. i just thought it very alarming 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 or regulated. and that led me in the fall of zero four to object on technical grounds then the inspector general of e.p.a. 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 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 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. i've been on. this is one of the one we're. this is before. the problems before with the right this is right in that three women married like a hundred years. it's been a worse thirteen years i'm i'm fifty four she's fifty nine sister two

sister and. there's a ton of. bricks. in one nine hundred ninety three christen steve a boulder 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 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 cruz. in nine hundred ninety five they bought their dream house a fixer upper in a rural neighborhood outside rifle well without a place and we plan to stay there for me. 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 changed. crisper get in the shower. her skin turned bright red i think was ninety six in her her skin it was it was burning fire she was well steve began to develop symptoms as well i feel dizzy. i get well in those 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 chewer terri tumor and she developed a rare neurological speech impairment but i thought i thought i got the thing or say well. placed i've had several patients who have. been having symptoms since that time and were exposed to world gas

exploration near their homes these are all people in a small cluster around right. last year you create 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 to our political point the 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 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 the oil and 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 you to get an e.p.a. run ins infrared cameras. turned them towards these oil and gas facilities and under infrared light. the volatile organic conditions were visible. they look like a. mirage. and so one could see in this interview red camera the amount of both

organic carbon coming off these storage tanks. every well it is filled into a straight and it has organic chemicals. all 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 in humans to ethylene oxide and ethylene oxide is of course senator besides the drilling in their immediate neighborhood chris and steve were directly downwind of 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 chris's symptoms were getting worse a 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 made actually start delivering water to us then they came back and told us that your water safe to drink so we started drinking the water. 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 good dose of the war

again it comes from the shower water will be several times their dose you would have gotten from the drinking water after we started drinking. it put a glass of water over and there was a little oil. 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 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 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 have seen the same thing in their neighborhood in rifle i think almost all of our neighbors have . people that occupy their houses now. people who work for the world. there's a growing resistance on the part of people who live in the path of drilling.

and. see that living with this development has affected their 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 one area. that 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 to desire to protect the land and their citizens. in june of two thousand and seven usually 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. 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. response there is 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 going to push very hard with secretary kempthorne and me asking 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 a 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 the leases anyway our goal is ciro incidence and zero impact on the environment and . we're not there obviously. we do have injuries we do have. what we try and prevent them or do the best that we can assign a market interest and often across the road anywhere i mean you know that's not how it's not in my dangerous as natural gas we're not out on oil or oil spills or natural gas wells farming are dangerous. today's hearing will examine lupul xin 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 learned 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 is what you traditionally just for are we not doing enough basic research and syria 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 bill 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 going to hear some. of these man's whom are coming to you know you want to

honor their. house bill thirty forty one maybe one of the most significant things that we accomplished and this legislative session it reorganized the current oil and gas that's a fish commission we believe it brings a better balance to the commission so that's not dominated by any one interest group we're going to be responsible as we move forward going to be mindful of the impact is the number of drilling applications climb as the number of effect from plates climb as well. half of the state of colorado or more sense about the gas pairings 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 the people of this state i hope the people estate look at the fact that today we have a whole supply 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 three hundred sixty thousand wells sixty thousand wells put in said to. williams i'm going to have to respect. it purchase your project. or start looking over your back to like. you'd like to know that. we experienced. it you know it radio. over record our person this week you performed i don't know if you were the best year ever and thank you for your great . 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 are 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 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 gas and the neo sees but also to do something with that water. when they capture these hazardous substances they council 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 one or two lives in this it does serve the country through alternative energy we all use energy we all know we need energy there are a lot better ways we could do energy and i'd like to see us 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 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 why didn't you do it.

susanka good sound to stand. in cause a phone. do fun. to be stand. in the car come up. to you. to come to. listen because the sun's full. love. to say. these night good sun to reach out. beyond our confidence you do not. live in a strong. suit. it

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