EPA Confirms Earlier Results on Shale Gas Water Testing

The second round of water testing conducted by the The Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency in Dimrock, Pennslyvania, the town featured in documentary "Gasland," has found no need for immediate actions.

The EPA released the sec­ond round of 20 water tests from Dimock on Fri­day.  Spokesperson Roy Seneca commented:

“This set of sam­pling did not show lev­els of con­t­a­m­i­nants that would give EPA rea­son to take imme­di­ate action. EPA remains com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing Dimock res­i­dents with the best avail­able data and infor­ma­tion on the qual­ity of drink­ing water as expe­di­tiously as possible.”

The EPA col­lected water sam­ples from about 60 homes in Dimock and is releas­ing the results in stages. In March, the EPA released results from 11 house­holds, and con­cluded that the water was safe to drink. But the agency wanted to con­tinue test­ing sev­eral wells that con­tained unusu­ally high lev­els of arsenic.

Cabot Oil and Gas, which has dozens of wells drilled in Dimock, released a state­ment say­ing the EPA’s find­ings con­firm their belief that the company’s activ­i­ties did not pol­lute Dimock’s well water.

“This data con­firms the ear­lier EPA find­ing that lev­els of con­t­a­m­i­nants found do not pos­sess a threat to human health and the envi­ron­ment.  The EPA data is con­sis­tent with lit­er­ally thou­sands of pages of water qual­ity data accu­mu­lated by state and local author­i­ties and by Cabot.”

Related Reading: EPA Say "No Threat" to Town in Gasland Documentary