we've learned just flown in video for your media project a free meal gun to our teeth on tom. welcome back you know whether it's you here is a look at the top stories ten candidates face off in the french presidential election with both radical left and right said to make strong gains voting is due to begin at a little over an hour as an arms force and bruising as terry and failed promises leave voters' legs and. u.n. security council he dies in ordering the deployment of a massive observer mission to syria but russia and the u.s. are divided over the details of the move moscow hopes the monitors can oversee procrit peace plan to follow washington warns of we still take unilateral action against the massive. cost of the rain is on high alert to safeguard the formula one grand prix which is racing ahead despite a wave of anti-government protests and

a brutal crackdown that's left one debt tens of thousands are taking to the streets to demand immediate democratic reforms. and a big impact on the small screen the world watches whistleblower joining us on this talk show makes its debut off here on our team giving voice to those ostracized by the mainstream media shows already stirring up a range of global reaction. i was back at the top the hour any time of day you know an examination of the consequences and conflicts that can arise between landowners and energy companies in the united states our special report is coming your way next. 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 silt 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 for that that loss of my welfare it's not you the gas commission you have a will is drilled next to your residence 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. underground the drilling breached their water well causing their drinking water to fill with gray sediment and fizzling so to. the colorado oil and gas conservation commission tested the water well and found methane 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 the 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 on that well or any other months later the oil and gas commission admitted 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 emma can a court. 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 governor on the trampoline in spite of her well explosion and fire hofmeister his stage in her house surrounded by her children and grandchildren. this kind of helps me give me a little more steady innocent till i can grab something and you know they were doing ok as long as the regs on that weren't there and i was just working while you still go out with smiles on that i just couldn't go outside it wasn't a house. then they brought in a temporary rig as they're having problems with one of the holes i think and then the smells started up again as they were doing fracking and all bore 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 i have much more 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 my husband took me to the emergency room at the hospital to get down. i had twenty one grandkids and i'm great. yeah they've been pretty sick and they've had colds as girls are. going to fax. 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 there you see the highest percentage of possible health effects it's always been irritation and irritation in blistering sinuses as coughing and then this effect called 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 stage 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 there cheney within a few months of coming into office and as vice president he was pressuring administrators. christie todd whitman to exempt hydraulic fracking from safety from our regulations my own point of view as

a technician. i just thought it very alarming that he 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 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 leaves you and i as an american public in this position we cannot know what the industry injects in our land we think it is exempt from being reported.

down the colorado river about nine miles to the west of silt is the town of rifle. i am on. business all of the one with. this is before. any problems before with the right this is right in that three women are like a hundred years. it's been there were thirteen years i'm i'm fifty four

she's fifty nine sustains two cents to. this picture which makes. in one nine hundred ninety three christen steve moore balding 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 over colorado where it was beautiful and clean air and clean water they found themselves in garfield county looking for a new home there is chris. in one nine hundred ninety five they bought their dream house a fixer upper in a rural neighborhood outside rifle with very little with a place and we planned. it was shortly after chris and steve moved in the drilling rigs began to appear on some of their neighbors inland and in the surrounding hills

and everything changed. crisper given the shower. her skin turned bright red i think was ninety six. 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 particular terry tumor and she developed a rare neurological speech impairment but i think i think i go through all the same. place i've had several patients who have. been. having symptoms since the time were exposed to world gas

exploration near their homes these are all people in a small cluster of rifle 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 affecting 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 cuz im innocent stands a risk to public drinking water source and that e.p.a. was going to take over the investigation however soon as we got back to our political point supervisors they cancelled that investigation so e.p.a. did not investigate legitimate complaints from citizens in garfield county. if you live in or 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 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 growth organic carbon was coming from the oil and gas industry a unique study was undertaken but you can get an e.p.a. brought in some infrared cameras. turned them towards these oil and gas facilities and under infrared light. the volatile organic commissions were visible. they look like a. mirage. and so one could see in this interview red camera the amount of old

organic carbon coming off these storage tanks. every well is drilled into a straight and that 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 at very very quickly all of those are potentially toxic but we don't know to what extent. many of them are dangerous ethylene for instance it's converted in humans to effing oxide and that is a carcinogen besides the drilling in their immediate neighborhood chris and steve were 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 well near the most 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 drilling the burned clogged gas well the gas companies 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 no longer 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 worry that if you absorb it through your skin your dose of the

volatile organic compounds from the the shower water will be several times the dose you would have gotten from drinking water can we start thinking. that a glass of water over 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. 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. and all the people that occupy the houses now are our people that work for the world. there's a growing resistance on the part of people who live in the path of. saying

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 one area. that is in another area. 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 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 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. 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 it's very hard with secretary kerry for not only asking to grant the governor the request the governor has made attempts. 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 to the bureau found the protests to be without merit and issued the leases anyway our goal is to zero incidence and zero impact on the environment and . we're not there obviously. we do have injuries we do have. but we try to prevent them or do the best we can sign our dangerous them off across the road and i mean you know it's not the it's not a more dangerous as natural gas we're not out on oil or oil spills or the natural gas wells on in our dangerous. days 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 take 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 the energy bill was passed by the house of representatives in two thousand and seven did include additional protections for service 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 it changed 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 sorry. that these may have to hire you know you want me to

honor their. 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 efficacious time as the number of effect complaints time as well. half of the state of colorado or more sits above the gas barriers and on 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 want people to stay hopeful people listening 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 start at the three hundred sixty thousand wells sixty thousand wells it is said to. williams but after respectfully declined to participate in your project. we tried looking over your feel like. you'd like to know that. we transferred. did you know at radio. over point our interest at this point i don't know if there is a strike you went through the best year ever and they read it 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 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. technology is available for industry to comply with all these lines 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 b o c s but also to do something with that water. when they capture these hazardous substances they council cash or 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 and this 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 and that's most important is for congress to close these loopholes and to hold the oil and gas industry in the same standards as other

industries if the industry way fifteen years down the road here in 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.

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