because we all know this disaster didn't begin under obama we all know it so anybody in the state that i would have to question their honesty based on their political affiliation and that was occupy wall street protester jesse mcgrath as we've proven our t. is keeping up to the minute with what's going on on occupy wall street and if you're looking for more information when we're not on the air you should follow my colleague extraordinary our intrepid producer lucy cavanagh she's in the midst of all the action in new york with the latest hottest news from occupy wall street again if you'd like to keep up with the latest sights and sounds at occupy wall street you should follow her at least the caffein up and that is going to do it for now i'm christine present i want to thank you so much for watching.

wealthy british style. market why not i'm going to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's conjure up for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report. in two thousand and four some residents in garfield county began to complain if they were getting sick as a result of the drilling activities in their neighborhoods. a young woman from sils

laura amos was one of the earliest and loudest voices. as everyone in this room probably knows my groundwater has been contaminated with methane williamsport gets a lot of people in this room with contamination and pollution issues so who then is responsible to me for the out that loss of my welfare if it's not you the gas commission if the will is drilled next to your residence or near your residence within the legal setbacks and there's a perceived or real impact on your property value we don't address that in two thousand and one gas wells were drilled using the fracking technique a mere five hundred feet from the amos home underground the drilling breached their water well causing their drinking water to fill with gray sediment and faith is like soda pop. the colorado oil and gas conservation commission tested the water

well and found methane and said it was safe but they warned the amos's to keep a window open so the methane gas wouldn't build up and cause an explosion in their home if they amos's stop drinking the water. but continued to bathe in it she later found out that a chemical that had been used in the two thousand and one fracking has been linked to adrenal gland tumors. when she went to in canada they denied using it that well or any other months later the oil and gas commission admitted that it had been used after all. after years of mounting medical bills devalued property and diminishing options laura agreed to a monetary settlement with any kind of corporation the company responsible for her problems. the settlement stipulated she stopped telling her story publicly which is

why she was not interviewed for this film many family stories like hers will never be told because of company settlements that require silence. as girl rather trampoline in spite of her well explosion and fire he hofmeister has stage in her house surrounded by her children and grandchildren. this kind of helps me gives me a little more study in essence so i can grab something you know they were doing ok as long as they were exam that weren't there and i was just working while you still go out with smiles and that my disk and the outside it wasn't. but then they brought in the temporary rig because they're having problems with one of the holes i think and then the smells started up again as they were doing

a fracking board is right over here we had one back there behind us we had two on the side here that were all working you know. flaring up gas and i have much more as well after the fire whatever was there are just burned and came right . at me you know it was like somebody had just. chemicals on me finally i couldn't stand it anymore and monday my husband took me to the margin same hospital to get down. i are twenty one grandkids and one great. oh. yeah they've been pretty sick and they've had colds as my girls. in fact. rahm's as much really bad he's on four different medicines. basically we found that if you were to take all of the chemicals that are used in a particular state always where you see the highest percentage of possible health

effects it's always skin irritation irritation and blistering sinuses as coughing and then this effect called sensitizing which is good. he still lives on dry hollow road shortly after this interview d's son and daughter in law and their four children moved out of the state when they moved there respiratory problems disappeared. in two thousand and four the bush cheney administration's environmental protection agency asserted that fracturing does not threaten drinking water this was childish by a thirty year e.p.a. environmental engineer weston wilson acting under protected whistleblower status the former chairman c.e.o. of halliburton cheney within a few months of coming into office as vice president he was pressuring

administrators of. christie todd whitman to exempt hydraulic fracking from a safety regulation my own point of view as a technician i just thought it very alarming the e.p.a. technically had described how toxic these materials are toxic at the point of injection and still come out with a summary that says they don't need to be reported a regular. and that led me in the fall of zero four to object. on technical grounds then the inspector general of e.p.a. began an investigation of my complaints. and several months into that congress took the report from e.t.a. saying that fracking did not present a risk along with other information and exempted hydraulic fracking from regulation under the safe drinking water act that lays you and i as an american public in this position we cannot know what the industry injects in our

land when it is exempt from being reported. down the colorado river about nine miles to the west of silt is the town of rifle. i am from thoughtful. this is only losing one was. this is before. the problems before with the

rifle this is right and then three or when you marry like a hundred years. it's been a worse first few years i'm fifty four since fifty nine. is tunes that. there's a picture of. a picture. in one thousand nine hundred three chris and steve move all the decided to leave california to move to colorado we both got laid off from our work because we both volunteered to be laid off because we wanted to get out of california move to colorado where it was beautiful and clean air and clean water they found themselves in garfield county looking for a new home there is cruz. in nine hundred ninety five they bought their dream house a fixer upper in a rural neighborhood outside rifle. place and we planned to stay there.

it was shortly after chris and steve moved in the drilling rigs began to appear on some of their neighbors' land and in the surrounding hills. or even trying. crisper get in the shower. her skin turned bright red i think. it hurt her skin it was it was burning fire she was well steve began to develop symptoms as well i feel dizzy. i get well the nose is priss health began to deteriorate rapidly she began losing her sight had severe headaches and had pain in her hands and feet there were two surgeries to remove a particular terry tumor and she developed a rare neurological speech impairment but i think i think i go through all the same. face hassle i've had several patients who have.

been. having symptoms since the time the were exposed the oil and gas exploration near their homes these are all people in a small cluster around right. last year e.p.a. got several citizens requests from garfield county and the citizens were saying. gosh my drinking water might be compared made by this practice or the air we breathe might be affected e.p.a. can you look into it e.p.a. should of. myself and another staff person we had prepared the letters and we were we were ready to write to the colorado oil and gas commission that we felt that this practice cause him in a substantial risk to public drinking water source and the e.p.a. was going to take over the investigation however soon as we got back to our political point the supervisors they cancel put investigation so e.p.a. did not investigate the legitimate complaints from citizens in garfield county. if

you live in or in a rural residential area and you were in a low lying area your house was in a low lying area they could accumulate these gases when they come off the tank battery and so forth you need be breathing those for twelve hours a day one of the concerns of the agency with respect to the oil and gas industry is how much both organic carbon how much volatile gases come from the industry especially from storage of oil or storage of gas. last summer in an effort to track down how much volatile organic carbon was coming from the oil and gas industry a unique study was undertaken by u.p.a. and e.p.a. brought in some infrared cameras. and turned them towards these oil and gas facilities and under infrared light. the volatile organic commissions were visible

. they looked like a. mirage. and so one could see in this intricate great camera the amount of all it's organic carbon coming off these storage tanks. every well is drilled into a strait and it has organic chemicals. oil is a mixture of these very heavy organics but it's a range from these kind of greasy very heavy oily stuff to stuff which is quite those materials about three very correctly all those are potentially toxic but we don't know to what extent. many of them are dangerous ethylene for instance is converted in humans to ethylene oxide and ethylene outside is of course senator besides the drilling in their immediate neighborhood chris and steve are directly

downwind what was becoming a major drilling field exposing them to even higher levels of airborne toxins. another source of possible exposure was a waste water treatment facility located across the river from their home. in one nine hundred ninety seven as chris is symptoms were getting worse a water well near the most baldy's was blown out and contaminated by drilling. according to state records on september fifteenth one thousand nine hundred ninety seven barrett resources lost well control drilling the burned clogged gas well the gas companies told everybody not to drink the water and they actually started delivering water to us then they came back and told us that your water safe to drink so we started drinking a lot. when the exposure is through a water pathway people are usually given an alternate drinking water supply you

don't think of it but there are a lot of sources of water vapor in the house your dishwasher every time you flush the toilet and you breathe it in. through your skin or a dose of the valborg. from the shower water will be several times that those you would have gotten from the drinking water after we started thinking that was not right but a glass of water said overnight there was a little oil slick. in desperation chris and steve moved to grand junction colorado abandoning their home and a place that had been their dream. you know. and it was it was valued at four hundred forty thousand dollars and we just walked away from it. there are no official statistics tracking people who have moved away because of the effects of gas and oil development but in the two colorado

communities profiled in this film the impact has been profound. there is a record of at least nine dry hole families who formally complained about the drilling and they have moved away. some were afraid some were sick all were exhausted by their fight in the industry. chris and steve had seen the same thing in their neighborhood in rifle i think almost all of our neighbors have moved away and all the people out of the houses now are people that work for the world. and. there's a growing risk. on the part of people who live in the path of dreams and.

see that living with this development has affected our lives in nearly every way imaginable with other recourse some landowners have become activists. i think there's no question that people are getting sick from the environmental effects of exploration and production throughout the united states and what's striking is when you ask them what their symptoms are it's the same in one area. that is in another area. states like new mexico and colorado are caught between intense pressure from the federal government to lease more land for drilling and the desire to protect the land and their citizens. in june of two

thousand and seven newly elected colorado governor bill ritter is faced with a critical confrontation with the bureau of land management and agency of the interior parts they had authorized more than fifteen hundred new gas wells on the rhone plateau one of the last pristine areas and garfield county we just started with a very modest request a hundred twenty days for a new administration and we were turned down and we don't think twenty four days is enough for us to be able to really have a thoughtful improve. too much that we don't know for us to be able to really respond in a very short amount of time so that's very hard with secretary kerry. the governor has made of him. in the summer of two thousand. in an eight in spite of protests from governor ritter and colorado legislators the bureau of land

management went ahead with the federal auction of leases on the rhone plateau. the entire top of the plateau fifty five thousand acres it was leased nearly fifteen thousand citizens sent protest letters but the bureau found the protests to be without merit and issued the leases anyway our goal was ciro incidence and zero impact on the environment down there. we're not there obviously. we do have injuries we do have fails. but we try to prevent them we do the best that we can sign a more dangerous than off and cross the road anywhere i mean you know that's not how it's not a more dangerous as natural gas run out in a while or also the natural gas on a market interest. today's hearing will examine loopholes and federal health and environmental protections that are exploited by the oil and gas industry as

children we all learned about basic fairness and we know that it's not just not fair would someone gets to play by different rules than the rest of us but as we learned today there is one set of environmental rules for the oil and gas industry and a different set of rules for the rest of america the federal government's got to be involved in that this isn't something that the states can do definitely because this chemical testing has expensive states don't have the money would you think it would be hard to find these chemicals if you waited for years to sample them definitely yes why does it you know why take so long to do the testing. because this isn't what you traditionally test for are we not doing enough basic research into this area we are not there slipping through our safety net truly. there have been many attempts to create more balance between the interests of

industry and those of surface owners. jus in part to the activism of landowners in colorado a new mexico new legislation was passed and both states giving landowners some new rights but for industry it is still essentially business as usual the pace of new drilling continues to accelerate unabated attempts at regulatory change at the federal level have not been as successful the energy bill that was passed by the house of representatives in two thousand and seven did include additional protections for surface owners when the oil and gas is owned by the federal government. that those provisions unfortunately did not make it into law. in the spring of two thousand and seven governor bill ritter signed one of the new colorado bills in change the makeup of the state commission that regulates the industry the ceremony was attended by some of the residents of garfield county

island boy. and these are my hands whom are too. small for dinner. i spoke thirty forty one maybe one of the most significant things that we accomplished in this legislative session to reorganize the current oil and gas conservation commission we believe it brings a better balance to the commission so that's dominated by any one interest group we're going to be responsible as we move forward but to be mindful of the impact is the number of drilling applications time as the number of the attacks complaints climb as well. half of the state of colorado or more sets of brother gas bearings and on. and so. this is an issue that will be with us for many many years to come and the

decisions that we make today are going to define. how this were all transpire over the next twenty years. and what the people of the state i hope the people the state look at the fact that today we have close to five thousand wells have been drilled that's just in the northwestern area and if you look down the road fifteen years and you've got completing sixty thousand wells sixty thousand wells what does that do. williams is going to have to respectfully declined to participate in your project. struggle to be so sure that you feel like . you'd like to know that. we transfer. video and radio contacts over to the point i don't know about interest to them at this particular point i don't know if you wish you the best in your endeavors thank you

for your consideration. as in the rocky mountains the growth of domestic drilling is beginning to impact people and places across america in ways never imagined oil companies are seeking new leases in thirty two states since nineteen ninety hundreds of thousands of new wells have been drilled and the pace of development is excel aerating and. incredibly drilling is now planned in the new york city watershed which provides drinking water to millions. but some feel it doesn't have to be this way. technology is available for industry to comply with all these laws and to conduct their business in a much cleaner way it's often affordable and it's often profitable. we can make

them do it better the profits now in the industry are so high that there's no reason why they can't start using some new technology develop the new technology to capture the escaping gases and b.o.c. but also to do something with that water. when they capture these has to substances carry a council capture more of their saleable product we need data and we need data alamos we need data on humans we need data on the population. and that requires again money a plan you know and doing. this for an alternate years in this does serve the country through alternative energy we all use energy we all know we need energy there are a lot better ways we could do energy and i'd like to see us move towards

a clean energy future which most important is for. congress to close these on ponds and to hold the oil and gas industry in a scene standards as other industries if the industry waits fifteen years down the road here you need answering some very hard questions to a jury and to a number of plaintiffs saying you know when it was so inexpensive that put some of these pollution control equipment and practices on your operation why when you knew that there were sicknesses you know why didn't you do it.

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good also good to see a story and a seem so for life please you think you understand it and then you blame something else if you're see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. if. he is.

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