News
Sep 28, 2011
Cows drink frack water and birth stillborn calves
Burning Questions: Quarantined Cows Give Birth to Dead Calves
September 27, 2011 | 1:52 PM
By Susan Phillips
This is part of an ongoing StateImpact series answering reader-submitted burning questions about natural gas drilling. Last week, we tackled water testing, whether or not fracking can lead to earthquakes, the status of the state’s deep injection wells, and all things water. Today we’re following up to a story covered heavily by the press more than a year ago.
In late April 2010, drilling waste water from a large storage pond leaked through its plastic liner and flowed onto a cow pasture in Shippen Township, Tioga County. Farmers Don and Carol Johnson found the leak, along with the hoof prints of 28 beef cattle who had wandered through and possibly drank the contaminated water. The waste water came from a well that had been fracked on their property by East Resources.
When tested, the water contained chloride, iron, sulfate, barium, magnesium, manganese, potassium, sodium, strontium and calcium. The spill killed all vegetation in an area 30 feet by 40 feet. In early May, Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture quarantined the cows, worried that the resulting beef could be tainted and make people sick. East Resources objected to the quarantine, saying it was an unnecessary step to take. It was Pennsylvania’s first quarantine resulting from gas drilling.
In this most recent “burning question” we’re looking at what happened to those cows. The question comes from Andy Leahy, and it’s a good one. Leahy is a blogger with NY Shale Gas Now. He asked the question because he says reporters will often seize on a potentially catastrophic headline, but fail to follow-up and report the real impact.
“If the animals got sick and died, I’m sure that would be news,” wrote Leahy in an email. “But I have heard no such thing. And there is a fairly well-placed, hard-working constituency out there, making sure the media finds out these things.”
Leahy says if nothing horrible happens to the cows, the media doesn’t report it, and the end result is biased coverage. There were some news reports published about a year ago that said the cows were happy and healthy. But we tracked down the farmer, Carol Johnson, to find out how they’re doing now. It turns out Johnson is pretty worried about her cows. Although no one actually saw the cows drink the frack water, she says there’s no reason to believe they didn’t.
“Well, you don’t put hoof marks in that water, that deep, without somebody drinking something,” says Johnson.
The water had a high salt content, and Johnson says animals, including cows like to lick up salt.
Of the original cows, only ten yearlings are still quarantined. But Johnson says of the eleven calves born this spring, only 3 have survived.
“It’s abominable,” says Johnson, who along with her husband Don, has been raising cows on that land for 53 years, after taking over the farm from Don Johnson’s grandfather. “They were born dead or extremely weak. It’s highly unusual,” she said. “I might lose one or two calves a year, but I don’t lose eight out of eleven.”
Johnson says necropsies of two calves have been performed and it lists ecoli bacteria as the cause of death. She says a veterinarian she consulted said the mother’s could have compromised immunities from ingesting the frack water.
Shell Oil and Gas has since taken over East Resources, and now controls the lease. Johnson says she wants Shell to buy her entire herd of cattle and start fresh. And she warns hunters she sees near her property not to eat any of the game they catch. “Deer, grouse, rabbits, they’re up on that [well] pad licking,” she says. “They don’t know what’s in the water.…The whole thing has become one big mess.”
We asked Shell if they would be willing to buy the Johnson cows but haven’t yet heard back from them. We’ll let you know when we do. Carol Johnson says she regularly tests her water for contaminants and so far, it’s come up clean.