News reports on the Marcellus Shale gas industry cover increasing numbers of environmental and health protection law violations. Gas wells leaking, spills of toxic chemicals, illegal dumping of wastewater into rivers — surely, the companies responsible must face severe fines and penalties?

 

In May, Clean Water Action released a report analyzing the Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) enforcement activity for 2011 against natural gas drilling companies. The report’s findings raise huge concerns:

• While DEP issued 1,192 violations, few penalties were imposed.
• Fewer than half the violations resulted in any enforcement actions.
• Only 7% of the violators faced monetary fines.
• Fines being assessed on one company were not assessed against other companies committing identical violations.

Clean Water Action also documented cases where violations posing serious environmental and health threats — such as gas wells not being properly cemented and cased — carried virtually no consequences for the environmental lawbreakers.

With state funding for the DEP at historic lows, such enforcement failures are to be expected. This year Gov. Corbett again cut the DEP’s budget, this time by $12.4 million. This represents the fourth year in a row of budget cuts for DEP, totaling $92.7 million or 43% of the agency’s budget. Just a decade ago, Gov. Tom Ridge’s budgets allocated almost three times as much for the DEP.

Clean Water Action is campaigning for:

• Consistent enforcement of environmental and health law violations.
• Harsher punishments for repeat violators.
• No more drilling permits for companies with extensive violation records.
• Restoration of DEP’s budget.

The report on DEP enforcement of gas drilling violations is available at www.cleanwater.org/pa