Failure to control and track wastewater
\n\"Associated Press review found that Pennsylvania's efforts to minimize, control and track wastewater discharges have sometimes failed.
\nFor example:
\n• Of roughly 6 million barrels of well liquids produced in a 12-month period The Associated Press examined, the state couldn't account for the disposal method for 1.28 million barrels, about one-fifth of the total, due to a weakness in its reporting system and incomplete filings by some energy firms.
\n• Some public water utilities downstream from big gas wastewater treatment plants have struggled to stay under the federal maximum for contaminants known as trihalomethanes, which can cause cancer if swallowed over a long period.
\n• Regulations that should have kept drilling wastewater out of the important Delaware River Basin, the water supply for 15 million people in four states, were circumvented for many months.\"
\nFrack water ---> Trihalomethanes in drinking water
\n\"The municipal authority that provides drinking water to Beaver Falls, 27 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, began flunking tests for trihalomethanes regularly last year, about the time a facility 18 miles upstream, Advanced Waste Services, became Pennsylvania's dominant gas wastewater treatment plant.
\nTrihalomethanes aren't found in drilling wastewater, but there can be a link. The waste stream often contains bromide, a salt, which reacts with chlorine disinfectants used by drinking water systems to kill microbes. That interaction creates trihalomethanes.
\nThe EPA says people who drink water with elevated levels of trihalomethanes for many years have an increased risk of getting cancer and could also develop problems of the liver, kidney or central nervous system.
\nGas drilling waste isn't the only substance that can cause elevated trihalomethane levels. Pennsylvania's multitude of acid-leaching, abandoned coal mines and other industrial sources are also a major factor in the high salt levels that lead to the problem.
\nBeaver Falls' treatment plant manager Jim Riggio said he doesn't know what is causing the problem, but a chemical analysis raised the possibility that it might be linked to the hundreds of thousands of barrels of partially treated gas well brine that now flow past his intakes every year.
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