welcome back this is here with a trickle the headline. the u.n. security council has voted unanimously in favor of a resolution to send three hundred observers to syria to monitor the fragile cease fire russia says if the significant step towards peace in the country while the two hours calls for more pressure on assad regime. also there's a media blackout as the french prepared to cause their votes for a new leader in the us round of the presidential election time candidates including nicolas sarkozy are in line for the top job of the country hit by social divisions and record unemployment. and then she hungry china works to secure

a slice of the sometimes mineral resources with the chinese premier on a tour of the in the wooded state. up next part to our special report of the people of america's rocky mountain west to find themselves helpless against a massive natural gas company drilling almost on that all steps. 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 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 or near your residence within the legal

system. and there's a perceived or real impact on your 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 fiz like soda pop. the colorado oil and gas conservation commission tested the water well and found methane but said it was safe but they warned the emesis 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 chewers. 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 can a 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. and. let's go over the trampoline in spite of her well explosion and fire de hofmeister his stage in her house surrounded by her children and grandchildren. was 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 and that weren't there and i was working well and you still got with the smells and that my just couldn't go outside it wasn't. 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 as they were doing the fracking and all borders right over here we had one back there behind us we had two on the side here they're all working you know. flaring with gas and i have much more you know after the fire whatever it was they are just burned and came right at me you know it was like somebody had just. chemicals on me finally i couldn't stand it anymore and monday and my husband took me to them urgency from hospital to get down. the one

guy gives of one. oh. yeah they've been pretty sick they've had colds as girls so i'm going to. 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 of possible health effects it's always in irritation taishan blistering sinuses as coughing and then this effect will sensitizing itchy skin early 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 challenged by a thirty year e.p.a. environmental engineer western wilson acting under protected whistleblower status the former chairman c.e.o. of halliburton the 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 safe drinking water act regulations 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 a regular. and that led me in the fall of zero four to object on technical

grounds then the inspector general of the again investigation of my complaints. and several months into the. congress took the report from e.p.a. saying that fracking not present a risk. along with other information and exempted hydraulic fracking from regulation on the safe drinking water act that leaves you and i as an american public in this position we cannot know what the industry injects in our land. it is exempt from the record.

down the colorado river about nine miles to the west of silt is the town of rifle. fully. employed and. this is only the one with. this is before. the problems before with the rifle this is right in that three when you marry like a hundred years. it's been the worst fifteen years. i'm fifty four says fifty nine sustains two sons to. just return to tradition. in one thousand nine hundred three chris and steve move all they 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 ninety ninety five they bought their dream house a fixer upper in a rural neighborhood outside rifle. 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. or even trying. crisper get in the shower. her skin turned bright red i think. 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 get well he knows as 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 also think both say the. first half and i thought several patients who have. been. having symptoms since that time were exposed to world gas exploration near their homes these are all people in a small cluster around right. 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 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 soon as we got that through our political appointee supervisors they canceled that investigation so e.p.a. did not investigate of the gentleman complaints from citizens and garfield county. if you live in or in a rural residential area and you're 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 stories of gas. last summer in an effort to track down how much fault organic carbon was coming from the oil and gas industry a unique study was undertaken by u.p.a. and e.p.a. in some infrared cameras. and 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 in pretty good red 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 are bad very 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 a carcinogen 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 chris's symptoms were getting worse a water will 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 companies. 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 water pathway people are usually given an alternate drinking water supply if 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 your dose of the valar organic. 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 a little oil. in desperation chris and steve moved to grand junction

colorado abandoning their home and a place that had been there during. just. you know. those 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 have seen the same thing in their neighborhood in rifle i think almost all of our neighbors have . people that occupy their houses. people who work for the world.

there's a growing resistance on the part of people who live in the path of dream and. see that living with this development has affected our lives in nearly every way imaginable with no 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 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. overland 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 and 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 parts 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. 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 pushed very hard with secretary kempthorne am i asking to grant the governor the request because it 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 was ciro incidents and zero impact on the environment and that. were not there obviously. we do have injuries we do

have. but we try and prevent them or we do the best we can sign a more dangerous than off across the road anywhere i mean you know that's not how it's not in my dangerous it's natural gas from out an oil or oil spills or some natural gas well from a more dangerous. today's hearing will examine loopholes in the 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 isn't what you traditionally test for or are we not doing enough basic research in this area we are not there slipping through are seeking that 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 and colorado when you 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 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 live in boise. and these may have to fire you already or it's over there. still 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 now 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 advocates this time as a member of the pack complaints climb as well. half of the state of colorado or more sits above the gas barriers 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. and i hope the people of the state i hope the people let's take a 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 to pay to sixty thousand wells sixty thousand wells what is

a do. williams but after every practically client you participate in your project. struggle to. feel like. you'd like to know that. we transfer. did you know at radio shack over there a corner of interest in this particular corridor i don't know if you were the best ever and thank you but right. 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 one thousand 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. technology is available for industry to comply with all these lines and to conduct their business in a much cleaner 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 gases addio seize but also to do something with that water. rene traps are these hazardous substances carry a constant capture more of their saleable product we need data and we need

data on animals we need data on humans we gave up on the population and that requires again money a plan you know and doing. this for one or two lives 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 us move towards a clean energy future what's most important is for congress to close these loopholes and to haul the whiling ass industry into seeing standards as other industries if the industry way fifteen years down the road here and he was 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 you know why didn't you do it. susanka could stand to stand up. now can cause a fall. to fun. to be stand. in the car come up hug. me do good. to come to. this in

front of the sun is full of. love. to say. these night good sun to reach out. beyond the confidence to come. inside. with a strong. suit. wealthy

british style. time. market finance scandals find out what's really happening to the global economy with mikes concert for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into khan's report.