CWA v Waste Treatment Corp Wastewater Discharge Lawsuit Settled
In October of last year MDN told you the radical national anti-drilling organization Clean Water Action (CWA) had sued a small Pennsylvania company by the name of Waste Treatment Corporation (WTC) in Warren, PA in federal court claiming the company continued to accept, treat and discharge Marcellus drilling wastewater into the Allegheny River (see CWA Sues/Accuses Waste Treatment Corp of Continued Shale Pollution). WTC was supposed to have stopped that practice two years earlier, in 2011, after then-Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), Michael Krancer, got all such operations to cease and desist. Responses to the CWA lawsuit from both the WTC and the DEP raised more questions than they answered for us (see Waste Treatment, PA DEP Respond to CWA Lawsuit). Since last year, the lawsuit has been quiet–at least publicly. Yesterday CWA announced they’ve reached a settlement of the case with WTC agreeing to immediately stop accepting/discharging Marcellus wastewater (even though they say they don’t), install expensive new equipment over the next 8 months, and then restart accepting Marcellus wastewater processing again…
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Hack “researchers” will collect research others have done, run some numbers in a spreadsheet to bias the outcome, and then make off-the-wall pronouncements like burning coal is less damaging to the environment than drilling for natural gas (see 
“This is Dr. Frasier Crane. I’m listening.” Oops. Wrong channel. Click. The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection will conduct a “listening session” to hear people address the mythical topic of climate change and the federal EPA’s draconian efforts to restrict things like carbon–the stuff you breathe out with every breath. The feds are forcing states to clamp down on so-called greenhouse gas emissions and have proposed a “Clean Power Greenhouse Gas Reduction Rule” to do just that. The PA DEP wants to hear from PA residents what they think about all of this nonsense so they can check off the appropriate boxes on their checklist. The “listening session” will be held on September 25 in Harrisburg…
The next round in so-called anti-drilling research into the “health impacts” from fracking have arrived in the form of a study about to be published in the National Institutes of Health journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Titled “Proximity to Natural Gas Wells and Reported Health Status: Results of a Household Survey in Washington County, Pennsylvania” (full copy embedded below), this latest salvo in the fracking wars is DOA. Why? The anti-drilling Heinz Endowments, led by Mamma Teresa Heinz-Kerry, the Schmidt Family Foundation, founded by former Google CEO (and big-time anti-driller) Eric Schmidt, and the Philadelphia-area Claneil Foundation, funder of many anti-drilling “studies” are the main sponsors of this latest “study” that tabulates self-reported ailments of skin rashes and coughing from 492 people (in 180 families) living in Washington County, PA. Guess what they found? If you read the USA Today headline, they found “People near ‘fracking’ wells report health woes,” to which we say, those who don’t live near fracking wells report health woes too! The study itself says this: “…these results should be viewed as hypothesis generating…proximity of natural gas wells may be (emphasis added) associated with the prevalence of health symptoms including dermal and respiratory 3 conditions in residents living near natural gas extraction activities. Further study of these associations, including the role of specific air and water exposures, is warranted.” That is, nothing conclusive was found from this small sample of 180 households in a single county. But let’s not let “nothing conclusive” get in the way of spinning yet another tall tale that fracking causes health problems. Crank up the media lie machine…