Marc Glass Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Lawsuit Alleges Union Carbide Failed To Report Toxic Landfill

On a recent sticky July afternoon, Diana Green stands on the muddy bank of lower Davis Creek in South Charleston, West Virginia.

As a child, she enjoyed wading in the nearly 10-mile-long stream in search of crayfish and salamanders. As an adult, Green set down roots there, purchasing a farm that backs up to the creek. Seeing the waterway choked with trash and pollution, Green helped form a small community-based watershed group in the 1990s. The Davis Creek Watershed Association has been dedicated to improving the environmental quality of the watershed, and 25 years later, she says they have largely succeeded. Several different fish species, from skipjack to bass live in the stream.

But these waters have also been shaped by the Kanawha Valley’s deep connection to the nearby chemical industry.

The creek backs up against land owned by Union Carbide Corp., a corporate monolith that has for decades provided a solid living for thousands of area residents, investing in the region and its workers.

Now, the company’s goodwill is being challenged by new information unearthed in a series of lawsuits by a corporate landowner. A lawsuit filed by the Courtland Co., a private, West Virginia-based landholding firm that owns property near Davis Creek, alleges Union Carbide has for decades knowingly leaked potentially toxic pollutants into the waters of Davis Creek.

Union Carbide, purchased by Dow Chemical Co. in 2001, insists in court filings that there is “no evidence to support that UCC is currently endangering the public and adversely impacting public resources.”

The company declined to answer a list of detailed questions. In an emailed statement it said: “Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) is aware of the complaints by Courtland Company. UCC denies all claims asserted against it by Courtland and will continue to vigorously defend itself. As this is ongoing litigation, UCC will not comment further at this time.”

Michael Callaghan, the attorney representing Courtland, vehemently disagrees with the company’s assessment. Callaghan is a former assistant U.S. attorney and secretary of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.

“I’ve been doing environmental law in some form or fashion for 30 years, and I have never seen anything like this,” he said. “To walk away from a liability and just leave it on the ground is outrageous.”

I've been doing environmental law in some form or fashion for 30 years, and I have never seen anything like this – Michael Callaghan, attorney

Landfill Revealed

In August 2018, Courtland filed its first lawsuit against Union Carbide. A year earlier, the company conducted some environmental sampling on its property and found elevated levels of pollutants such as arsenic, barium, cadmium, lead and selenium. In the lawsuit, the company asserts the contamination came from the nearby Tech Center, which was Carbide’s research and development hub for decades.

In the suit, Courtland asked Union Carbide and Dow to investigate and clean up the contamination.

“I would call that a garden variety environment case. Just a straightforward case of your neighbor pollutes on you and we need to solve that problem,” Callaghan said. “Well, the case took quite a strange twist.”

Near the end of an October 2019 deposition, Jerome Cibrik, remediation leader at Union Carbide, revealed that “another UCC facility” in “this general area north of the tracks” was causing contamination in some monitoring wells. The tracks are part of a rail yard, sometimes called the Massey rail yard or coal yard, also owned by Union Carbide.

A screenshot of part of Jerome Cibrik’s deposition.

When asked what was disposed of in the site Cirbik said, “We don’t have good records of what was in there.” He then identified DYNEL, a polyester fiber material, as a substance that was specifically disposed of at the Filmont site.

“We had found some limited files that deal with this facility and they mentioned disposal, mainly nonhazardous materials and DYNEL,” he said. “That’s about all we know for sure what went there from the South Charleston facility.”

DYNEL is a textile fiber with a fur-like texture and appearance that was developed in the late 1940s. It’s made from vinyl chloride and acrylonitrile. It was produced at the South Charleston plant until 1975.

Cibrik noted the landfill operated at least during the 1970s and 1980s. Other documentation shows it likely began operating in the 1950s. When asked if the site was built in compliance with federal environmental law, specifically the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, or RCRA, he said no.

The complicated law, passed by Congress in 1976, created a framework for the proper management of hazardous and non-hazardous waste.

“I do not believe so and it is not subject to those regulations,” he said. “There is also evidence hazardous waste went into it.”

Cibrik called the area the “Filmont Landfill.”

Documentation Search

In December 2019, Courtland filed a second lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, this time focused on the Filmont Landfill. The complaint alleges hazardous, toxic chemicals from both the rail yard and landfill are leaching into the soil, groundwater and surface water and contaminating both their property and running into Davis Creek.

That includes arsenic, 1,4- dioxane, multiple types of ethers, benzene, chloroform and vinyl chloride, which have been measured in groundwater on the site in excess of federally established screening levels, and in some cases dozens of times above federal drinking water limits set by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Sampling done in 2011 by Union Carbide in wells installed across Davis Creek from the Filmont site showed levels of 1,4-dioxane — a synthetic industrial chemical and likely human carcinogen according to EPA — at levels 177 times above the screening level.

Courtland has largely used the land to store vehicles and other materials, and argues it’s impossible it created the contamination. In court documents, the company asserts the underground channels through which groundwater from the Filmont site and rail yard flow are connected to Davis Creek. Lawyers for the company argue if pollution from the landfill has migrated onto Courtland’s property, then it could easily be migrating into other places, such as a nearby residential neighborhood.

But the full extent of what could be going on remains hidden. The bulk of the monitoring data and information about this landfill remains under a protective order asked for by Union Carbide. West Virginia Public Broadcasting has joined Green and some members of the Davis Creek Watershed Association in asking the judge to make the records public, given the possible public health and safety ramifications of the dumping. The judge is currently considering unsealing about two dozen documents.

A Mystery Landfill

The Filmont Landfill is located adjacent to the West Virginia Regional Technology Park, formerly owned by Union Carbide. Constructed in 1949, the sprawling campus was often referred to as the Tech Center. Scientists there were responsible for some of the most innovative breakthroughs in chemical technology in modern history.

“The Tech Center was a world-class place with world-class scientists,” said Gary Brown, a retired Tech Center employee who worked there from 1969 until 2001 when Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide.

The Tech Center, like Carbide’s other two facilities in the Valley — the South Charleston and Institute plants — were constructed largely before the passage of most modern environmental laws.

When Brown first arrived in the Valley in the late 1960s, he recalled, he couldn’t hang his clothes outside to dry without them being covered with soot. The passage of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Toxic Substances Control Act and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act fundamentally changed the way companies could dispose of waste.

“The world changed for sure,” he said. “At one time I think people and companies looked at a river and they said ‘well, that’s a good way we can dump our waste in the river and it’ll disappear.”

Beginning in 1999, Union Carbide began working with the EPA to clean up hazardous waste within the 574-acre Tech Center, due to legal obligations under RCRA.

The company identified 70 different areas that contained waste, including three inactive landfills that until 1973 accepted coal ash slurry from the power plant at the Tech Center, municipal sludge from the South Charleston wastewater treatment plant, and some waste from Carbide’s South Charleston facility.

A 2005 investigation at the Tech Center found the landfills were contaminating groundwater with levels of arsenic and barium that, if consumed, could harm human health. Under the “corrective action,” which was finalized in 2010, Carbide was required to monitor groundwater across the Tech Center property.

The West Virginia Regional Technology Park located in South Charleston, West Virginia.

The Filmont Landfill, the dump site Courtland claims in the lawsuit is contaminated with multiple toxic pollutants, does not appear in any of the Tech Center documentation. But four EPA documents from the late 1970s and early 1980s describe some of what was dumped on the site.

According to a report filed in March 1979 by EPA’s National Enforcement Investigations Center, Union Carbide employees reported solid waste from the company’s South Charleston facility, including “lumber, paper, scrap polymer, etc” were disposed of in the Filmont Landfill.

An EPA document from 1984 states the Filmont Landfill received industrial grit processed by the South Charleston Sewage Treatment Company, a subsidiary of Union Carbide, which operated the wastewater plant owned by the City of South Charleston. The plant treated both municipal and industrial waste, including from Carbide’s South Charleston plant.

Another document notes drums were both dumped and buried on the site, which is listed as 20 acres in size.

A search of EPA’s RCRA database shows no record that the Filmont landfill was granted a permit. A spokesperson for the agency said in an email, “To the best of our knowledge there is/was no RCRA (hazardous waste) regulated landfill named Filmont in South Charleston, WV.”

West Virginia Public Broadcasting has filed a Freedom of Information Act Request with the WVDEP and is awaiting a response. Record requests filed by Courtland’s lawyers to both EPA and WVDEP have not returned any information.

South Charleston Wells

While much of the information and data about the Filmont Landfill remains sealed, public records obtained from the City of South Charleston offer a window into the scope of the contamination.

In late 2009, emails show Union Carbide and a consulting firm that handles the bulk of environmental monitoring and compliance at the Tech Center site reached out to the City of South Charleston asking for an agreement to access city property to install two monitoring wells on the other side of Davis Creek from the Filmont Landfill.

In a Nov. 18, 2009 email, Paul Weber, with CH2M Hill Environmental Services, a contractor for Union Carbide, wrote to Steve DeBarr, general manager of the City of South Charleston Sanitary Board, proposing the company install temporary wells on city property.

“UCC has investigated the groundwater contamination at the Filmont Landfill up to their property boundary, which is adjacent to Davis Creek,” Weber said. “The downgradient extent of contamination has not been defined by these previous investigations. Although UCC does not expect the contamination to extend beyond Davis Creek, UCC would like to install these two temporary monitoring wells on the other side of Davis Creek to confirm this expectation.”

In July 2010, as the city was mulling over Carbide’s request, Cibrik, the head of remediation for Carbide, sent Michael Moore, attorney for the City of South Charleston, a list of figures that show “what constituents were found in groundwater at our Filmont site.”

He notes metals, semi-volatile organic compounds and volatile organic compounds were all identified within the 10 monitoring wells, adding “metals often exceed regulatory levels at natural background concentrations.”

It would take until the summer of 2011 before Union Carbide and the city would finalize an agreement for the company to drill the two wells west of Davis Creek, one on city property.

Carbide and the city also developed a background information and potential frequently asked questions document to address questions about the drilling and well monitoring.

The wells were drilled on Sept. 6, 2011. In October, Cibrik asked for a meeting with DeBarr and Moore to discuss the results of sampling conducted at the wells. The wells were sampled twice, once in September and again in October. Results showed levels of arsenic, dioxane and lead at levels above EPA standards. Arsenic is a known carcinogen. Dioxane is an ether and likely carcinogenic, according to the EPA. The data also showed 1,4-dioxane appeared to have migrated past the creek.

Following that meeting, Carbide asked the City of South Charleston for a second agreement to install a third well. On May 4, 2012, Cibrik emailed DeBarr and Moore noting the new well had been sampled twice and showed no concerning results. Cibrik characterized the bulk of the data as “good news,” noting that the groundwater flow did not appear to be going toward the nearby residential neighborhood.

When reached by phone recently, DeBarr said it was his understanding at the time, based on data provided and interpreted by Union Carbide, that the Filmont site did not pose a problem or threat to property or residents in South Charleston.

“I don’t have the expertise to say anything contrary to what they told me,” he said.

DeBarr said after 2012 the City of South Charleston did not receive any further data from the monitoring wells.

‘Significant Contamination’

Marc Glass, a principal researcher in charge of evaluation and remediation of environmental contamination in soil and water for the Morgantown-based environmental consulting firm Downstream Strategies, said the limited data available in the case does seem to indicate pollution from the Filmont Landfill appears to have left the site, especially dioxane and some chlorinated solvents.

“There’s really significant contamination there of some nasty things right at the property boundary, and it’s on the other side of Davis Creek,” he said.

Even if nearby residents aren’t using the groundwater, Glass said given the levels of contamination observed in these wells it’s possible the pollutants could rise up through the surface in vapor from and collect inside buildings.

There's really significant contamination there of some nasty things right at the property boundary, and it's on the other side of Davis Creek – Marc Glass, Downstream Strategies

Bill Muno is the former head of the Superfund program for EPA’s Region 5 and at one time oversaw the region’s RCRA program. After RCRA’s passage, Muno said anyone who generated, transported or disposed of hazardous waste was required to register with EPA.

“If the landfill was operated after November of 1980, and Union Carbide wanted to continue to operate it, it would have had to file a [RCRA] Part A permit application,” he said.

Muno said if the landfill wasn’t in use when RCRA went into effect, and it poses a threat to the health and safety of the public or environment, Union Carbide would be still responsible for taking care of the problem either on its own or through the Superfund program.

Glass agrees.

“If you dispose of hazardous waste or place hazardous waste or even store hazardous waste for a period of time — over 90 days under the law — then you have obligations under RCRA because you’re responsible for that waste material,” he said.

He said more investigation by the company as well as state and federal regulators is warranted.

“We already have enough information, even in 2012, to say we should expect there to be contamination distributed either more deeply or more widely,” Glass said.

A road sign at the WV Regional Tech Park.

Callaghan, the attorney representing Courtland, has asked the judge overseeing the case to take immediate action to address the Filmont site.

“Part of what the lawsuit is looking to do is to protect, first of all the interests of my client, but secondly, the public [and] the public space exposed to these chemicals,” he said. “The public needs to know the nature and extent of this exposure so we can determine what kind of human health risk exists.”

As the cases move forward in court and more specifics come to light, Diana Green with the Davis Creek Watershed Association, hopes the Filmont site can be cleaned up.

Standing on the bank of the creek, surrounded by lush foliage, she lets out a heavy sigh.

“I think we’re all concerned about having all the truth of every situation that involves our watershed,” Green says. “You look all around and it’s beautiful, green and you can’t picture what’s going on below the surface.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide. It was 2001 not 2011.

W.Va. Continues to Wrestle with Radioactive Drilling Waste

In the growing wake of the natural gas boom, West Virginia has been trying to figure out what exactly to do with waste generated by the oil and gas industry.

The waste presents unique challenges because there’s so much of it, and because it’s often laced with some pretty toxic stuff. The answer by and large is to bury the solid waste in municipal landfills – the same landfills that accept our household trash. A recent study conducted by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection says the practice is safe, for the most part. But many people are skeptical and worried about what’s going to happen in the long term.

A few weeks ago I drove up along Cider Run road to the entrance of the Wetzel County landfill and pulled over.

You can’t drive in unless you’re just dropping a load off, and the company that operates this facility didn’t respond to my requests to enter and have a look around. Save for the sign and the weigh station, it really just looks like any other back holler in West Virginia. The single lane road to the landfill follows a creek along a valley between forested hills that curve steeply up and away.

Wetzel County Solid Waste Authority member, Bill Hughes, was with me. He also hasn’t been allowed into the facility, but he’s spent time at the entrance monitoring traffic.

Hughes is a grandfather-of-nine who’s lived in the area for over 40 years. He’s been lobbying lawmakers and writing opinion pieces questioning the safety of how natural gas companies go about drilling and what they do with waste.

“The yellow goal posts that you’re seeing,” Hughes said pointing to the weigh station at the entrance of the landfill, “those are referred to as Ludlum detectors and they are looking for radiation.”

Radioactive Waste

Landfills that accept drill cuttings are required to have radioactivity detectors because waste rock and mud pulled from rock formations deep in the ground is often laced with radioactive materials.

But Hughes and other people are worried that radioactive waste is getting into their landfill in spite of the detectors, and possibly leaching out. In response to concerns about the drilling waste, the legislature asked the DEP to commission a study. That study was released earlier this year.

“The research ‘found little concern’” DEP said, “regarding leachate associated with ‘drill cuttings that were placed in approved landfills.”

But it also found that the leachate is toxic, and that it does contain radioactive material.

“It’s clear that the discharge concentrations of several of the parameters are exceeding what the state water quality limits are,” said the director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute, Paul Ziemkievicz, who took a closer look at the DEP study. “But remember these leachates are not going directly into the waters of the United States.”

Dilution Solution

The radioactive material doesn’t go directly into groundwater or rivers, because there are multiple liners around the landfill. The liquid collects in those liners and is pumped out. It’s usually taken to a wastewater treatment facility. But the treatment facilities are not designed to accept industrial wastes. They’re owned by local governments and are the same places that treat sewage and other municipal wastewaters … waters which are then discharged into rivers. The DEP’s study demonstrates that these facilities are currently diluting the leachate to safe drinking water quality standards.

But some people are still worried.

“I want to refrain from being alarmist, but I will say that much of the data are alarming,” said Marc Glass, a remediation specialists who works for the Morgantown-based environmental consulting firm, Downstream Strategies.

“The amount of environmental contaminant that we’re generating,” Glass said, “we’re taking from a place that’s safely sequestered in the earth and mixing them in our environment on a large scale.”

Concentrating NORM

There are several different constituents in the waste that you might not want to tango with, among them is what’s called Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material or NORM.

According to the World Nuclear Association, NORM is basically everywhere at low levels. It’s not like gamma radiation which can penetrate steel walls. NORMs are mostly particles that are unlikely to penetrate most any hard surface – even skin can be an effective barrier. This type of radioactive material is really only a harmful, cancer-causing agent if ingested – as in breathed in or swallowed.

Water experts like Ziemkievicz are not overly concerned about current levels of radioactive waste being discharged into the environment, but they ARE worried about the long-term implications of current practices.

“With radioactivity you’re always concerned about accumulation,” Ziemkievicz said, “not the immediate concentration you might be getting out of an effluent.”

Other experts are also concerned about accumulation, especially given the amount of waste we could conceivably generate over the next 30 years or more. Glass, over at Downstream Strategies, believes the DEP leachate study miscalculated how much waste will be produced in the future. About 16 hundred wells exist today, but about 4000 have been permitted. DEP anticipates another 5,000 to 15,000 wells are yet to be drilled.

“Even if we made conservative assumptions,” Glass said, “my best guess based on the sources [the DEP] cite, we should be looking at maybe even 70,000 or 100,000 Marcellus shale well equivalents of what we will be disposing of in the next 20 to 50 years.”

Conclusions

Glass says the DEP’s study indicates that West Virginia needs to reevaluate how we’re treating the leachate from landfill because it’s not effective, and he says we should expect that problem to get much worse as the scale of drilling increases.

The DEP is recommending improved monitoring of leachate, groundwater and even water wells around landfills, but some groups don’t think the state can be trusted to handle the problem. The National Resources Defense Council and the West Virginia Surface Owners Association, among others, are threatening to sue the federal Environmental Protection Agency to force it to step in.

Gas Well Interaction Can be a Boon to Some, Disaster for Others in West Virginia

When natural gas drillers use extreme pressures to drill and crack rocks thousands of feet underground – when they frack for natural gas, for example – sometimes nearby conventional gas wells will suddenly see production double, or triple.

When drilling processes of a new well affects an already existing one, it’s called well communication. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Sometimes it isn’t.

Swiss Cheese, West Virginia

In West Virginia, over 1,500 horizontal wells exist on some 400 well pads. That’s in addition to roughly 50-thousand conventional wells spread throughout many back yards and hillsides. Then there are another 12,000 wells that are abandoned (many of which were drilled prior to 1929 when the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection started to keep track of such things).

One thing is fairly certain about all of these wells: they are all conduits underground, through the water table. Nowhere is the Swiss cheese that is West Virginia more apparent than in Doddridge County where gas wells new and old are a common as cows.

Abandoned Hiss

Lyndia Ervolina is not an industry expert, but she knows what it’s like to live surrounded by horizontal drilling operations. Not only is the industry moving around Ervolina on wheels, Big Gas has moved in to Ervolina’s yard, literally. It comes from across the street.

“I have a condensate tank up there that they blow off right across the road that they put in when they put the pipeline in. So when it gets blown off into the air it comes to my house,” Ervolina said.

The troubling fact is that the smell of treated gas isn’t the only indicator of air pollution Ervolina worries about. There’s also a noise.

Right next to the condensate tank, an abandoned well that was drilled in the ’60s is making this noise. That sound is gas venting into the air from some underground rock formation. Neither Ervolina nor the DEP knows who is responsible for it. It’s been making this sound for years.

“I came out one day and there were pieces of the thing laying all over the place and it was just pouring gas out, pouring gas out,” she said.

She can’t say for sure what happened to the well. There was some pipeline construction in the immediate vicinity. In the last few years, her area of Doddridge county has seen a lot of fracking, which is when drillers use liquid, sand, and extreme pressure to crack rock thousands of feet underground.

“The casing is gone. It’s completely busted up. So let’s get out of here.”

Ervolina says she already gets so much exposure to gas and pollutants from the condensate tank that she won’t linger around it for long.

Untreated natural gas doesn’t have an odor, but there is actual video footage taken with special filters that clearly reveals this particular well venting gas. Ervolina says when nearby horizontal wells are being fracked, the well hiss is louder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ70MsrM1j0

Well Communication

The phenomenon Ervolina is describing, when one well affects pressure or production of another well, is an example of wells communicating. Research at West Virginia University is just getting underway now at a horizontal gas well in Morgantown to determine if any gas is migrating from the Marcellus shale rock formation there into overlying formations or underground sources of drinking water.

One Morgantown scientist, Marc Glass, says the possibility of migrating liquids and gasses is something scientists have been concerned about for years. Glass is in charge of the Environmental Monitoring and Remediation Program at Downstream Strategies, the Morgantown-based environmental consulting firm. Like Ervolina and other residents, Glass says he’s concerned about potential contamination associated with well communication. He explains that plenty of demonstrations of well communication exist. But he says predicting how wells will communicate is beyond us.

Technology exists today where, just by listening carefully during the fracking process, we can pinpoint where the rocks underground are cracking. It’s called microseismic monitoring. But Glass says it has limitations.

“Microseismic tells you where the fracture has occurred. It does not tell you where the fluid that was required to generate the pressure actually is, was or will be,” Glass said. “It only tells you that there was enough fluid present to create enough pressure to induce a fracture.”

Antero Resources is a gas company doing a lot of horizontal drilling in the state. Antero’s regional vice president and chief administrative officer, Al Schoppe, explained that well communication isn’t always a bad thing. It’s an indicator that an area has been thoroughly “developed,” he said. But it is something Antero operators are also concerned with. Schoppe says mostly, Antero has safety concerns should older equipment in the area give way under greater pressures. He says it’s common for horizontal drillers to map all the wells in the vicinity of their operation. And if they can, his operators try to communicate with any local operators who might be affected by the drilling process.

Unfortunately, there’s no policy or law where they have to also talk to residents in the vicinity.

The DEP confirms there have been at least two incidents where, as a direct result of horizontal drilling activities, conventional gas wells have seen increased pressures. There was an incident in 2012 in Ritchie County. And more recently, after horizontal drilling activity in Ohio, conventional wells were affected on the others de of the Ohio River in West Virginia. DEP says that so long as it doesn’t break equipment, increases in pressure are often a good thing for these conventional gas wells because they see increases in production. But for people living near abandoned wells, it seems more like bad luck.

Plugging Wells

The hissing, broken well at Ervolina’s house is a conduit for underground pollutants into our atmosphere, and the DEP says it should be plugged. That’s essentially when you pour cement into the well. As simple pouring some cement into a hole sounds, DEP officials say the process costs anywhere from $25,000 to more than $50,000 per well. Even by conservative estimates, plugging all the abandoned wells in West Virginia (there are about 12-thousand that we know of) would cost the state $300-million. And experts agree that the abandoned wells are hardly the problem when you consider the 50,000 aging conventional gas wells in the state owned and operated by families and small companies who simply do not have the means to plug their wells. The price tag to plug those wells is $1.25 billion.

From the West Virginia DEP, this map shows the locations of the approximately 11,000 abandoned wells that have been permitted in West Virginia. To meet the “abandoned” criteria, it means that no production data for these wells has been submitted for 12 or more consecutive months.

Blowing a Cement Cork out of the Ground

So while the DEP tries to figure out who is responsible for the abandoned well in Doddridge County, the Ervolinas have to continue to deal with the air pollution. But should they also worry about their water?

Industry advocates claim that liquid communication between wells is so unlikely that no one needs to worry. But many residents are worried and many are living with contaminated water as a direct result of horizontal drilling activity.

Suellen Hill and her husband Dave are surface owners in Harrison County who have been living with the reality of horizontal drilling since 2008. A complicated reverse osmosis water system was installed in their home and every two weeks bottled water is delivered to them after several surface spills contaminated their water well. Their water was not contaminated as a result of well communication.

But they are concerned about the threat of contamination throughout the region from conventional gas wells and water wells being pressurized by drilling operations.

“I don’t want to be a doomsayer, but I think our legislature and all of the agencies have opened a Pandora’s Box of pollution that is really beyond all of our imagination,” Sue Hill said.

These concerns rose after witnessing strange and surprising things happen on their property.

A site of an old South Penn shallow oil well exists on the Hill farm, about a third of a mile from a horizontal well pad. The oil well there is long-retired.

The Hills are standing over what is essentially a large concrete cork that’s about four feet long and about two feet wide with an old metal casing in the middle. During the drilling process at some point there was enough pressure in this old 1910 oil well to blow this cement plug completely out of the ground.

“It was probably drilled around 1910. It had been plugged. I’m not sure what date. And we discovered in about 2010 or 2011 that this plug was actually blown out of the ground.”

It’s a troubling thought because abandoned and conventional wells can be full of carcinogenic toxins. Their casings that cut through the water table, if they are still intact, are not built for pressures applied in horizontal wells. Many experts admit that these potential conduits pose threats to the health of watersheds, air, and the people who exist in the vicinity.

Found Formaldehyde Begs Basic Questions, Expert Says

Marc Glass is a principal researcher in charge of evaluation and remediation of environmental contamination in soil and water for the environmental consulting firm Downstream Strategies. He’s been testing water samples for private residents affected by the Elk River chemical spill. While his results haven’t turned up any traces of formaldehyde, it is something they’ve been testing for.

How long did the Freedom tank leak?

Glass says the MCHM process of breaking down starts pretty quickly. The half-life is approximately 14 days—meaning about half of the chemical compound will have broken down into other products (like formaldehyde and formic acid) in about two-weeks’ time.

“But the more breakdown products you find,” Glass says, “the longer ago it makes you feel the spill started.”

That’s the big question burning in Glass’s mind: What kind of a time frame are we really talking about? Glass says it shouldn’t be difficult to find out. He says it should be a simple matter to reconcile the inventory for Freedom Industries to compare what they purchased to what they sold or used.

“I think we should start looking at that and I think we should start looking at a much longer term than just a few hours or days prior to the spill. I think we should for starters look at maybe a three-year period.”

What are the adverse health effects?

Glass says the Environmental Protection Agency, under the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control, has determined that small exposures to formaldehyde, about one part per million in drinking water, is not expected to cause adverse health effects.

“They further determine that they don’t think that ten parts per million consumed in drinking water for a day, or five parts per million for 10 days is expected to cause any adverse health effects. That’s why the concentration and the amount of time that somebody’s had exposure to that is relevant to assessing the health impacts.”

That’s not the only question Glass has.

What other chemicals should we be testing for?

“I’m also curious about what’s in the soil at the site because this was released from a tank and went across or through soil prior to getting into the Elk River. So maybe there were other contaminants.”

Glass points out that the Freedom site is a storage place that’s had products stored for decades. So accidental spills and releases could be present in the soil. He says if those are present in the soil and you put a solvent like MCHM into the mix, you risk mobilizing contaminants.

“So I’d really like to get a characterization of that site vertically and horizontally to know really what we should be looking for,” Glass says.

Glass says it’s frustrating to have so many unanswered questions when he’s asked by residents if the water is safe. He says basic information key to safeguarding the community is simply out of reach.