live from moscow this is the weekly top stories now the french decide their future with voting in the presidential election well underway early results suggest incumbent because his main rival socialist and old have made it into the second round and decisive one to. the un resolves to deploy three hundred strong observer mission in syria to monitor the front troops there despite or you know in this post in the security council some members are accused of undermining the peace . bahrain's controversial formula one grand prix goes ahead despite widespread protests against the regime and a brutal crackdown by police that's left. tens of thousands have been out in force

demanding immediate and democratic reform. and thirty minutes that gripped global attention premiered his own interview show on t.v. this week giving voice to those ostracized by the mainstream media shows a range of reaction from praise to hysteria. about with more no stories for half an hour from now in the meantime an eye opening examination of the consequences in conflicts that can arise between landowners and untouchable energy companies in the u.s. 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 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 for that that last of my welfare it's not you the gas commission you have a will is next to your residence or 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 fit is 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 amas is to keep a window open so the methane gas wouldn't build up and cause an explosion in their

home if the aim is to 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 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 canada corp. and 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 hofmeister his stage in her house surrounded by her children and grandchildren. is kinda helps me give me a little more study innocent till i can grab something 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 smells and that i just couldn't be outside it wasn't in the house. then they brought in the temporary raid because they're having problems with a lot of holes i think and then the smells started up again as they were doing fracking and all aboard was right over here we had one back fair behind us we had two on the side here that were all working you know. flaring with gas and i have much more of it after the fire whatever was there or 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 hospital to get down. to one grandkids and i'm very. happy. that. yeah they've been pretty sick they've had colds as girls. like 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 in irritation and blistering sinuses as coughing and then this effect called sensitizing and she's good fairly thin

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 the ministry a christie todd whitman to exempt hydraulic fracking from sinking water at 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 a regular. and that led me in the fall of zero four to object on technical grounds then the inspector general of e.p.a. again 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 least you and i as no 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. i am on fast food. this is only living one was. this is before. the problems before with the right this is right and then three when you marry like one hundred years. it's been a worse thirteen years i'm i'm fifty four and she's fifty nine says trains to

sense to. return to traditional right. in one nine hundred ninety three christen 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 might have to get out of california moved 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 boat to dream house a fixer upper in a rural neighborhood outside rifle we have a window with us place and we plan to stay there for. 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 then everything changed. 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 could well he knows 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 chiller terri tumor and she developed a rare neurological speech impairment but i thought i thought i was the same all the same. for. 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 cluster around 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 soon as we got there to our political point the supervisors they cancel that investigation so e.p.a. did not investigate legitimate complaints from sort of zones and garfield county. if you live in or in a rural residential area and you were in a low lying area your house was in the low lying area they could accumulate the

gases when they come off the tank battery and so forth he may be reading 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 wealth organic carbon was coming from the oil and gas industry a unique study was undertaken by you to get an e.p.a. brought in some infrared cameras. turned them towards these oil and gas facilities and under infrared light. the goal toward getting 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 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 of stuff which is quite those materials are at a very very correct rate all 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 ethylene oxide is a car 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 near the mo baldy's 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 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 you no longer there. when the exposure is salt 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 if you absorb it through your skin your dose of the volatile organic compounds from the shower water will be several times the dose

you would have gotten from drinking water after we started thinking. that a glass of water. there was like 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. people who work for the worlds. there's a growing resistance on the part of people who live in the path of drilling.

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. 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 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 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 push very hard with secretary kempthorne that i may ask him to grant the governor the request because it has made attempts. in the summer of two thousand and eight in spite of protests from governor ritter and colorado legislators to 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 at the bureau found the protests to be without merit and issued the leases anyway our goal is ciro incidents and zero impact on the environment and. we're not there obviously. we do have injuries we do have fails. but we try to prevent them and we do the best that we can sign our dangerous than walk across the road and i mean you know it's not how it's not a more dangerous as natural gas or out on oil or oil spills or from natural gas wells arman are dangerous. 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 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 do you know why it takes so long to do the testing. because this isn't 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. to impart to the activism of land owners 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 a success for the energy bill was passed by the house of representatives in two thousand and seven did include additional protections for service errors 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 regulates the industry to ceremony was attended by some of the residents of garfield county i am very sorry. that these may have been wired to you know you want to honor the.

house bill 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've waited for rings a better balance to the commission so that's no not 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 applications climb as the number of effect from plates climb as well. half of the state of colorado or more sets of russian gas bearings 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 that people in this state i hope

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 to play to sixty thousand wells sixty thousand volts what does that do. well you're going to have to respect going. to participate in your project. will start looking over your back feel like. you'd like to know that. we transfer. did you know it radio. over. and over. this make your point i don't know if you went to 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 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 they 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 hazardous substances they can also capture more have 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 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 what's most important is for congress to close these loopholes and to haul the oil and gas industry in 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 the these pollution control equipment and practices on your operation why when you knew that there were sicknesses why didn't you get.

since john could see how to stand up. now in terms of fall. do fun. to do stand. in the car come up. with you where. it comes to camp. on the sun spoil. her love. how to use a. nice night good sun to reach out. to be the no confidence feeling to come. inside. live a strong. suit. and

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