SECOND OF TWO PARTS

Rebecca Dunlap had a quality test done on her well in 2010 because she had heard it was the best way to protect her water from any contamination from the residual effects of gas drilling.

Living in Lock Haven, far from areas where drilling was taking place, Dunlap had no idea less than a year later, her test would prove to be so important.

In February, a tanker truck crashed near her home, spilling 3,600 gallons of frack-water on property within 200 feet of her water well. The baseline data from Dunlap’s well was compared with a test taken after the spill. The results showed her water had not been contaminated. The frozen ground had prevented the frack-water from permeating the aquifer.

“Had I not had my well tested, I would not have had baseline data, and I wouldn’t have been sure about the quality of my water,” Dunlap said. “I was fortunate, and it was great to have that peace of mind.”

Bryan Swistock, a water specialist with Penn State Cooperative Extension, said water quality tests are “critical” for all Pennsylvanians who have private water wells and live anywhere near Marcellus activity.

“There are many more options during the leasing stage, but after signing a lease, (private well owners) don’t have a lot of control. At that point, all they can do is document how their water supply was before any drilling gets done,” Swistock said. “The more testing they do, the more legal protection they’ll have when and if something goes wrong.”

Since the spill, Dunlap has reluctantly trod into the middle of a debate over the best way to protect Pennsylvania’s water while not impeding the economic development of Marcellus Shale. The logbook of the truck that crashed near her home had no information as to what materials the truck was hauling, and she said the Department of Environmental Protection has found diesel fuel and chlorides — both common constituents in natural gas operations — are in her property’s topsoil at levels higher than before the spill.

“When accidents like this occur, it brings to light how regulations just haven’t caught up with the many contingencies of the drilling process,” she said.

On the state level, the agency with the greatest responsibility for regulating the drilling industry is the DEP. It was criticized for not being prepared to deal with the fast-moving drilling industry when it arrived in a large-scale way in the state, around 2008.

In 2010, the DEP tightened its rules for drilling, casing, cementing, testing and monitoring gas wells, as well as for protecting public and private water supplies. Earlier this year, the agency asked drillers stop sending frack-water to treatment facilities inside the state, a practice that had drawn scrutiny for contributing to higher levels of bromide and total dissolved solids in the rivers into which that water was eventually released.

On July 22, Gov. Tom Corbett’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Panel released a report backing further revisions to the environmental regulations that govern the industry. Included in the report were recommendations for better tracking of frack-water, an expansion of the area of presumed liability for industry contamination of private and public water supplies, and an increase in the minimum setback distance of Marcellus wells from private wells and public water supplies.

Steve Forde, a spokesman for the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, said its members “take very seriously concerns around water quality.”

“In order to get it right, it’s about maximizing the economic benefits while minimizing environmental disruptions,” he said.

Jan Jarrett, president and CEO of the environmental group PennFuture, said there needs to be improvement in state regulations concerning water and better enforcement of the existing rules.

“I’m hoping the legislature gets started with better rule-making right away, but we don’t have wait for the General Assembly to get started on strengthening protections,” she said.

An area on which Forde and Jarrett agree is the need for construction standards for 20,000 or so new private water wells dug each year in the state. The Marcellus Shale Advisory Panel also pointed out the need to create regulations concerning drilling private wells, as Pennsylvania is one of “a handful of states” without any statewide private water well construction standards.

“What happens now is drillers say, ‘It wasn’t our fault, your well sucked,’ ” Jarrett said. “With a standard, well owners would have the power to say, ‘No, I have properly constructed the well, and you’re at fault.’ ”

One of the most contested battles in the fight between the industry and environmentalists has been over methane migration into water supplies. The industry has long denied any connection between hydraulic fracturing and the methane migration, but instances in past years of the nontoxic but highly flammable gas bubbling into private water wells soon after the fracking of a nearby Marcellus well have raised doubts about that conclusion.

David Yoxtheimer, a hydrogeologist and extension associate with the Marcellus Initiative for Outreach and Research at Penn State, said hints of information are leaking out that drilling into Marcellus can directly cause methane migration.

“Methane is less dense than water, so it wants to rise. A lot of times it get trapped in more porous formations — you get shallower pockets of gas trapped in sandstones at 2,000 feet below the ground surface. When drilling the well, you go down through shallower sandstones, and what can happen is the methane that migrated up and charged those sandstones can leak up and outside the wellbore and into aquifers,” he said.

New DEP regulations requiring a third string of steel casings on all Marcellus wells have helped stop methane migration by preventing the methane from running up the side of the well, Yoxtheimer said.

Regardless, Yoxtheimer said, the debate should focus on ensuring the industry continues to evolve better methods of drilling to prevent the conflicts that have bubbled up as a result of Marcellus development.

“These companies don’t want to have methane migration happening, and are willing to install another string if it helps” stop the problem, he said. “They know that an ounce of prevention put in place is worth it because the remedial costs and effects are going to cost (them) 100 times more.”

Even Dunlap said she doesn’t want the gas industry to stop its work in the state.

“Even with the accident, I’m not against drilling,” she said. “I just think it needs to happen responsibly and slowly. I think the focus should always be on what can be done better, especially to make sure private property is protected.”

Cliff White can be reached at 235-3928.