Point of view: Poisoning our drinking water

By Anne Marie Garti

NOTE: This PDF shows how hydraulic fracturing — known as fracking’ or ‘fracing’ — works. The state Department of Environmental Conservation has proposed using this method of drilling to get natural gas from the earth in Upstate New York.

Fifteen years ago, hundreds of people attended a hearing about a water filtration plant that the city Department of Environmental Protection was proposing to build in the Jerome Park Reservoir. In response, the city agency altered its scope of work for an environmental impact statement (EIS) to include: (1) new studies on possible sites and (2) a “no filtration” option.

Over the past few months, the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) held six hearings on its scope of work for a supplemental EIS that would enable extensive drilling for natural gas across half the state of New York. But this time the agency that will be doing the EIS — the DEC — may not be listening to the public.

The Department of Enviormental Conservation is mandated by state law to help the industry extract as much oil and gas as possible, as efficiently as possible. And to stop local governments from interfering with oil and gas development, the state has removed almost all “home rule” provisions. This means that towns cannot establish zoning, set-back, noise or other regulations to restrict drilling.

The DEC’s draft scope of work was woefully inadequate. Yet it has put its environmental review on a fast track and expects to have a final impact statement done by next summer.

Hundreds of people came to the hearing I attended upstate, and almost all of them called for either no gas drilling, or very strict regulations. Only a handful of people spoke in favor of drilling. These included institutions and individuals who would reap economic benefits: industry representatives, elected officials and landowners who had leased their land.

There is much at stake in this process, including New York City’s drinking water. Forty- five elected officials, including Riverdale and Kingsbridge’s Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz and state Sen. Eric Schneiderman, asked DEC Commissioner Pete Grannis to hold a hearing in New York City. He refused.

Some people in this city may have a hard time understanding why this issue is important. You may have heard advertisements describing “natural” gas as clean. Upstate New York may seem far away. And you may take your water for granted.

In fact, natural gas is just another fossil fuel, and burning it increases global warming.

Drilling for natural gas is even worse than burning it. It requires millions of gallons of clean water to “frack” each well, and when the wastewater comes back out of the ground, it is extremely toxic. No one really knows how to treat it, or where to put it.

If gas drilling moves forward as proposed, then New York City would have to pay $20 to $30 billion to filter the Catskill/ Delaware water supplies. But a filtration plant cannot remove metals and radioactive materials, like the arsenic and radon that will come up from deep in the earth.

Most of the people who live upstate, both inside and outside of the New York City watershed, also drink unfiltered water. If their springs and wells are contaminated, then they will lose the value of their homes.

It seems like total madness to poison our precious water for fossil fuel, yet that is exactly what our state government is about to enable.

The pollution from gas drilling will not stay upstate; in fact, it will not even stay in New York state. The polluted water will flow in rivers through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware. And it will flow out of your faucet. The polluted air will blow across the hills, through the streets, and into your windows. If the soil upstate is contaminated, then the fruits, vegetables, dairy products and meats that are grown there will be contaminated, too. These products are consumed in markets in the city, across the state and around the world.

Gas drilling is being proposed for half of New York state, and if it is allowed to proceed it will convert rich agricultural land and beautiful recreational areas into vast industrial brown fields. All New Yorkers will pay for the long-term consequences, for by the time the true costs emerge, the oil and gas companies will have made their profits and left the state.

This issue is a test for New York. Have we learned anything from the deregulated financial industry? Have we come to terms with the consequences of our insatiable appetite for energy?

People across the state have to come together to protect our collective resources. And New York City has to do its share. We need to drastically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels — in our apartments, homes, offices, cars and trucks. And we have to figure out how to tap our rivers and oceans, and our offshore winds, for energy.

New York City also has to stop expecting someone else to live with the consequences of our consumption. For when we dig deep into the earth to remove sediments that were deposited hundreds of millions of years ago, we are releasing the heat that used to exist on the earth’s surface. If we keep drilling to maintain our comfort, then we may end up recreating an earth like the one that existed hundreds of millions of years ago, an earth without “higher” forms of life.

Anne Marie Garti, a Van Cortlandt Village resident, is president of the Jerome Park Conservancy.

Point of view is an occasional column open to all readers.

This is part of the January 1, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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