Experts Find 30 Trillion Tons of Toxic
Liquid Injected into Earth Poisons Ground Water
By PRESS TV
Jun 24, 2012 - 12:34:39 AM
Experts find 30 trillion tons of toxic liquid
injected into earth poisons ground water
Thu Jun 21, 2012 8:38PM GMT
Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected
more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using
broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.
No
company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers
or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental
officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would
safely entomb the waste for millennia.
There are
growing signs they were mistaken.
Records
from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury
this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending
dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion,
seeping into shallow aquifers that store a
significant portion of the nation's drinking water.
In 2010,
contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park.
Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling
waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the
nation's most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early
1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be
needed to supply Miami's drinking water.
Federal
officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this
dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater
reserves - from which most Americans get their drinking water - remain safe
and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into
the ground.
But in
interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection
is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on
oversight that doesn't always work.
Some experts
see the well failures and leaks discovered so far as signs of broader
problems, raising concerns about how much pollution may be leaking out
undetected. By the time the damage is discovered, they say, it could be
irreversible.
"Are we heading down a path we might regret in the
future?" said Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell University engineering
professor who has been an outspoken critic of claims that wells don't leak.
"Yes." Raw Story
HIGHLIGHTS
"In
10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is
polluted," said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as
a technical expert with the EPA's underground injection program in
Washington. "A lot of people are going to get
sick, and a lot of people may die." syracuse.com
The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, which has primary regulatory authority
over the nation's injection wells, would not discuss specific well failures
identified by ProPublica or make staffers available for interviews. The
agency also declined to answer many questions in writing, though it sent
responses to several. Salon
According
to risk analyses cited in EPA documents, a significant well leak that leads
to water contamination is highly unlikely - on the order of one in a
million. Once waste is underground, though, there are few ways to track how
far it goes, how quickly or where it winds
up. There is plenty of theory, but little data to prove the system works.
Raw Story
FACTS &
FIGURES
There are
more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more
than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the
surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how
many of the sites are leaking. syracuse.com
The boom
in oil and natural gas drilling is deepening the uncertainties, geologists
acknowledge. Drilling produces copious amounts of waste, burdening
regulators and demanding hundreds of additional disposal wells. Those wells
- more holes punched in the ground - are changing the earth's geology,
adding man-made fractures that allow water and waste to flow more freely.
scientificamerican.com
In September 2009, workers for Unit Petroleum Company
discovered oil and gas waste in a roadside ditch in southern Louisiana.
After tracing the fluid to a crack in the casing of a nearby injection
well, operators tested the rest of the well. Only then did they
find another hole - 600 feet down, and just a few hundred feet away from an
aquifer that is a source of drinking water for that part of the state.
Salon
AN/SM
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