Posted Thursday, Mar. 03, 2011
By Mike Norman
mnorman@star-telegram.com
Lab rats of Tarrant County, unite!
There's revolution in the air around the world. The problem we lab rats have is that we have no idea what else is in our air. We live in the urban laboratory of Barnett Shale natural gas drilling.
We breathe what we breathe and scurry through our daily lives. We hear people in white coats saying that the natural gas wells all around us will do us no harm. Other people in coats just as white say those wells may be putting things in our air that could eventually damage our health or our children's health.
How are we to know? We just want to go about our daily lives. But then, as with the subjects of any experiment, we're stuck with the result.
Last week, the Fort Worth school board received a report from the Fort Worth League of Neighborhoods about what a team of experts learned by examining data from air quality studies. The league wants the school district to include restrictions on natural gas companies when they lease the rights to drill under school properties.
Next week, the board is scheduled to hear from natural gas companies and others about what they think of the league's report and its conclusions.
School board members don't wear white coats, and they are not experts. Still, they're challenged to decide which side is right. People across the city and their children have to live with that decision.
The league report's conclusions take two branches. The first is that anyone who believes natural gas wells and other facilities like those throughout Tarrant County are tightly regulated and inspected by a state agency or any other independent source is just plain wrong. State oversight is mainly a paperwork matter that relies on what the gas companies say, the report states.
Secondly, the report says alarming levels of contaminants, especially carbon disulfide, are in the air around some gas facilities. Carbon disulfide is a neurotoxin that, when breathed at certain levels, can harm the human brain, liver and heart. Some scientific studies have shown that pregnant lab rats forced to breathe high levels of carbon disulfide had offspring that died soon after birth or had birth defects.
The likely industry response at Tuesday's board meeting is no mystery. The industry-funded Barnett Shale Energy Education Council has already responded. Ed Ireland, the council's executive director, was quoted in a trade publication as calling the league study "a hoax."
Reports on the council's website say carbon disulfide has been measured at only minuscule levels around natural gas drilling and production sites and dangerously high concentrations "are difficult to imagine."
How do we know who's right? We're just the lab rats, and any effects on us or lack thereof can only be observed later.
If we were to take over the lab, we might run things differently. We might be very cautious, not steered quite so much by the financial interests of natural gas drilling.
If we ran the Fort Worth school board, we might hold off on concluding anything until we had more impartial information.
We'd wait to lease any more school property for natural gas exploration until we get the results of the city's $1 million, independently conducted Air Quality Study, due out in June. Three or four months of delay is nothing compared to the health of children in Fort Worth schools.
Even a lab rat can see that.
Mike Norman is editorial director of the Star-Telegram/Arlington and Northeast Tarrant County.817-390-7830
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