An extensive air monitoring study meant to determine how safe it is to live and breathe near Marcellus Shale facilities is three years behind schedule.
In 2012, the state Department of Environmental Protection announced it was launching a year-long effort to measure pollutants from gas compressors and a processing plant in southwestern Pennsylvania. It projected it would take 365 days to collect the data, and 90 days to get the data back from the lab, do analysis and write the final report.
Sampling — which was done in Washington County, at MarkWest Energy Partners’ large processing plant in Houston and near several compressor stations — was behind schedule but was completed in 2014.
For the past year and a half, the results have limboed between different administrations, questions about methodology, and a lack of resources.
Last September, during a visit to the Post-Gazette, then-DEP secretary John Quigley said when a draft report on the study was presented to him, he had asked his staff to “rewind and start over.”
“There were some questions on the methodology and how measurements were done,” he said. “I asked my folks to take a fresh look at it.”
Mr. Quigley said last week he believes the questions revolved around “the number of air contaminants that DEP tested for, analyzed, and reported on to reach conclusions.” The original protocol for the study proposed sampling for 70 different pollutants.
The former secretary, who was forced from his position in May after a curse-laden e-mail he’d sent to environmental groups surfaced in public, said the DEP’s chronic and worsening understaffing was stretching the timeline of the study.
“Huge demands on a very limited number of people,” he said. “Things don’t get done and take much longer than they should. The air quality function of the agency (among many others) has been written up by EPA for inadequate staffing.”
The data is voluminous.
As of a year ago, the study had generated more than half a million pages of records, the DEP said last summer in response to a public records request which the agency denied because “the report has yet to be finalized.”
The year-long sampling study followed three short-term surveys of shale hotspots in Pennsylvania, which found elevated levels of gas-associated chemicals but concluded they did not pose a health threat.
The DEP cautioned that the short-term studies showed snapshots, rather than a complete picture of long-term exposure to communities with industrial gas production. For that, the agency said, it would rely on the extensive data that would be collected during the year-long effort.
Last year, the DEP sent its monitoring data to the state Department of Health, which is working with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry that monitors toxic chemical exposure in humans.
Wes Culp, a spokesman for the state health department, said the agencies are hoping to complete their review and release a report by late fall.
Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455.
First Published: July 12, 2016, 11:39 a.m.
