Colorado’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission didn’t want to hear from her, but Nurse Cathy Behr, who works at the Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango, Colorado, had her day in court anyway.
Photo: p1r, Creative Commons, Flickr
Behr spoke out because on April 17, a 150-gallon spill at a BP gas well (BP – $61.20) on Southern Ute tribal land brought in field worker Clinton Marshall, who reportedly reeked of chemical contamination. The well in question was Unit AF No. 1 well, which lies west of the Los Pinos River approximately 1.5 miles south of Bayfield. The well was being operated by Weatherford International Ltd. (WFT – $38.34), a gas and oil recovery firm.
Behr treated the man who had been exposed for a mere 10 minutes to a compound Weatherford later identified as ZetaFlow, used in gas well fracturing operations. Fracturing, or frac’ing a well involves injecting fluids under high pressure into a well bore to crack the rock and make the gas flow.
Shortly after treating Marshall, Behr herself fell ill. Within a matter of days, her heart, liver and lungs began to fail, and she spent 30 hours in intensive care with doctors trying simultaneously to keep her alive and identify the source of the poisoning.
Weatherford argues that they provided Material Safety Data Sheets, or MSDSs, when Marshall was admitted. The emergency room doctors deny this. In any case, the MSDS sheet does not reveal all of the ingredients of ZetaFlow because the formula is proprietary; that is, protected as a trade secret. The MSDS does show methanol and a proprietary phosphate ester, which make up less than 53 percent of the formulation.
Behr recovered, as did Marshall, though he was apparently fired and is now working in Farmington, New Mexico. Marshall likely lost his job because, in spite of reports to the contrary, Weatherford did not report the spill in a timely fashion and did not cooperate with hospital staff. Marshall, on the other hand, apparently said too much while being treated, though he later reversed his statement by insisting he had removed all of his contaminated clothing before entering the ER. Behr contradicts this, saying she removed Marshall’s boots, which were soaked. Other ER staff also noticed the potent odor emanating from Marshall.
Fracturing fluids commonly contain such ingredients as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, and hydrocarbon methanol phosphate ester. As a result of gas and oil industry lobbying, fracturing fluids are exempt from the Energy Policy Act of 2005’s Safe Water Drinking Act section, even though drillers have been known to pump several hundred thousand gallons of these fluids into each well. Leakage into aquifers is a constant concern.
Since the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission doesn’t have any jurisdiction over tribal lands, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stepped in and promised to investigate the spill. However, the EPA is likely to be as ineffective, as usual, since the law depends on companies self-reporting and the documentation in this case is incomplete. Cheryl Turcotte, enforcement coordinator for the EPA’s Community Right to Know program, added that – if ZetaFlow’s ingredients are indeed a legitimate trade secret – the EPA and the public may never know the source of Behr’s illness, which ER doctors ascribed to benzene poisoning.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 was pushed through by Republicans and a Bush administration eager to deepen the already full pockets of the energy industry. In exchange, the act offered a few sops to consumer and environmental initiatives, many of which have since died an unnatural death. A new administration must revoke or rewrite this act to reflect a world in which fossil-fuel energy has grown prohibitively expensive and – more importantly – detrimental to the health of everything that lives on earth.
Disclosure: I don’t own BP or Weatherford stock.