Clean Water, Courtesy of the Feds
June 19th, 2007 at 11:00 am
No thanks to the state agencies that are supposed to safeguard water supplies, residents in the small East Texas towns of Bethany and DeBerry are finally on their way to getting clean drinking water. For years, they’ve been fighting a bureaucratic battle with every agency under the sun, trying to convince officials that an abandoned oilfield waste injection well has contaminated their water for the better part of a decade. Recently, Environmental Protection Agency officials confirmed that groundwater in the area is contaminated, and the federal agency will pay to install a main water line, reported the Shreveport Times.
While this one town is hopefully on the path to relief, similar environmental disasters from these injection wells are hardly rare. Last year, the Observer catalogued numerous towns where problems with wells were exacerbated by a lack of substantial oversight by the Texas Railroad Commission:
[Homeowners] share the same problem. Their properties border a proposed injection well that could pump hundreds of thousands of gallons a day of oilfield waste into the ground. This waste, known in the industry as “production water,” is mostly oily saltwater used in drilling. But it also contains substances such as waste crude, sludge from storage pits and tank bottoms, used glycol, amine, and hydrogen sulfide scrubber liquid, to name only a few. There are at least 26 acknowledged chemicals in the waste, including such known carcinogens as benzene and one category unhelpfully listed as “other.” … Yet the Railroad Commission doesn’t classify oil and gas waste as hazardous. That means the commission, by Texas law, can place “production water” just about anywhere. These wastes must be disposed of—mostly they end up underground.
The town of DeBerry and it’s long bureaucratic fight received special attention. It is disturbing that the burden of protecting drinking water and environmental responsibility would be left to a few under-resourced residents in a tiny rural town, instead of the state agencies supposedly charged with this oversight.
July 6th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
[…] Clean Water, Courtesy of the FedsTexas Observer - There are at least 26 acknowledged chemicals in the waste, including such known carcinogens as benzene and one category unhelpfully listed as other. Yet the Railroad Commission doesn t classify oil and gas waste as hazardous. That means […]
March 24th, 2008 at 10:35 am
[…] Observer readers know that the three-member commission has a hold on several important levers of power and responsibility, including regulation — […]