by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 4, 2012 | Agriculture, Toxification
By Pesticide Action Network
Results released today from water sampling across four Midwestern states – Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota – indicate that the endocrine disrupting pesticide atrazine is still being found in drinking water at levels linked to birth defects and low birth weight. Syngenta, one of the world’s largest pesticide corporations, has continued to promote the use of the chemical, despite growing concerns from independent scientists. The US Environmental Protection Agency will weigh these findings as it continues its re-evaluation of the chemical in the coming months.
“These water monitoring results should raise concerns for policymakers, they confirm that atrazine continues to contaminate Midwest drinking water at meaningful levels,” said Emily Marquez, PhD, endocrinologist and staff scientist for Pesticide Action Network. “Endocrine disrupting chemicals like atrazine are hormonally active at vanishingly small amounts. That is why scientists are looking again at atrazine, and that is why the EU set water contamination tolerance levels at 0.1 ppb. EPA’s current legal limit of 3 ppb is 30 times that and much too permissive. The best way to ensure rural communities and farmers are protected is to keep atrazine out of their water entirely.”
In the results released today, atrazine was found in a majority of water samples from Midwestern homes and farms. Atrazine is found more often than any other pesticide in groundwater – 94% of drinking water tested by USDA contains the chemical. The weed killer is the second most widely used pesticides in the U.S., with more than 76 million pounds used last year, mostly on Midwestern corn fields. Atrazine is applied most heavily in Illinois, where applications exceed 85 pounds per square mile.
The results, on average, demonstrate that levels frequently found in drinking water are five times the former legal limit in Europe, and five times the levels associated with adverse health effects, including low birth-weight in babies. Europe’s legal limit was 0.1 ppb before the chemical was banned in 2003. One Illinois sample is above the EPA limit for atrazine in drinking water, and is well above the level associated with significantly increased risk of birth defects.
“Syngenta’s atrazine is linked to irreversible harms like cancer and birth defects. Rural families are on the frontlines of pesticide exposure and we risk contaminating the water of millions of people with the chemical’s continued use,” said Julia Govis, a mother, author of Who’s Poisoning Our Children, and Statewide Program Coordinator of Illinois Farm to School.
As EPA continues its reevaluation of the chemical and plans to release additional findings on atrazine in June, new studies highlight the link between low-level exposure atrazine and adverse human health effects, including cancer and altered development. At the same time, the chemical’s manufacturer, Syngenta, continues to influence scientific analysis of the chemical, downplaying evidence showing that atrazine is harmful.
Last summer, EPA’s independent scientific advisory panel concluded an 18-month review of atrazine’s health and environmental effects. They pointed to “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential” for ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, hairy-cell leukemia, and thyroid cancer.
Unfortunately, EPA has been misled or ignored key findings. Dr. Jason Rohr, a scientist from University of South Florida, took a look at industry-funded reviews of the effects of atrazine on fish and frogs, indicators of impacts on human health, and he found: “The industry-funded review misrepresented more than 50 studies and included 122 inaccurate and 22 misleading statements. Of these inaccurate and misleading statements, 96.5% seem to benefit the makers of atrazine in that they support the safety of the chemical.”
Despite pressure from pesticide maker Syngenta, farmers across the Midwest are demonstrating ways of producing corn and growing food without relying on Syngenta’s atrazine.
“Levels of atrazine in our water raise concerns about the health impacts on farmers and communities like mine. The results underscore the challenges facing many farmers; they are caught in a pesticide trap, and it’s no surprise that they are forced to use more and more pesticides. These results should spur state and federal officials to take action and support farmers as they transition away from Syngenta’s atrazine, towards safe and healthy farming,” said Anita Poeppel, owner of Broad Branch Farm in Central Illinois.
From Pesticide Action Network: http://www.panna.org/press-release/atrazine-found-water-dozens-midwest-communities
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 3, 2012 | Toxification
By Rob Edwards / The Guardian
Hundreds of sites across England and Wales could be contaminated with radioactive waste from old military bases and factories, according to a new government report.
Up to 1,000 sites could be polluted, though the best guess is that between 150 and 250 are, says a report on contaminated land by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), released last month, but previously unreported.
This is far higher than previous official estimates, with evidence from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) last December suggesting that there were just 15 sites in the UK contaminated with radium from old planes and other equipment.
The MoD has come under fire from former prime minister Gordon Brown for trying to evade responsibility for cleaning up the contamination it has caused. His constituency in Fife, north of Edinburgh, includes one of the most notorious examples of radioactive pollution at Dalgety Bay.
In the past year, the MoD has realised that there are others areas of radioactive contamination across the country that may need to be cleaned up, Brown said. “They’ve started to use their lawyers to get out of what is, in the first place, I think, a moral responsibility and in the second place, will become a legal responsibility.”
The MoD has begun a year-long investigation of the contamination at Dalgety Bay to try and avoid it becoming the first place in the UK to be legally designated as radioactive contaminated land. More than 2,500 radioactive hotspots have been found on the foreshore in the past 22 years, one-third of them since last September.
Brown has also criticised the failure to act on a 1958 Cabinet report uncovered by BBC Radio 4’s Face the Facts, to be broadcast at 12.30pm on Wednesday. The previously secret report by a group of radiation experts urged ministers to control the disposal of the radium painted on dials of military planes to make them visible in the dark.
“There may be undesirably high levels of radiation near these dumps,” warned the Cabinet report. “Records of burials and of burial sites should be kept and handed on to future users of the land.”
But this was not done at Dalgety Bay, Brown said. “The truth is that, at that point, someone did know that there was a potential problem. Someone should have then passed it to the Ministry of Defence, and urged them to take the appropriate action.”
Former environment minister Michael Meacher MP said he ordered officials to identify and produce clean-up plans for all the contaminated sites in 1997. “I am astonished and deeply concerned that that does not appear to have happened,” he told the BBC.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/02/radioactive-waste-contaminating-uk-sites
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 3, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Abraham Lustgarten / ProPublica
A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.
More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to the study, which was published in the journal Ground Water two weeks ago. Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well.
Scientists have theorized that impermeable layers of rock would keep the fluid, which contains benzene and other dangerous chemicals, safely locked nearly a mile below water supplies. This view of the earth’s underground geology is a cornerstone of the industry’s argument that fracking poses minimal threats to the environment.
But the study, using computer modeling, concluded that natural faults and fractures in the Marcellus, exacerbated by the effects of fracking itself, could allow chemicals to reach the surface in as little as “just a few years.”
“Simply put, [the rock layers] are not impermeable,” said the study’s author, Tom Myers, an independent hydrogeologist whose clients include the federal government and environmental groups.
“The Marcellus shale is being fracked into a very high permeability,” he said. “Fluids could move from most any injection process.”
The research for the study was paid for by Catskill Mountainkeeper and the Park Foundation, two upstate New York organizations that have opposed gas drilling and fracking in the Marcellus.
Much of the debate about the environmental risks of gas drilling has centered on the risk that spills could pollute surface water or that structural failures would cause wells to leak.
Though some scientists believed it was possible for fracking to contaminate underground water supplies, those risks have been considered secondary. The study in Ground Water is the first peer-reviewed research evaluating this possibility.
The study did not use sampling or case histories to assess contamination risks. Rather, it used software and computer modeling to predict how fracking fluids would move over time. The simulations sought to account for the natural fractures and faults in the underground rock formations and the effects of fracking.
The models predict that fracking will dramatically speed up the movement of chemicals injected into the ground. Fluids traveled distances within 100 years that would take tens of thousands of years under natural conditions. And when the models factored in the Marcellus’ natural faults and fractures, fluids could move 10 times as fast as that.
Where man-made fractures intersect with natural faults, or break out of the Marcellus layer into the stone layer above it, the study found, “contaminants could reach the surface areas in tens of years, or less.”
The study also concluded that the force that fracking exerts does not immediately let up when the process ends. It can take nearly a year to ease.
As a result, chemicals left underground are still being pushed away from the drill site long after drilling is finished. It can take five or six years before the natural balance of pressure in the underground system is fully restored, the study found.
Myers’ research focused exclusively on the Marcellus, but he said his findings may have broader relevance. Many regions where oil and gas is being drilled have more permeable underground environments than the one he analyzed, he said.
“One would have to say that the possible travel times for a similar thing in Arkansas or Northeast Texas is probably faster than what I’ve come up with,” Myers said.
Read more from Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/02/fracking-fluids-aquifers_n_1472355.html?ref=green
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 29, 2012 | Toxification
By Jeanna Bryner / Live Science
An oceanographer who noticed a disappearing act in which the surface of the ocean went from confetti-covered to clear now suggests wind may driving large amounts of trash deeper into the sea.
Oceanographer Giora Proskurowski was sailing in the Pacific Ocean when he saw the small bits of plastic debris disappear beneath the water as soon as the wind picked up.
His research on the theory, with Tobias Kukulka of the University of Delaware, suggests that on average, plastic debris in the ocean may be 2.5 times higher than estimates using surface-water sampling. In high winds, the volume of plastic trash could be underestimated by a factor of 27, the researchers report this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Plastic waste can wreak havoc on an ecosystem, harming fish and other organisms that ingest it, possibly even degrading a fish’s liver; the trashy bits also make nice homes for bacteria and algae that get carried to other areas of the ocean where they could be invasive or cause other problems, the researchers noted.
In 2010, the team collected water samples at various depths in the North Atlantic Ocean. “Almost every subsurface tow we took had plastic in the net,” Proskurowski told LiveScience, adding that they used a specialized tow net that isolated certain layers of the water, so it would only open at a specific depth and close before being pulled up.
Next, they combined the trash tally with wind measurements to come up with a mathematical model, which allowed them to calculate the amount of debris at different depths on average as well as look at how that amount changed with different conditions, such as on a windy day.
They found 2.5 times more debris in the layers of water below the “surface water” (defined as the top 9.8 inches or 25 centimeters) as was found in that surface section. The debris was distributed down to a depth of about 65 to 82 feet (20 to 25 meters).
The findings mean the estimates of plastic litter in the ocean, conducted by skimming the surface water only, may in some cases vastly underestimate the true amount of plastic debris there.
“The scope of the [plastic debris] problem is not just at the very surface but goes down to 20 meters or so, and that plastic is distributed throughout this layer,” Proskurowski said during an interview.
He and his colleagues plan to publish a simplified version of the model so others investigating ocean plastics can use it.
From Live Science: http://www.livescience.com/19940-plastic-trash-oceans-underestimated.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 24, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Earthworks
Today Colleyville and Southlake residents, and Earthworks’ Oil & Gas Accountability Project released results from local residents’ privately-funded air testing of Titan Operations’ “mini-frack” on the border of both communities. The tests, performed by GD Air Testing Inc. of Richardson, TX, prove emissions released during fracking and flowback contain dangerous levels of toxic chemicals.
“We paid for tests because we can’t depend on the city or the fracking industry,” said Colleyville resident Kim Davis. She continued, “The tests confirmed our worst fears, while Colleyville ignored their own tests to let fracking continue. Apparently the city represents Titan and the gas industry instead of local residents.”
Colleyville City ordinances expressly prohibit the release of any gases: “No person shall allow, cause or permit gases to be vented into the atmosphere or to be burned by open flame.”
The community-funded test results, which detected twenty-six chemicals, also showed carbon disulfide, a neurotoxin at twice the state level for short-term exposure. Benzene, a known carcinogen, and Naphthalene, a suspected carcinogen, were both over state long-term exposure levels by more than 9 times and more than 7 times, respectively. Carbonyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide and Pyridine were all detected above safe limits for long-term exposure.
Gordon Aalund, an MD with toxicology training who lives in Southlake and practices emergency medicine said, “Exceeding long and short term exposure limits to these toxics places us all at increased and unneeded risk.” He went on to say, “When your government fails to protect you and the company cannot be trusted, private citizens are forced to act.”
The Colleyville results indirectly confirm the suspicions of Arlington-area residents about air pollution from ongoing Chesapeake Energy fracking and flowback operations in their neighborhood since December 2011. Residents who experienced health impacts were told by Chesapeake that flowback emissions were only “steam”. When challenged to substantiate its claims with public testing, the company failed to respond.
“It’s great that concerned citizens in the Colleyville-area have the wherewithal to pay for their own testing when government fails to do its job. But I live in southeast Arlington, where our community doesn’t have the resources to do government’s job for it,” said Arlington resident Chuck Harper. He continued, “Why isn’t TCEQ doing these tests? If the watchdog isn’t watching, who do we turn to for protection?”
“It’s state and local failures like these that make plain the need to close fracking loopholes in federal environmental laws,” said Earthworks’ Oil & Gas Accountability Project organizer Sharon Wilson. She continued, “When TCEQ can’t be bothered to protect their own citizens, when cities ignore their own laws, when companies lie to communities left, right and center, there’s nowhere else to turn.”
From Earthworks: http://www.earthworksaction.org/media/detail/independent_test_results_show_fracking_flowback_emissions_are_dangerous_tox#When:13:16:19Z
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 23, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, NEWS, Toxification
By Amnesty International
A major oil spill in the Niger Delta was far worse than Shell previously admitted, according to an independent assessment obtained by Amnesty International and the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD), which exposes how the oil giant dramatically under-estimated the quantities involved.
The spill in 2008, caused by a fault in a Shell pipeline, resulted in tens of thousands of barrels of oil polluting the land and creek surrounding Bodo, a Niger Delta town of some 69,000 people.
The previously unpublished assessment, carried out by US firm Accufacts, found that between 1,440 and 4,320 barrels of oil were flooding the Bodo area each day following the leak. The Nigerian regulators have confirmed that the spill lasted for 72 days.
Shell’s official investigation report claims only 1,640 barrels of oil were spilt in total. But based on the independent assessment the total amount of oil spilt over the 72 day period is between 103,000 barrels and 311,000 barrels.
Audrey Gaughran, Director of Global Issues at Amnesty International, said:
“The difference is staggering: even using the lower end of the Accufacts estimate, the volume of oil spilt at Bodo was more than 60 times the volume Shell has repeatedly claimed leaked.
“Even if we use the start date given by Shell, the volume of oil spilt is far greater than Shell recorded.”
Shell’s oil spill investigation report also claims that the spill started on 5 October 2008 – while the community and Nigerian regulators have confirmed a start date of 28 August 2008.
What is not in dispute is that Shell did not stop the spill until 7 November – four weeks after it claims it began – and 10 weeks after the start date given by the community and the regulator.
Converting the amount into litres, Shell’s figure is just over 260,000 litres, while the lowest estimate based on the Accufacts assessment, and using Shell’s start date, would be 7.8 million litres.
However, using the start date given by the community and regulator and the higher end of the estimate, then it is possible that as much as over 49 million litres of oil spilt at Bodo.
The publication of the independent assessment coincides with a global week of action in which people from across the world are calling on Shell to stop hiding from the devastating impact of its operations in the Niger Delta on people’s lives and the environment.
The serious under-recording at Bodo also has wider implications: Shell repeatedly claims to its investors, customers and the media that the majority of the oil spilt in the Niger Delta is caused by sabotage.
The basis for this claim is the oil spill investigation process, which is deeply flawed and lacks credibility. The cause of spills, the volume of oil spilt, and other important parameters like the start date, are not recorded in any credible way.
Bodo is one example but Amnesty International and CEHRD have also exposed serious failings in other oil spill investigations.
Both organisations have repeatedly called for an independent process for investigation of oil spills, and an end to the system that allows oil companies to have such influence over the process.
Shell initially claimed to the media that 85 per cent of oil spilt in the Niger Delta in 2008 was caused by sabotage. The company later admitted that this figure did not include a major oil spill that was subsequently found to be due to operational failures.
Based on the new evidence obtained by Amnesty International and CEHRD about the 2008 Bodo oil spill more than half of the oil spilt in the Niger Delta in 2008 was due to operational failures – and possibly as much as 80 per cent. However, given the serious flaws in the oil spill investigation process, all oil spills would have to be subjected to independent assessment to obtain accurate figures.
Audrey Gaughran said:
“Sabotage is a real and serious problem in the Niger Delta, but Shell misuses the issue as a PR shield and makes claims that simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.”
More than three years after the Bodo oil spill, Shell has yet to conduct a proper clean up or to pay any official compensation to the affected communities. After years of trying to seek justice in Nigeria the people of Bodo have now taken their claim to the UK courts.
Patrick Naagbanton, Coordinator of CEHRD, added:
“The evidence of Shell’s bad practice in the Niger Delta is mounting. Shell seems more interested in conducting a PR operation than a clean-up operation. The problem is not going away; and sadly neither is the misery for the people of Bodo.”
This week thousands of activists in more than 14 countries – from Japan to Sweden, Senegal to the USA, as well as in Shell’s home countries the Netherlands and the United Kingdom – are taking part in events and protests, including outside Shell’s offices and petrol stations, calling on Shell to clean up its act in the Niger Delta.
Amnesty International is also running an online petition calling on Shell’s Chief Executive Peter Vosser to act.
The week will reach a climax when affected communities stage a peaceful demonstration outside Shell’s offices in Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta.
From Amnesty International
Photo by Ellie Storms on Unsplash
