Pittsburgh, a resilient city

Point State Park at Sunset

From steel, to collapse, to a diverse knowledge and health-based economy, Pittsburgh has come to embody the definition of a resilient city. Our growing economy alone doesn't make this the vibrant city that it is, however. Pittsburgh’s rivers, trees and the air we breathe impact our health and well being. As climate change exacerbates bad air on hot days and brings more intense storms and extreme cold, protecting our environment will mean protecting our neighborhoods. Smart policies and planning now can turn environmental threats into impetus for bolstering healthy and cohesive communities.

That is what the Rockefeller Foundation saw in our city when they selected Pittsburgh to be one of only 100 Resilient Cities, worldwide. 

100 Resilient Cities provides resources and guidance for an active network of urban hubs throughout the world. The first group of 32 cities began work in December 2013 and the second group was announced in December 2014. Of the 331 applications for the second round, Pittsburgh was one of 35 to be selected and PennFuture is thrilled to be part of the local collaboration to make our city stronger.

On June 6, we met with other stakeholders from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors for an agenda-setting workshop. The conversations were eclectic and electric, and centered around key urban concerns (both chronic and acute), many of which overlap with our environmental efforts, including:

• Infrastructure failure and flooding concerns (in addition to safety concerns, flooding equals raw sewage in our streams and rivers -- where we boat, swim and get our drinking water).
• Hazardous materials accidents (oil bomb trains, anyone?) 
• Heat waves (unhealthy ozone pollution is expected to get worse as summers get hotter)
• Significant environmental degradation (clean air, clean water and healthy land: the building blocks of life) 

With our own holistic mission to create a just future where nature, communities and the economy thrive, we at PennFuture are very excited about Pittsburgh’s participation in the 100 Resilient Cities effort. It makes sense and the time is ripe.

Nicole Catino is PennFuture's 2015 Student Conservation Association Green Cities Sustainability Fellow and is based in Pittsburgh.

Natural gas lobbyists want to silence "public interests."

At a hearing of Pennsylvania's Oil & Gas Technical Advisory Board (TAB) on March 20 to discuss proposed revisions to the state's oil and gas regulations, natural gas industry lobbyists said that "public interests" should not be among the "considerations" when weighing new drilling standards. We're not kidding -- they really said that, and it was picked up in a story by Laura Legere of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Dave Conti at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review also weighed in.

These lobbyists would just as soon dismiss the over 24,000 public comments submitted to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection on the proposed rules, which will cover everything from how to handle fracking wastewater -- to keep it from leaching into our drinking water -- to surface activities at well sites including contamination of our air and land as well as noise and light pollution.

Pennsylvania's oil and gas law, Act 13, was passed in 2012. Since then, industry has been dragging out and delaying the process for common sense rules of the road that will help ensure public health and the environment are protected, a standard requested by Gov. Tom Wolf more than once on the campaign trail and since he took office.

Specific proposals include centralized wastewater impoundments; the placement of well pads near public resources that could include schools, parks and playgrounds; and restoring contaminated drinking water supplies to pre-drilling conditions. Similarly, we will need to address methane emissions -- a potent greenhouse gas -- with strong rules as voluntary measures are not working.

It's outrageous that natural gas interests believe the public interest should be dismissed. The impacts of natural gas drilling, an inherently industrial activity, affect our children and families today and may well into the future. We have a right to be heard, and the TAB has the responsibility of recommending standards that will protect the public interest.

Elaine Labalme is director of communications for PennFuture and is based in Pittsburgh.

Quakes in Arkansas: New Cause for Concern About Drinking Water?

CNN reports that central Arkansas experienced over three dozen quakes in the past week. An Arkansas Geologic Survey scientist described that number of quakes occurring in such a short time as being "Powerball sort of odds," while emphasizing that he did not know whether the quakes were natural or man-induced. The two strongest tremors were measured at 3.4 and 3.5 on the magnitude scale.

This somewhat disturbing news came on the heels of better news for the gas industry last week, also out of Arkansas. In that news, Duke scientists sampled 127 drinking water wells over the Fayetteville Shale formation in central Arkansas and found no indication that fracking had contaminated any of the drinking water wells.

When talking quakes, one needs to distinguish between wells fracked for gas production and the use of deep wells for disposal of wastewater. One obvious difference is that fracking for production rapidly increases pressure for a short period of time and then releases that pressure as wastewater and production fluids flow back to the surface, whereas deep well disposal pressurizes rock formations for an extended period of time.

Thus far, scientists have made the link between quakes and deep disposal wells -- not production wells. The U.S. Geological Survey concluded that disposal wells near fault lines can cause earthquakes by increasing fluid pressure along faults, causing them to fracture. In 2011, scientists attributed a magnitude 5.6 quake in Oklahoma to wastewater disposal near a fault line. Columbia University scientists came to the same conclusion about earthquakes just outside of Youngstown, Ohio in 2011.

The concern is not solely, or even primarily, about personal and property damage at the surface, it is whether the quakes will cause fractures that ultimately lead wastewater to escape and contaminate fresh drinking water aquifers.

There is increasing evidence of a link between deep wastewater disposal wells and earthquakes, which emphasizes the need for the natural gas industry to fund research into developing better ways to efficiently manage its wastewater, other than by putting it down a hole under pressure.

New Duke study finds no contamination from fracking in Arkansas

Duke scientists sampled 127 drinking water wells over the Fayetteville Shale gas development area of Arkansas, where 4,000 wells have been drilled. The samples were analyzed for radioisotopes and chemicals and those results were compared to analysis of flowback water from gas wells. The scientists found no evidence that natural gas development using fracking contaminated shallow drinking water wells.

This is the same group at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment that found direct evidence of methane contamination in drinking water wells near shale gas drilling sites in the Marcellus Shale basin of northeastern Pennsylvania, as well as possible connectivity between deep brines and shallow aquifers, but no evidence of contamination from fracking fluids.

According to Avner Vengosh, a professor of geochemistry who participated in the study, "the take-home message is that regardless of the location, systematic monitoring of geochemical and isotopic tracers is necessary for assessing possible groundwater contamination."

Pennsylvania does not require this sort of systematic, geochemical and isotopic monitoring.