What’s Killing the Babies of Vernal, Utah?
Stunningly, though, the feds gave the industry a pass when, this June, a five-year EPA study found no systemic contamination of drinking-water sources by slickwater fluids used in fracking. But in the next breath, it cited case after case where precisely that had happened, then said it couldn’t gauge the frequency of such events because the industry hadn’t furnished essential data: the quality of the water before they started fracking. The result: Activists and industry both claimed victory, and the EPA called for more study.
It was with a healthy dram of fear, then, that I took the red-dirt road to the La Point Recycle and Storage pond. We hiked up a half-mile path from our car, stepping over cow shit and shed deer antlers. We smelled the pond well before we reached the rise: a molten stench that stabbed the back of our noses and burned our eyes bloodshot on contact. A cyclone fence surrounded the pit, but the gate at the north end was unlocked and unmanned. (La Point declined to comment for this story.) Holding jackets over our mouths, we crept across the deck so that Moench could hook a particle counter to the fence. The air now was a shock wave of solvents that sent us scrambling for higher ground above the pit. Looking down from our perch on a sandy bluff, we saw the evap pond in its immensity: a green-black sheet so thick with sludge its surface didn’t ripple in the breeze.
“The solvents you’re smelling, they can travel for miles — and there were about 50 of these pits at the height of the boom,” said Wagner.
I did a quick accounting in my head: a half-million gallons of waste from each of thousands of wells, either hauled to ponds like this or pumped to underground pits. Add to that more than 2,000 wells that have been granted but not drilled yet — nearly all of them approved by the Vernal field office. Where will all that poison go, and who will still be here to breathe and drink it?
A couple of weeks later, Young called me with horrible news: “Four of my five ladies lost their babies. Four miscarriages in just two weeks! How’m I s’posed to do this anymore?”
I asked her what she thought might have caused this spate of losses. “They all live in town and said their water tasted bad, so I went to their houses and took samples.” She tested the water with a monitoring device used by drillers; most of the batches tested were positive for extreme toxicity from hydrogen sulfide, H2S, one of the most deadly of the gases released by drilling. Exposure to it has killed a number of rig workers over the past few decades. In high enough concentration, just one breath is enough. In much smaller amounts, H2S can cause miscarriages — and the amounts Young says she found were more than 7,000 times the EPA threshold for safety.
“I know I have to call somebody, but who?” Young says. “Who is there to trust in this town?”
What’s Killing the Babies of Vernal, Utah?, Page 12 of 12