Sandra Steingraber Testimony Public Hearing NY State Assembly Jan. 10, 2013

Written Testimony for the Public Hearing on DEC’s High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing Regulations

by Sandra Steingraber on Thursday, January 10, 2013 at 6:42pm ·

 New York State Assembly

January 10, 2013

Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D.

Distinguished Scholar in Residence

Department of Environmental Studies

Ithaca College

Ithaca, New York 14850

My name is Sandra Steingraber. I am Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Department of Environmental Studies at Ithaca College. My Ph.D. is in biology, and I have spent the last twenty years researching and writing in the field of environmental health. I have served as a science advisor at both the state and national level, working with the state of California on its research program to investigate the causes of breast cancer and with both the National Action Plan on Breast Cancer under the Clinton Administration and President’s Cancer Panel under George W. Bush.

I’m here to speak today as a founding member of Concerned Health Professionals of New York. This is a group of scientists, physicians, and nurses that came together last fall, in a spirit of shared alarm, when we learned that the DEC’s study of the health effects of fracking—which we had long asked for—was not going to be conducted using any normative protocols nor in an open manner, which is also normative for public health inquiries.

A normative protocol for a health study that attempts to forecast the public health risks of a polluting activity that has not yet been approved is called a comprehensive Health Impact Assessment. It was designed by our nation’s Centers for Disease Control and is endorsed by the World Health Organization. An HIA has, as one of its fundamental elements, democracy. It is scoped and carried out in a transparent manner and with the participation of the public at every stage. This participation takes the form of public hearings and periods of public commentary. It does so out of the recognition that when the public is being asked to endure possible risks to its health from a polluting industry, the public has the right to witness and participate in the study that will help determine the decision-making as to whether to permit or prohibit this industry.

In addition, when the lay public contributes its own local and historical knowledge to an environmental health study, the study design is better for it. Public participation makes for better science.

What is going on right now with the so-called health study underway at DEC and DOH is the very opposite of that public spiritedness. The DEC has, under the cover of secrecy, scoped and carried out a health review of some kind that no member of New York’s scientific community has seen. This review is itself being reviewed by DOH chief, Dr. Shah, and a team of three distinguished public health experts from out of state. We do not know what this team has been asked to review, but we do know that two of the three of them have signed contracts with non-disclosure agreements.

And we do know, from the introduction to the newly released regulations for hydraulic fracturing released by the DEC on November 29, that the decision whether or not to frack New York hangs on the results of these outside reviewers.

Thus does the health of 19.5 million New Yorkers depend on the results of a secret review of a secret review.

And thus, Concerned Health Professionals of New York came together. Not knowing what data the reviewers have been asked to comment on, we hastily created a website on which we uploaded all of the important reports and peer-review studies that we know of—from investigations of well casing failures to radioactivity in production brine (which is to be spread on our roadways). We also uploaded our many unanswered letters to DEC Commissioner Martens, DOC Commissioner Shah, and Governor Cuomo.

And I’d like to add here as an aside:  My 11-year-old son receives answers to his letters to the Governor. I never have. We share the same mailing address.

Concerned Health Professionals of New York also took the unusual step of creating an eight-minute video message to the three outside panelists in which we—doctors, nurses, and scientists—describe our long-standing, unaddressed concerns about fracking in New York State. We uploaded this as an embedded video. And then we emailed each of the reviewers to let them know that we had created this website repository of data for them, out of our concern that the document that they are reviewing—whatever it is—does not address itself to all the animating issues.

Can I just say how crazy this feels to us? These three outside experts are our colleagues. Two of the three are personal friends of mine. We have spoken together on panels and at conferences. They share data with me. I cite their research in my writings. And now a gag order prevents them from speaking to me about data that I as a New York scientist am not allowed to see.

The leak last week to the press of what looks to be an old draft of this health review turns our alarm into full-blown cynicism. This eight-page document contains no data. It is a series of assertions that seems to say that the health effects of fracking are unknown and unknowable by any future research. Therefore, regulations can mitigate them. Therefore, fracking is safe.

This is not sound scientific reasoning. The premises on which its logic rests cannot be evaluated because there are no citations or footnotes or references. Emerging evidence in the scientific literature flies in the face of its conclusions.

The DEC and DOH needs to be asked, “What is this document? Who wrote it? For what purpose? What are your sources?”

I’m aware that this Assembly has invited the DEC Commissioner to his hearing to explain himself—an invitation that he refused.  To justify the no-show, DEC spokesperson Emily DeSantis issued a statement pointing to the previous hearings attended by Commissioner Martens.

Concerned Health Professionals of New York condemns this statement. The refusal of the DEC to appear at this hearing and answer questions about the health review has not only broken Governor Cuomo’s promise of transparency, it has broken public trust itself.

Although New York citizens have been entirely cut out of the decision-making process on fracking, the public continues to have profound interest in participating in the inquiry and the decision-making process of fracking.

I know this because I designed a website to help people create comments on the revised draft regulations over the holidays. It’s called Thirty Days of Fracking Regs, and it takes an Advent calendar approach to public commentary. Each day, for the last 30 days, I have posted on this website one regulation, which I then translate into plainspoken English. I then provide some science relevant to that regulation. Because there is no final SGEIS to serve as the scientific basis for the regs, I did that research myself. I then invited the public to create a handcrafted comment about that regulation.

Tomorrow, I will be hand delivering all the comments that my readers and I created together. There are more than 20,000 of them. All are original and unique. As a metric of public commitment and concern, I would like to point out that 500 of them were written on Christmas Day. On New Year’s Day, more than 1000 comments came in. In addition, college students home on break devoted their free time to crafting comments as part of a group project called Homework Against Fracking.

These and other initiatives that have guided citizens through the comment-writing process means that we will hand-deliver to the DEC more than 200,000 comments tomorrow, January 11, which is the final day of comment delivery. We require a U-Haul to do so. And I understand that such a truck has already been rented.

I am asking you now to help ensure that each one of these comments is logged by the DEC, read, and considered. 

Finally:  outside of Governor Cuomo’s State of the State address yesterday, more than 1,500 people protested against fracking. That event included a recitation of the Pledge to Resist Fracking in New York. The Pledge is a solemn commitment to engage in actions of non-violent protest and demonstration up to and including civil disobedience should the Governor greenlight fracking for New York under the undemocratic, fatally flawed decision-making process now underway. Prior to yesterday, more than 6,000 people had already signed this solemn pledge. I am one of them.

I dearly hope that we do not have to activate this pledge, that the signatures of thousands of New York citizens alone will have the power to move the Governor to the exit door.  But the very existence of the Pledge to Resist Fracking in New York is clear sign not only of loss of faith in the DEC but of loss of faith in government itself.

Welcome to Day 1 of life after the close of the DEC public comment period! We made history together. Yesterday, the DEC received more than 204,000 public comments from New Yorkers all saying, in their different ways, that the Regs Emperor has no clothes. And of that total, 200,000 were delivered the old fashioned way: on pieces of paper inside of a mighty pile of boxes piloted through the streets of Albany in a U-Haul truck. These represent the sum total of comments compiled and collected by various grassroots groups, including Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, Greenpeace, Credo, New Yorkers Against Fracking, Sierra Club, 350.org. And of those 200,000 pieces of paper, more than 10 percent came from us, the busy worker ants at Thirty Days of Fracking Regs. Our total comment count as of 8 p.m. on Thursday: 24,450. And for those of you who directly submitted comments to the DEC between Thursday night and the 5 p.m. deadline for comment submission on Friday, your comments boost that total even further. I feel sure that, all together, we Thirty Days club members hit the 25,000 mark. (And, by the way, a few minutes before the Friday 5 p.m. deadline, I did finally finish and submit own comments. Phew!) I guarantee that we have mightily impressed our fellow writers: namely, the world-weary members of the Albany press corps. As I read aloud two of your comments during the noon press conference, the room filled with a respectful hush. I also guarantee that all of your comments are now inside DEC headquarters. I know that because at 2 p.m. I myself brought them there as part of delegation of happy activists that ferried every box, fire-brigade style, from inside the back of the U-Haul truck to inside the DEC lobby. That was the best moving experience of my life. The heaviness of those boxes was borne by the lightness of my heart. Here are some photographs for proof. As you can see, some of your comments were carried in by Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, who first spoke brilliantly at the press conference and then brought their star power to the doors of the Governor’s office and into the lobby of the DEC. In both their prepared remarks and in conversation with the Governor’s assistants and DEC employees, Yoko and Sean were eloquent, loving, and visionary. Together, they remind us that imaginative power of art is fundamental to social change. The comment delivery on Friday capped off a remarkable week that began on Monday in The Egg with Bill McKibben’s rally against fracking and other extreme forms of fossil fuel extraction. It continued with our record-breaking 2,000-people protest during Governor Cuomo’s State of the State address on Wednesday and the epic 12-hour public hearing on Thursday, at which three Assembly subcommittees heard testimony about the incoherent and fatally flawed book of regs that profess to govern fracking in New York. (The DEC, by the way, was a no-show at those hearings, as was the DOH.) My own testimony at that hearing focused on our work together as members of the Thirty Days community. You can read my written testimony here. In short, the fight against fracking in New York is now officially a citizen uprising. But this fight is not over. In fact, it’s just begun. Many more opportunities for speaking truth to power lie ahead. We need all of your voices and all of your words. With your blessing, I’d like to keep the 30 Days community going as a collective writing workshop. We can now turn our pens to authoring letters to the editors of our local newspapers and open letters to public officials. These are very powerful tools for public education and social change. I’ll be writing you in the days ahead to inform and advise you. But for now, nothing but thanks and admiration from me.  Poring through a book of bad regs was not the way any of us imagined spending our holiday reading time, but what an amazing 30 days we shared together. And now it lives on in the public record. And with a little luck and A LOT MORE had work on our part, this comment period might well become the 30 days that changed the world. You’ll be hearing from me soon. With love and an unalterable belief in the power of words— Sandra p.s. Here below are my remarks at the noon Friday press conference with Sean and Yoko that immediately preceded the comment delivery to the DEC. My name is Sandra Steingraber. I’m a co-founder of New Yorkers Against Fracking, and in my other life, I’m an environmental scientists and an author. I research and write about things that many people don’t want to hear about—contaminated breast milk, the world’s faltering plankton stocks, cancer. But I’ve never given myself a more difficult writing assignment than helping New Yorkers write comments on the revised, draft regulations for High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing in New York, a 328-page book of legal rules that was released right before the holiday and for which we were given the legal minimum of 30 days to submit our thoughts. Today is the 30th day of that public comment period. Not only did I have to persuade my readers to pore through a mind-numbing list of technical rules and judge their scientific soundness, the science itself was not available.  The scientific basis for the regulations—the regs—is housed in another document, the draft supplemental generic Environmental Impact Statement—the sGEIS—and that document is not finished yet. The regs we had to comment on were released before the completion of the scientific inquiry that is to serve as their foundation. The regs are, thus, arbitrary placeholders as part of a legal maneuver that allowed the Department of Environmental Conservation—the DEC—to avoid missing a rule-making deadline. I had to ask people to read and comment on something tedious, impossible, and absurd. And, oh, yeah, we were going to be doing this during the eight days of Hanukkah and the twelve days of Christmas. It was the writing assignment from hell. Governor Cuomo himself seemed aware of this predicament when he appeared as a guest on Susan Arbetter’s radio program, Capitol Pressroom, during the early days of the comment period. I was queued up on the phone to be the next guest to be interviewed when the Governor was asked what he expected from this comment period. He laughed and said—and I’m paraphrasing here—that he expected to hear from the four people in New York whom we had not heard from yet. Well, Governor Cuomo, on this 30th day, we bring you not four comments but 204,000 comments…and counting.  Because many people hosted holiday comment-writing parties and community-comment writing workshops and faith-based comment-writing after-worship coffee hours, we know that many more comments are being sent directly to the DEC and will be postmarked today. Some are handwritten. Some are highly technical documents with footnotes. All together, their resounding message is this:  safe fracking is a myth. No regs, especially not these flimsy ones, can protect us. And with these boxes come two other messages. One is for the DEC:  204,000 is a lot of comments. We fully expect you to log, read, and consider each and every one of these carefully constructed comments from the citizens of New York. We’ll be watching. The secrecy in your agency doesn’t cut it anymore. The second message is for Governor Cuomo. 204,000 is a lot of comments. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Millions more New Yorkers—who were out of town or too busy during the holidays to critically respond to a 328-page book of regulations—share our convictions. 204,000 is a lot of comments.  204,000 is a lot of votes. Enough votes to swing an election, even in a big state like New York. So how did we convince so many thousands of people to spend their holiday on a book of arbitrary rules? It didn’t take much. People realized that their lives were at stake. Many groups developed creative and thoughtful ways for people to compose and submit comments. My own project was 30 Days of Fracking Regs. It worked like an Advent calendar. Each day, I posted one reg, translated it into plainspoken English, and then provided some science to serve as a basis for evaluation. (This was necessary because there was no sGEIS for context.) Then, readers were encouraged to compose their own comments. Grassroots Environmental Education developed a logo, ran radio ads, programmed a website, answered all queries, and downloaded and printed out all the submitted comments. For example, one day we looked at the reg that governs how close a drill rig can be located from our homes. That setback distance is 500. Is that distance sufficiently protective to our safety and health? Well, let’s just consider noise pollution. A fracking drill runs continuously, 24/7, for one to two months, and as many as six wells can be drilled from a single wellpad, meaning six months to a year of constant noise. A fracking drill has a decibel level on the wellpad of 115. To put that in perspective: a helicopter and a jackhammer each come in at 105. At 500 feet, the noise level is less but still exceeds 55 decibels, which is maximum level that is considered healthful while awake. It exceeds 45 decibels, which is the maximum level that is considered healthful while asleep, and it exceeds 35 decibels, which is the maximum level for children in school who are trying to learn. Above those levels, academic performance and attention span goes down in children, and we adults are at risk for high blood pressure and heart disease. So, on one of our 30 days of fracking regs, we all wrote about noise pollution. One amazing project that spun out from 30 Days was Homework Against Fracking, and Ren Ostry from my own Ithaca College, and who is here in the audience to answer press questions, is part of the brains behind this initiative. Homework Against Fracking involved college students home on break not only using their critical skills in argumentative writing to create comments but also hosting workshops so that high school and middle-school students could do the same. Here is the result of their work. And now I’d like to close by reading just two of the 204,000 comments that will be heading to DEC offices this afternoon.