with a much stronger or no holds barred look at the global financial headlines cause report . this is assays we clear of you the headline. sarkozy all earned the tough race for the top job in france goes into a second round with official results now showing an equal partner see just one and a hot percent behind his main rival the turnout has been unexpectedly high despite fears be electrodes might ignore the vote at a time of record unemployment and faltering economy. you are security council has agreed on a resolution just out of three hundred observers to see grid to monitor the french troops in the country despite the unanimous fire some remain skeptical or could we call the spine of europe thrusting to adopt fresh sanctions against damascus.

also paul brain has the controversial formula one grand prix motto rates are king a new wave of public protests against the regime clashes between demonstrators and security forces continues for the week with a brutal crackdown by pleas leaving a one dead. and thirty minutes that the great global expansion in june and a song premiered his own into the show on r.c. this week and giving voice to those ostracized by the mainstream media they show us part of ranger reaction from cranes to hysteria. and right now the people of rocky mountain west hope to safeguard their civil liberties and health with energy companies trying to drill in their own backyards talk to our special report still to extend its state is next cannot see. 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 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. gets a lot of people in this room with contamination and pollution issues so who then is responsible to me for the out at 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. underground the drilling breached their water well causing their drinking water to fill with gray sediment and fiz like soda pop. in colorado oil and gas conservation commission tested the water

well and found methane. said it was safe but they warned the amasis to keep a window open so the methane gas wouldn't build up here 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 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. 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 over the trampoline in spite of her well explosion and fire he hofmeister his stage in her house surrounded by her children and grandchildren. is kinda helps me gives me a little more steadiness and so i can grab something you know they were doing ok as long as they were exam that weren't there and i was as a working while you still go out with smiles and that i just couldn't be outside it wasn't in the house. then they brought in the temporary rig because they're having problems with one of the holes i think and then that's now started up again as they

were doing a 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 you know. flaring with gas and i have much more so after the fire whatever was there are just burned and came right at me you know it was like somebody had just found chemicals on me finally i couldn't stand it anymore and monday my husband took me into the bargain same hospital i did yeah. anyway thank you had someone very. yeah they've been pretty sick they've had asthma girls. faction. blames 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 as there was in irritation irritation in blistering sinuses as coughing and then this effect called sensitizing and she's good 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 child lynched 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 and as vice president he was pressuring the

administrators of b.p. 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 that he 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 the

american public in this position we cannot know but the industry injects in our land we it is exempt from being reported. down the colorado river about nine miles to the west of silt is the town of rifle. i came from. this is one of the one of the. this is before. any problems before we are

right this is right in that three i want to marry like a hundred years. it's been the worst fifteen years and i'm fifty four she's fifty nine. there's. a tradition. in one thousand nine hundred ninety three chris and steve moore goldie 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 cruz. in one thousand nine hundred five they bought their dream house a fixer upper in a rural neighborhood outside rifle we're very 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. everything changed. crisper given the shower. her still turn bright red i think. it hurt her skin it was it was burning virus she was well steve began to develop symptoms as well i feel dizzy. i give her the nose 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 true terri tumor and she developed a rare neurological speech impairment but i think i got the same although say. first i've had several patients who have.

been having symptoms since the time they were exposed to the oil and 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 that to our political point supervisors they canceled 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 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 both organic carbon how much volatile gases come from the industry especially from storage for oil or storage of gas. last summer in an effort to track down how much wealth organic carbon was coming from oil and gas industry a unique study was undertaken by uva and e.p.a. infrared cameras. and turned them towards these oil and gas facilities and under infrared light. the volt are getting commissions were visible. they look

like a. mirage. and so one could see in this interview red camera the amount of all the organic carbon coming off these storage tanks. every well is thrilled into a strange 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 of stuff which is quite dry those materials are out 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 christen steve are you drunk

leave 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 and water well near the mobile these was blown out and contaminated by drilling. according to state records on september fifteenth one thousand nine hundred ninety seven barrett resources the last well control 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 the 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 you would go through the organic compounds from the the shower water will be several times that those you would have gotten from the drinking water after we started drinking. water. there was 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 hollow 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 had seen the same thing in their neighborhood in rifle i think almost all of our neighbors have . people that occupy their houses now or people that work for the world. there's a growing resistance on the part of people who live in the past to. say

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 the 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 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 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 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 it was leased nearly fifteen thousand citizens sent protest letters to the bureau found the protests to be without merit and issued leases anyway our goal was to zero incidents and zero impact on the environment down there. were not there obviously. we do have injuries we do have. what we try and prevent them or we do the best we can signing archangels them off across the road anywhere i mean you know it's not it's not a more dangerous as natural gas or an oil or oil spills or natural gas wells from them 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 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 just 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 landowners in colorado a new mexico new legislation was passed and 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 in 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

live in boise. and this way has been mired to you know you. saw her. house go thirty forty one maybe one of the most significant things that we accomplished and 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 applications trine as a member of the pack complaints i'm as well. half of the state of colorado or more sense about the gas barons 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 listening look at the fact that today we have to fight bells and wells have been drilled that's just in the northwestern area and if you look down the road fifteen years and you start contemplating sixty thousand wells sixty thousand volts. well you're going to have to respectfully decline to participate in your project. or struggle over here but feel like. you'd like to know that. we transfer. did you know it radio. over. this if you care for it at all or if you wish you the best

year ever and that they are you there 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 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 the technology is available for industry to comply with all these mines 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 gaston's and b o c s 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 data on the population and that requires again money a plan you know and doing. this work on alternatives 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 is 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 there 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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