A Debate Over Who Regulates Gas 'Fracking' In Pa.

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A drilling rig looms behind a barn in Tioga County, Pa.

Scott Detrow/StateImpact Pennsylvania A drilling rig looms behind a barn in Tioga County, Pa.

A new Pennsylvania law could curb municipalities' ability to zone and regulate hydraulic fracturing — "fracking." And that raises questions about how much say a local government should have over what goes on within its borders.

State lawmakers are grappling with how to update the commonwealth's decades-old Oil and Gas Act to catch up with a natural gas drilling boom.

Right now, local regulations on where drilling rigs can go, how loudly they operate and how far they need to be from buildings differ from community to community. Pennsylvania lawmakers who support the natural gas drilling industry are trying to standardize the rules across the state.

"It can be like the equivalent of needing to get a new driver's license for every state that you go through when you're traveling," says Kathryn Klaber, head of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents drillers in Pennsylvania.

And some places, such as Pittsburgh, have passed outright bans on fracking. So have several New York communities, in anticipation of drilling in the Empire State.

A measure now before Pennsylvania lawmakers would assign an "impact" fee to each Marcellus Shale well.

It would also set statewide guidelines for what local governments can and can't regulate.

So if a municipality went beyond the new guidelines, the state attorney general would have the power to sue the local government and ban it from receiving revenue from the impact fee charged on each well.

Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, says streamlining local regulations will help build an industry and create thousands of jobs.

But State Sen. Jim Ferlo, a Democrat, says the legislation "threatens democracy."

"The political action donors that have given millions of dollars to this governor and to those in political leadership in the House and the Senate ... could not have asked for a better piece of legislation," Ferlo says.

Actually, they could have.

An earlier version of the bill backed by Corbett would have nullified all local regulation of natural gas drilling. Instead, the latest version sets strict limits on regulation. For example, townships wouldn't be allowed to ban drilling in residential areas.

The head of Pennsylvania's township supervisors association called the earlier outright ban "oppressive" to local government. But he says his group can live with the new language.

Not all local officials feel that way.

Brian Coppola sits on the Board of Supervisors in Robinson Township, a community with more than 40 Marcellus Shale wells. He calls state-level restrictions on what local governments can regulate a "disaster," and he thinks the latest bill is just as bad as the earlier across-the-board regulation ban.

"I would say that anything that allows a heavy-industrial use to go into our residential areas is pre-emption," he said. "Because that really is the foundation of zoning."

But pro-drilling groups say residential drilling bans actually hamper private property owners. "If I live in a residential area, don't I have a right to lease my natural gas?" she said.

Pennsylvania's neighbor, Ohio, sits on top of shale deposits, too. But the Buckeye State is ahead of Pennsylvania on this issue. It already enforces across-the-board zoning consistency.

Klaber of the Marcellus Shale Coalition says if a new law doesn't pass, Pennsylvania drillers will go to Ohio.

Pennsylvania's House and Senate have passed two different versions of the bill.

The differences will be hashed out over the coming weeks, with the goal of signing a bill into law by the end of the year.

Scott Detrow is a Pennsylvania-based reporter for NPR's StateImpact network, which focuses on government reporting in the states. Read More About It

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The Trouble With Health Problems Near Gas Fracking

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Water plant operator Torrey Jones checks the clarity of a sample of treated water at the Beaver Falls Municipal Authority water treatment plant in Beaver Falls, Pa.

Keith Srakocic/AP Water plant operator Torrey Jones checks the clarity of a sample of treated water at the Beaver Falls Municipal Authority water treatment plant in Beaver Falls, Pa.

Susan Wallace-Babb lived on a ranch in western Colorado. One summer night in 2005, she drove her truck down the road into a field out past her neighbors. She stepped out of her truck, felt woozy and immediately passed out.

"When she came to, she raced out of the area, called fire department officials and sought help. But it began a period of very intense, negative health effects for her," says ProPublica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten. "By the next morning, she felt intense nerve pain in her legs, intense nausea, and eventually within a couple of days had skin rashes over her body. And her health got progressively worse from that point on."

Wallace-Babb was told by local deputies that there was a spillover between a pair of fuel storage tanks that sat next to a natural gas well, located less than half a mile away from her car. Initially she wasn't sure it was related to gas drilling.

"It wasn't until she began talking with other residents of this part of Colorado and learning that others had similar experiences and talking with doctors who had expertise in gas field exposure [that] she did come to believe that, though it is difficult to prove, that her health problems have been caused by exposure to some sort of chemical in the drilling field," he says.

Lustgarten writes about Wallace-Babb and numerous others who have experienced symptoms close to natural gas drilling sites in a feature for the investigative reporting website ProPublica. He tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that he has heard numerous anecdotal reports of health problems near gas drilling sites since he began reporting on the subject in 2008. But figuring out the cause of their ailments is much more difficult because few data and little evidence exist.

"I hear [stories] thousands of miles apart, in various states, and to me — to an untrained medical professional — they sound alarmingly similar," he says. "But when we go to federal or state health officials, or drilling officials, or any officials, and ask how common these are ... nobody really knows. Nobody has systemically tracked how many health complaints there are, whether the complaints are similar, whether they can be tied to any specific chemical exposure or any environmental cause. It makes it very difficult beyond an anecdotal answer to get a handle on how widespread a problem this might be."

Part of the problem, writes Lustgarten, is that "the drilling companies have complicated efforts to gather pollution data and to understand the root of health complaints."

"The Clean Air Act requires reporting of emissions so that the government can collect the [toxic emissions] data from facilities of a certain size," he says. "The oil and gas facilities often fall under that threshold and an exemption allows them not to be aggregated or counted together. Because these facilities are small, there is no obligation to report to federal authorities what pollutants might be emitted from those facilities ... which means there's no information to paint a bigger picture of what communities are dealing with."

In addition, he tells Davies that states and federal agencies do not currently track anecdotal reports from people living close to drilling sites. Without an accurate measure of possible pollutants or contaminants near drilling sites, or a comprehensive database of population-based health data, it's difficult for epidemiologists to establish any link between gas drilling and ill health, says Lustgarten.

"You have to establish that there is a pollutant to be exposed to, that there is a risk to being exposed to that pollutant and then finally that people were exposed to that pollutant," he says. "And to investigate [this] scientifically would require an enormous study with, for example, a control population of people who aren't exposed to any kind of drilling and then people that are and watching them over time, while measuring air pollutants in the air and people's bloodstreams [to] definitively conclude that the specific contaminants from a specific source are the same ones that are making people sick."

The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a sister agency to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Lustgarten that a comprehensive study could cost upwards of $100 million.

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Abrahm Lustgarten won the 2009 George Polk Award for his reporting at ProPublica on natural gas drilling.

Lars Klove Abrahm Lustgarten won the 2009 George Polk Award for his reporting at ProPublica on natural gas drilling.

"When we talked in very loose terms about what it would take to do a study about the kinds of symptoms we're seeing in the gas fields and look at these areas, they threw out this $100 million cost," he says. "And they presented it as something that needs to be done and that it's time to do, but they really don't have the capacity, staffing or bandwidth to undertake it at this point."

The oil and gas companies have also stressed the need for research over individual anecdotal accounts, he says.

"In general, they tend to be dismissive of individual complaints while expressing an understandable need for further research and concern for the health of individuals, but really shying away from any connection with their own activities," he says. "You won't hear the drilling industry say, 'This isn't an issue and we don't have to study this.' You won't hear them say they don't care about Susan Wallace-Babb. But you will hear them say 'Susan Wallace-Babb appears to not like the industry and maybe she has health issues and maybe she wants the industry to leave [where she lives]. And by the way, we need to do a whole lot more research and it's a decade-long effort and let's just get started and not talk about blame at this point.' "

Abrahm Lustgarten won the 2009 George Polk Award for his reporting at ProPublica on natural gas drilling. He has also written for Fortune, Salon, Esquire and The New York Times.

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