PA Govt. Cut Most Toxins From "Analysis" Of Fracking; Zero Medical/Toxicology Input On Health Risk
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According to the Washington County court documents filed in August, concentrations of 25 airborne chemicals that the DEP’s field laboratory truck parked near the Yeager drill site in rural Amwell Township measured were mis-reported or not reported to administrators in Harrisburg who wrote the air quality report for southwestern Pennsylvania in December 2010.
Linda Hreha, a chemist in DEP’s mobile analytical section who did the air sampling on which all three of the state’s regional air quality reports are based, testified in her deposition on Dec. 5, 2013, that she measured but did not report elevated concentrations of air contaminants at the Yeager impoundment, including 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene at 550 parts per billion; methane at 1.2 parts per million; and methyl mercaptan at 1 part per million, twice the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommended exposure limit.
Because the depositions indicate DEP used the same data reporting procedures for shale gas pollution reports in 2011 in the North-central and Northeast regions of the state, the validity of those reports are also called into question. In all three reports, the DEP failed to calculate the health hazard for 25 of 38 chemicals it tested for but still concluded that the levels of those air pollutants that the shale gas development sites emitted were not likely to trigger air-related health concerns, she testified.
Not only did the DEP not calculate the vast majority of chemical hazards, but its determination that public health would not be harmed was not made by anyone with training in medicine, toxicology or environmental or occupational health, according to Nick Lazor, chief of the DEP’s Air Quality Monitoring Division, who oversaw production of the reports and was deposed on Jan. 17, 2014.
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http://powersource.post-gazette.com/powersource/policy-powersource/2014/10/20/State-studies-on-shale-site-air-emissions/stories/201410170097
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