we've had a pennyworth it's out there for over a year now which i think from the standpoint of the regulations we think are good but as far as the locations are the zone where ok so i'm going to take about fifteen minutes and discuss some public health and safety talks and our topics in proximity to have hydraulic fracturing with a focus on the paper that was just mentioned so the publication that we did was called adequacy of current state setbacks for directional high volume hydraulic fracturing in the marcellus barnett and niobrara sheriff shale plays and basically it was to answer the question whether or not these setbacks were adequate to protect public health and safety so to look at this we did an analysis of first geography in production thank her and statutes and regulations we looked at blowouts and evacuations thermal modeling and heat exposure and vapor clouds and air pollution so for geography and production we looked at the barnett shale in texas the niobrara shale in colorado and the marcellus shale which is predominately in pennsylvania and focus on that because of where we're located this evening so the marcellus shale cover sixty four percent of pennsylvania and in two thousand and fourteen there were over seven seventy thousand producing gas wells in washington county is we're averaging about thirty five hundred permits per distances are from the very liberal to the very conservative texas has the most liberal at two hundred feet pennsylvania is five hundred feet to a structure colorado is five hundred feet to a structure and one thousand feet to a high occupancy structure maryland is a thousand feet with a two thousand foot recommendation from the school of public health at maryland and in new york it's not permitted whatsoever with regard to policies and oversight at the federal level there he protect their protection from fires and heat as measured in kilowatts per meter squared in the maximum is five kilowatts per meter squared from by federal exposure there's also  a maximum on sulfite exposure and this is using nyasha in osha data the e p a recommends green completions which is capturing of excess gas throughout the process rather than venting into the atmosphere and also the federal government also oversees volatile organic compounds and sulfur dioxide at the st level our current setback distances five hundred feet from the wellhead to buildings and one thousand feet from a public water supply and i put a little asterix here the robin decision it's my understanding that that gives you a five hundred feet minimum but the municipality may just that distance the chapter seventy eight as pending approval but that distance would include two hundred feet from the edge of disturbance to a common area such as a playground or an outdoor park the state also regulates traffic noise and air quality at all at the local level the oversight can be done by stoning boards planning commissions township councils and also local noise ordinances often come into play so one of the areas that i was interested in looking at were explosions and evacuations and so in general well blowout risk is one in ten thousand wells in five years from two thousand and ten to two thousand and in fifteen in the marcellus shale there were eight reported well blowouts one death seven burn unit hospitalizations four hundred ten families evacuated one no fly zone and closure of a highway and i should stress that these are only reported blowouts that we had that we were able to find data on there are more blowouts and well integrity issues than this but these are the ones that we could collect data for that we were looking at and the most common evacuation distance was one mile when we're looking at suburban wildfires some special considerations need to be taken into consideration so we need to think about gas plumes smoke hydrogen sulfide gas explosions and heat power lines in nearby wells and when evacuations occur they should be done quickly and efficiently with ongoing communication to evacuees one thing that we were interested in was what is the risk of burns from a blowout fire so looking at the pennsylvania distance of five hundred feet the second degree burn which is the blistering would tend to occur after thirty minutes according to the modeling of an average gas well if you're closer than that at three hundred fifty feet the second degree burns would occur after approximately twenty seconds and one of the issues that we looked at were the wells and proximities to schools which is something that we focused on our in our paper and ideally to evacuate a school during a catastrophic event it takes five to ten minutes like during a fire drill but in an actual emergency this time can be longer and the best data we have on that was sandy hook elementary work took thirty minutes after the shelter in place was lifted so if you look at thinking about you know well had five hundred feet from a school and it takes thirty minutes to evacuate an actual merge and see there could be a significant burn rest of the staff and the children one other thing that we looked at war was how well the sites were pre planned and  a literature review and unfortunately found that there was minimal research into the emergency repairs response planning inadequate resources there were proximity to high occupancy facilities the size of the fires was  always taken into account and there was a lack of training and equipment looking at what is recommended by the marcellus shale coalition and the d p the m s c recommends to review the development site in the access routes assess your constraints and they just scribe constraints such as six sensitive resources like schools churches and hospitals basically high occupancy facilities with vulnerable populations and then the d p has an and gas reporting electronic system and each company should submit an emergency response plan for each well to the another thing that we looked at was the  and this has certain health effects that has a noxious odor causes some stress and annoyance there is respiratory irritation an increased need for anti assman drugs compromised learning and d n a damage the  p has has certain special caution areas that is well areas that are above the osha ceiling limit for hydrogen sulfide and i believe there's about twenty of them in pennsylvania we also have reviewed a study that looked at the potential impact radius of hydrogen sulfide in the event of a pipeline blowout and this was at fourteen twenty six feet for urban conditions in one nine hundred fifty four feet for rural conditions neighborhoods wanted to find out how far toxic gas plumes can travel so we looked at this on our paper closely and they looked at to all sites close the schools in using air monitoring data from industry and  extended for over a mile for the saw fides which is the concern near schools i'm just going to briefly touch on a few of the medical outcomes studies that we're seeing in proximity to drilling so this was one that was done in rural colorado by dr mckenzie and they looked at the number of babies born with congenital heart disease and they found that as you came in closer to multiple wells and the well density increased there was a increase in the number of birth defects also they looked at this in southwestern pennsylvania and by birth record and they found that the infants in the highest co of exposure that's greater than six wells per mile were more likely to have low birth weight and up in northeast pennsylvania they looked at hospitalization records and they found that total hospitalizations and heart hospitalizations for heart disease and neurological disease such as stroke and parkinson's corresponded with zip codes that were corresponded with a higher number of density of we and then the last is by going away it's and this was a household survey of symptoms and they found that people living less than a kilometer away from wells had more upper respiratory skin symptoms than those living farther away so our study overall had some limitations we only looked at well sites in three shale plays so we excluded compression or stay some pipelines which limited our data we also use media reports from and many of the blow outs that we weren't able to get official reports for and that can introduce bias our air pollution data is we only focused on benzene and the salt fides we have full air pollution data for wells would include nitrogen oxide particulate matter of the season ozone and we also looked at an average gas one model for the thermal and that did not take into account local geography weather patterns and engineering engineering specifics so the conclusions of our paper were that the p a five hundred foot setback distance is not sufficient in all cases to protect public health and safety and this distance could leave people vulnerable to thermal injury sulfite exposure an air pollution in the air pollution will be discussed by dr mccall in a moment we're also seeing some adverse health outcomes in proximity to the wells particularly with higher well density and then we recommended in our paper that industry use best practices to minimize exposure such as proper site pre planning in mitigation technology so for each community just what you with you're wrestling with there is an economic benefit of natural gas well  development and that has to be balanced with the health and safety risks of the community and work actually in a whole the questions until after dr macaulay's portion thank you there's a guy down on the ground so that really say hello down there can you tell us where we are i was up and says yes you're up in the year and the other guy in the who was that what he said he said all that was some scientist  said how how could you tell he says because what he told me was absolutely true but completely useless so i'm going to try to not be a complete scientist and be completely useless what i'm going to talk about because i want to talk about some of the more practical aspects of of setback distances and the air pollution issues now i'm moving away from safety issue s ok so what i'm talking about in all of this really is not about thermal injury it is about air pollution you could consider it also about noise because noise will apply all about the same set of circumstances here and so what i want to do is these are the issues in terms of questions you should ask in the end you should ask this of anybody coming in here to say they've got an answer i'll try to give you some of the answers to some of these questions but don't stop with me go ahead and ask where you can  not ok so the first one is there adequate air monitoring and now you know that the state of pennsylvania the department of environmental protection does they are monitoring in the state and these are part of a larger air monitoring system that the federal government runs and sees overseas and so if you were to look at the entire united states for just one of the pollutants which is particulate matter less than two point five micro meters and size here's the kind of pennsylvania it's not quite as many sampling stations obviously the idea behind this when all of this was set up was that if you had something that caused air pollution it was likely going to be large it was likely going to be fixed it was likely going to be there for a long period of time and anything that came out of it would get well mixed in the air and so you have one sampling station every ten or twenty miles you really still know what's going on that's not necessarily the case with the drilling operations these are much smaller operations their impact is going to be much more localized one drilling operation is probably not going to do a lot of damage from the drilling itself for a large areas around it and so these monitoring stations are not going to see what's happening so the next question is are the standards that we've got adequate and these are the nationally ambien air quality standards these are the standards by which the federal government determines that an area would be in compliance for its for the air missions and they're the kinds of things that you think of carbon monoxide where nitrogen dioxide ozone particulate pollution sulfur dioxide these are things coming from traffic sources for example but they might come from power plants that i come from steel mills and i come from coke ovens we don't have a lot of those anymore but that's when this rule of law was written that's what we have so when we looked around some of these operations we looked at some of the things that weren't on that we asked because there are some toxic things that aren't on that list you know there's only sick and a q s air pollutants that are determined to be the things that you have to run your compliance by and so in this case we're looking a bit unseen now benzene is something that causes cancer it also can do damage to your immune system and the standards that we've got here are not for cancer but for preventing damage to the immune system quite frankly a carcinogen there is no level that we can state that is a safe level for carcinogens and that's why they don't use that here because if we were talking about a carcinogen it would be kind of anomalous to say well here's a safe level doesn't work that way there is no safe level that the probabilities of getting cancer from being exposed to lower and lower levels get lower and lower but there's no known zero level except for zero exposure for the first images and so we don't want to use that as a reference because you just would say well you can't be exposed to this stuff except obviously it's going to be there and in this case it is so we looked at it at the sampling sites that we did under a rock contract to the department of environmental protection in west virginia they asked us to go around and take a look at the set back distance they had proposed which was six hundred twenty five feet from the center of the well now remember that that's how they measure their setback distances not everybody measures setbacks exactly the same way they may not say from the center of the well they may say from the edges of the pad and that's a different philosophy if you assume that everything comes from the center of the pad you can give yourself an extra two or three hundred feet where you don't have to have set back because you're going maybe two hundred feet or maybe three hundred feet in some cases even six hundred feet to the edges of the pad and that's what happened here we were at six hundred so there's a lot of stuff coming out in this flare it's it's unburned hydrocarbons as well as some that are being burned in so where we were close to that flare we got really high levels of benzene high enough that you would not want to be occupationally exposed to this level of benzene this is in the eighty parts per billion to two hundred seventy microgram range it's that that one big thing where you see the hazard question of twenty eight point three value  that was next to a flare but that's right at the edge of the pad and that was at the setback distance so conceivably somebody's house could have been right where say a push for hopefully they'd not set the flare up next to that they thought it was funny that they could set the flare up next or put them but unfortunately it gave them the highest results we've we've ever seen so yes flaring is something that's going by the wayside it's called green completion now so you don't flare because flaring carbons the other the other issue and that people haven't talked much about is the traffic that goes with getting these pads up and running the state of maryland did a study looking at the risk estimates for what happens around these pads and they noted that for completion of a pad which may have around six holes on average drilled and they're talking about ten thousand truck diesel equipment truck trips and ten thousand truck trips that's a lot of diesel traffic and diesel particulates is a known carcinogen and it has a lot of other effects we're just beginning to study some of these effects lot lower a lot smaller and the scientific information right now says that we think the small nano particles may be a lot more toxic than the bigger ones and it's not the amount of mass that they have it's the number that are there that are toxic and what's being monitored for pm two point five is the mass and you won't see these small particles in that massive analysis they just not enough of them they are the big particles over where it's like i had a table full of pumpkins and raisins and i weighed pumpkin and i had one pumpkin but a thousand raisins you never see it on a weight basis the pumpkin would be the mass in the race in two would weigh very little but those thousand raisins if they're each really toxic those are the things you want to worry about and so we've seen this runs a little bit off the bottles which are we've seen the kinds of levels you see in street traffic at at and fifteen to twenty trucks per hour  ten thousand trucks for a frac that that starts to build up particularly if you've got more than one well in montrose pennsylvania which is one of the areas hana county pennsylvania where they doing a lot of drilling now you can stand on the corner of downtown montrose and can a truck going by about every forty five seconds a large truck going by every forty five seconds because all of these wells are fulling down to main roads because why you use main roads well because you can travel better and faster on a main road so if you're coming off the side roads the idea is to travel down to get to that main road to get in and out fast because these are sub contractors who are making their money by the number of truckloads that they do per hour per day and so they're bringing in things like sam to bring in things like water they're bringing in equipment and if you have karen or twenty sites going at once when that's ten sites with ten thousand trucks per side and that traffic tends to build up so that you're at interstate kinds of levels on the smaller roads now most of us w think ok well it's just traffic it's just like an emission living next to interstate what's wrong with that well in fact we know me p a knows and the scientific community knows there's a lot wrong with living next to an interstate people who live next to an interstate a lot sicker they show a lot more symptoms of all sorts of things the kinds of things that immediately come that it seemed to come to the attention our children with  asthma that these small particles exacerbate their asthma make their asthma worse they tend to show up in the emergency room and down there there's a little green line you can barely see that's about eight thousand particles per cubic centimeter of air that's where you see  very measurable increase in the number of kids going to the in the emergency room and above that we're getting up to one hundred sixty thousand particles that's twenty times that level  along the street corner so you have to worry not only about the setback distance but the step back from the roads in the surrounding area scientists who have looked at interstate traffic say you've got to be three hundred meters off the interstate off of either side so you now have a six hundred meter band of areas where you might have health problems running down the major highways that are going to be used for this so if you're considering having hydraulic fracturing and these wells in your area you might want to take a real close look at where the traffic is going and who might be affected you don't want it running by your schools because that that's go and the other the other health effect that we see is cardiovascular disease and people over sixty five i just reach that milestone i don't like the fact that maybe i'm going to see cardiovascular effects if i'm around areas where there's a lot of diesel traffic so that's something to be concerned about and to ask questions about where is the traffic going to go can we keep it away from where the people are and this just shows you how small these particles are human hairs one hundred micro meters in diameter one of these particles is a tenth of a micro meter and smaller tenth of a micro meter means you can put a thousand stack a thousand of them across a human here these are really tiny things so are the setbacks protective well is all of the work going on right on the pad well no we know that the traffic is part of this and the traffic can line up for several miles from a pad waiting to get on for the hydraulic fracturing it can also be coming in and out obviously along these roads so you have both feet traffic that's sitting in line diesel trucks you don't like to turn them off i mean it's just the way they are you getting them started again is a pain and so people will idle them even when they're not supposed to be idling them mad that's a concern if you've got idling traffic for several miles back from each one of the sites you now have not just a distance of six hundred feet or five hundred feet or a thousand feet you have a distance of several miles where your where you've got emissions coming out of these trucks and where these admissions tend to be fairly toxic terrain is another problem  setback distances were first thought of out in the west and midwest this is not the west and midwest you know if if they smooth out pennsylvania and west virginia we'd be much larger than texas because we're hills right and that hills and the hilly terrain cans to trap pollution down in it in fact the textbook example in all of the air pollution textbooks is to ignore up and sylvania that's not so far from here in the reason why is the weather conditions it's the weather conditions that cause the air to get trapped in these valleys along with the terrain features so we're going to see terrain where density media ology playing effect of trapping stuff down in these valleys and a lot of time to studies even my study was not done when there were really noticeable inversions these are the things that hold that pollution down you can see inversions around here we talk about a fog of haulers right that fog in the hollers is down there because there's an inversion layer over top of it how many times you see fog in the hollers a lot particularly in the spring and in the fall and that's when dinora happened it happened in october of one nine hundred forty eight and they had an inversion a massive air that held everything in place for two solid weeks and the air into norah got so thick with people had to drive around with their whites on one of the pennsylvania new stations just give retrospective a back just last week when i was one watching t v s you see you could see it and it was one of those things it happens in this part of the tree so you have to consider that too is the drilling going to be sitting down in the valley like up there and be where is it going to be on top of a hill like see it's on top of a hill you've got more of a instantly and if you're sitting on the plains of texas you've got a constant wind blowing and it's what you don't have the same kinds of valleys that are trapping things in the bowls of central with a lid on top of bats the meteorology dinora pennsylvania and there's the farm hollers so if you see that that's however often that occurs however often you're going to ha are there alternatives when we talk about monitoring we're really talking about quality control right so if you have a manufacturing process or any manufacturing process and you don't talk about quality control your product you're not talking about staying in business very long right so the monitoring of the drilling sites should be part of their quality control in fact it should be part of their control technology in general and in fact the law already says they should have the best available control technology be a c t right if they're not monitoring they're not doing their best available control  and you can do monitoring pretty easily there are lots of companies out there that will now give you a monitoring set up that will allow you to see what's happening on your site in real time because in real time you know what's happening when it's happening how it's happening and if it's a problem and in fact i always thought that it was a great idea for the drilling companies to do this because a lot of the engineers are engineers i train i i taught in the school of engineering for thirty years  and when i talk to my engineers they say if you tell us what the problem is we'll tell you how we can fix it all right let them know what the problem is it's it's not that hard it's not that expensive  a couple solar panels so that they can sit anywhere you set them up to sit anywhere and you can put intrinsic versus broadcast the information back to a station that will receive that and in fact it could be broadcast back to the control trailer and so what you don't want to see are these spikes see the spikes in the red circles that means you've got something out of control you want something near the mean going along steady in strain that's good quality control that's good engineering practice that's what i'm teaching my engineers i don't know what anybody else does that's not quality assurance closing the barn door after the horses got out because if you're monitoring and not doing it in real time essentially you don't find out that you've got a problem till problems over that means the horse is already out of the bargain right now time to be closing the barn lot of diesel trucks sitting there idling you'd see a spike and you can say all right we don't need this many trucks idling here right it's easy enough to break them up easy enough space  and the idea would be in fact you put it at the sensitive locations you put these monitors have the sensitive locations so you know what's going on there and if you start seeing trends if you start seeing too many spikes you say all right we have to know what's going on my conceivably make the point that well we can put we can put these operations closer to some locations because we're going to monitor and we're going to watch monitoring particularly if you've been doing it for a while and if you have a history that says yes if we monitor we know what's going on and we can stop those spikes from occurring do we know or do you know if this practice is happening anywhere yeah actually if if we just talk about noise for a moment it's been done in texas for a while they'll set up noise monitoring along a lot of these areas because noise is a big i didn't talk about noise much here but noise is a big consideration as well a lot of the operations that we have here have impulse type noises so these are quick things you know like clapping your hands or a gunshot going off and when that happens to with if they're sleeping for example you raise the blood pressure you wake them up in the middle of the night you raise their blood pressure that is a problem man so we know that in texas they put these monitoring stations and we're trying to use that with our experimental drilling operations in morgantown in and around morgantown we have the marcellus shale engineering and environmental laboratory in the utica shale engineering environmental laboratory that's part of w ohio state's consortium looking at these issues and so we're trying to monitor the in real farm for this and they are there the industry is now catching on because there are more and more suppliers of these kinds of packages adjustments and there's a problem with yeah actually we tried to run our marcellus shale laboratory with the adjustments already in place that we've been learning about so for instance we were able to pipe water in and by piping water and we were seeing much lower levels of contaminants because we think it was coming from the diesel equipment we used a new coating on the sand to lower of the  couple attributable sources that you've mentioned for benzene are very many sources for it sure there's many other pollutants that are out there right and that that that there may be a way of dealing with the diesel are going to get rid of problems there's no way of saying that in an x distance there will be no problem but i tried and yeah and we have a responsibility to say that we're protecting you could say all right if it's down in the valley we've got a different situation than if it's up on a hilltop and so you have to address what you're going to do about the controls and how you're going to do those controls for those two different sites it's it's not the idea of a setback distances assumes that there's a one size fits all solution to this problem and what i'm here to say is there is no one size fits all solution to this problem right and so again back to so what what kind of a solution do you come up with the only thing that i've been able to propose that i i think begins to address it in and i think again it's not optimized it's not you know scientifically the really comfortable way answer is that the monitoring that you do on a site and keeping that monitoring in control should minimize the impact but beyond math you have to say is the impact worth it here and can we predict what the impact is going to be it really is one of those kinds of situations you know we can reduce the setback or something that you know some some benefit to them they might do it but even if that we you know they would so far they have been very very hesitant to share a i'm sure is going to be to have but some no drill areas where you say ok and no drill times so if you're sitting down in a really steep valley where are you might have an inversion occurring man you can't do drilling there during that time when there's an inversion we have operations have to seize cash right now there's some residential your generation rates are but i can tell you that you can determine what year what year the router rates are or you can extrapolate to some degree what we're here to generation racer but you know what kind of model of you i think you this is reinforced with light with regard to the magnitude of the severity some of the issues associated with this but there's a couple of points that i guess of the field would say that that concentration dissipates at some water rhythmic scale such that if it's bad in five hundred feet it's seven hundred feet it might be half of what it radius i think another point that i'm thinking is you talk about i always watch of the valleys work better for the sound issue keeping it contained you put the drill rigs up on top of the hillside on from claire and it was severe so those are real risks and i'm not so sure this little community is big enough to absorb all of those hazards in figure out a way to around it it kind of blends in you could be building a home up against that within that five hundred feet and the next time they come back and do an operation in there you could have a new neighbor up to g true but and to to clear those areas something other than the residential that they or i believe fits the classical definition of spots o r spots only is independent of size of area doesn't make any difference what size area here zoning what it is is taking a piece of ground the piece of property th is right now soon something else and without any particular rationale sewing and some to another purpose where the people there did what their property adjacent to it and what that property in this township based solely upon the fact that we have studies that show there are potential negative impacts we have property owners here that have we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of acres of property owners or a come back after us unless we have a bon to do it well padded to do or do the necessary pons drainage areas you can probably do it in one hundred acres now if you get two or three property owners together combined with one hundred acres they can come in and say because we've excluded entirely they want site specific relief and all of a sudden you've got three or four property owners who together got a hundred acres and then we've got a problem but i do know that th variables lend themselves more towards a conditional use situation whereby in addition to a set amount of critics that th has the ability to look at those variables and say well we're going to need you know we're going to let you do this but you need to do a b c d and e it to me is if you could open up more areas that of the evidence that the council needs to be able to sit back or rely on so when this gets challenge we have some chance of being able to do better because i can tell you one of the reasons why i thought this for was actually very interesting is that we've been looking at this for a long time and what i thought was going to be interesting is that they've come to the same conclusion that those of us who've been reading this this kind of literature is that there isn't really a on it if i could just raise a question along with everything else that has been shared with us about the potential for error and noise one of the other issues that came up  traffic and i'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around how rows and rows of fracking trucks water trucks whatever are going to get through just about r mccloughan road without coming back onto the main roads where you have all of the residents you know besides not necessarily wanting to spot zone or worry about identifying certain parcels or subdividing the logistics of getting access to that without going into the main populated areas to me also is a concern so even if we establish the argument how do we decide we can do it we first of all the machinations we're going through with all of this have shown that we're trying to find something the point is if you look at each of these options and figure out what makes the pro makes the call much it seems like we keep coming up with more and more concept out of hand even if you fix it this way there's a reason you can't do it downplay said in these cases the simple system even how do we get in and out of the spaces you and i would also have to ask if we're talking about potential danger for all of the emissions and we're going to say that you can be agricultural on a slave as well as for them if they in fact lease or are related issues i don't know i think this is an area that's still under development as far as research i know there's some talk about on the in this is the frustration i think that i think we're all sharing we just need to get the process moving along and i think that's an important piece of information but i think when you have that piece of information i think what michael and i are saying is we'd like to get this the planning commission and say what do you want to do do you want to provide for the issues or not provide for the issues to go to council methods in question because if we do than we can hold his head one way or the other and be done with it right now we continue to feel like we're in limbo one of the concerns i race before which the roadway so even if these people say oh yeah i might like to do that i think that from my township perspective and from a logistics perspective it's going to be difficult but since we do not have identified these sites is there a potential that in addition to looking at a step backwards because of the topography there the doctor mentioned that some of those things could be taken into account to decide whether seven fifteen or  appropriate step back because just about sin the valley this is in the valley and this one a little behind me are those those other the case to the state that monitoring dear is best available control technology which they have to use i don't see how you can have best available control technology and not have monitoring that's