The fine folks at ProPublica had another interesting oil and gas drilling story a couple of weeks ago, reporting:

Hydraulic fracturing, along with other processes used to drill wells, generates emissions and millions of gallons of hazardous waste that are dumped into open-air pits. The pits have been shown to leak into groundwater and also give off chemical emissions as the fluids evaporate. Residents’ most common complaints are respiratory infections, headaches, neurological impairment, nausea and skin rashes. More rarely, they have reported more serious effects, from miscarriages and tumors to benzene poisoning and cancer.

ProPublica examined government environmental reports and private lawsuits and interviewed scores of residents, physicians and toxicologists in four states—Colorado, Texas, Wyoming and Pennsylvania—that are drilling hot spots. Our review showed that cases like Wallace-Babb’s go back a decade in parts of Colorado and Wyoming, where drilling has taken place for years. They are just beginning to emerge in Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus Shale drilling boom began in earnest in 2008.

Concern about such health complaints is longstanding—Congress held hearings on them in 2007 at which Wallace-Babb testified. But the extent and cause of the problems remains unknown. Neither states nor the federal government have systematically tracked reports from people like Wallace-Babb, or comprehensively investigated how drilling affects human health.

I was reminded of this piece the other day when I saw the Wheeling paper’s headline, Doctor Wants Study of Drilling’s Impact, in which they reported:

The impact of hydraulic fracturing on the public’s health still needs to be studied, said Dr. Alan Ducatman.

Ducatman, West Virginia University School of Public Health dean, made the point during a program held Tuesday at Ohio Valley Medical Center in Wheeling. The program, “Marcellus Shale Drilling: A Health Perspective,” was hosted by the Ohio County Medical Society, OVMC and the Wheeling Area Chamber of Commerce.

Ducatman said things that could be impacted are people’s water, air and their environment in general, such as their roads and homes. For example, some patients, including some Marcellus Shale gas drilling workers, have come into his clinic with a variety of complaints. Workers have had acid burns or other skin irritations. But such complaints or issues are common in industry in general, he added.

Others patients complain about noise from well pad sites and related trucking, and still others about air pollution and bright lights from sites keeping them awake at night.

“The industry should get out in front of these issues,” Ducatman said, referring to initiating health studies.

Regular readers know that Dr. Ducatman’s department at WVU has been doing a lot of important work on both the health impacts of mountaintop removal and on the effects of the toxic chemical C8 … it would be fascinating to see the WVU team get involved in looking more closely at gas drilling’s impacts.

West Virginia’s prescription drug abuse problem was spotlighted in January when the Gazette published a series by reporter Alison Knezevich on the issue.  She will be speaking about it on NPR’s On Point this morning at 10 a.m.

The show doesn’t air locally in Charleston, but the audio should be available about 11 a.m.

Alison is one of three guests being interviewed for an hour on On Point. Reporters Laura Ungar from the Courier-Journal in Louisville and Janet Zink from the Tallahassee bureau for the Saint Petersburg Times and Miami Herald will also share their perspectives on the issue.

In January she reported, West Virginia has the nation’s highest rate of drug deaths. Between 2001 and 2008, more than nine out of 10 of those deaths involved prescription drugs.

Alison has continued to follow the issue. In April the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy unveiled a plan, praised by West Virginia leaders, that’s designed to reduce prescription drug misuse by 15 percent over the next five years.

Here’s another video of the fight outside Impulse night club early in the morning of April 24.

There’s audio, but it’s hard to make out what anyone is saying. At one point a guy looks at the camera and says, “MMA, how you gettin’ whooped?”

Woody Woods from 98.7 The Beat told me about it a little while ago, when he asked me to come on his show this evening to talk about the story.

Also, in case you missed it, Danny Jones said the city could close Impulse, if things got out of hand.

A new report out this morning raises some interesting questions about the way West Virginia writes rules and regulations to govern everything from coal mining pollution to drug company marketing expenditures.

The discussion of West Virginia rulemaking is part of a broader, national examination of rulemaking in states around the country. The report, 52 Experiments with Regulatory Review: The Political and Economic Inputs into State Rulemakings, was put together by the New Y0rk University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

Regarding West Virginia’s rulemaking procedures, the report concludes:

West Virginia’s regulatory review scheme concentrates virtually all regulatory power in the hands of the Legislature. While the arrangement is designed to ensure that regulatory decisions are made by democratically accountable legislators, the system often seems to take regulatory power away from independent agencies experts and exposes the rulemaking process to political influence.

(more…)

As discussed in today’s story, The Charleston Gazette filed a lawsuit against the West Virginia State Police for reports produced by the department’s professional standards section on Wednesday.

This all started in May as an attempt to get a better understanding of how the State Police handle accusations against them.

And here’s a copy of the lawsuit filed yesterday.

The information the State Police released in this report says that 13 troopers were dismissed in 2009 based on sustained allegations, up from three the previous year. An additional 19 resigned prior to discipline. There were a total of 112 incidents where action was taken in 2009, according to the report.

The number of total complaints for the department has gone down, from 257 in 2007 to 165 in 2009. Of the 226 allegations contained in those complaints, about 50 percent were sustained and 24 percent were not sustained. Only 6 percent were exonerated.

But while the released statistics show the total number of complaints to be going down, the serious allegations of abuse keep coming.

Last month, the FBI confirmed they started an investigation into the Young Brothers.

These three stories from July do a good job of telling the other recent accusations:

W.Va. State Police stay mum on inquiries

Case closed in trooper rape accusation

Prosecutor not told ex-trooper falsified log

photo by Jim Noelker

This is the closing chapter of Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s autobiography, “Child of the Appalachian coalfields“:

Having completed fifty years in Congress as of 2002, and with some years remaining in the eighth six-year term to which the people of West Virginia have elected me, I have chosen to close this story of my journeys. Never having forgotten my roots, I continue to be aware that my highest duty is to West Virginia and to the people of that state who have honored me with public office for more than a half-century.

My own less-than-modest beginnings and the poverty of my state during my boyhood years have never faded from my view, and it has been my constant desire to improve the lives of the people who have sent me to Washington time and time again. To them, I shall be grateful from the bottom of my heart as long as I live.

The road from Wolf Creek Hollow has been uphill and downhill, long and tenuous and winding — a road filled with indelible memories: the ghosts of vanished years, the faces of long gone and the voices long stilled. It was a road filled with hopes in the morning of life; preparation when the sun was at its meridian; and service in the long afternoon with lengthening shadows that stretch away to the hills of Night. To paraphrase Robert Frost, it has been a road “less traveled by,” and that has “made all the difference.”

“There is no writer that shall not perish;

but what his hand hath written endureth forever.”

– From The Thousand and One Nights