In January the Los Angeles Times published an article about the fracking boomtown of Vernal, Utah. It described how a midwife named Donna Young was attacked and demonized for raising awareness of the rise in stillbirths in the city and her opposition to the idea that industry, which provides half of its annual budget, could be responsible .
With its fracking economy booming, Vernal, Utah, doesn’t want to know why babies die.
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Now Rolling Stone Magazine has delved deeper into the history of Vernal, as well as the political story behind its history, examining how rural areas used to become fracking hubs and how this affected their residents, in one piece: “What’s Killing the Babies of. ” Spring, Utah? ”
It describes how Young lost most of her customers, received death threats, and exposed an attempt to poison her cattle after the question was raised of whether Vernal’s booming oil industry has caused the wave of stillbirths, miscarriages, and birth defects in recent times Years.
“In most places, seeing serious danger to children would inspire people to name a road for you,” writes reporter Paul Solotaroff. “But in Vernal, a city literally built of oil, if you raise questions about the safety of fracking, you will be labeled a traitor and a target.”
Two years ago, Young discovered that at least 10 babies had died in 2013 alone, a high number for a city of 10,000 people. She brought the problem to the attention of TriCounty Director of Health, Joe Shaffer. The department conducted a study, but Young says it was a half-hearted attempt to uncover the cause of the epidemic, a deliberate attempt to circumvent the truth. As Rolling Stone describes it:
The county counted only infant deaths and brushed aside the facts about Vernal air pollution: ozone levels that rivaled the worst of summer days in New York, Los Angeles or Salt Lake City; Particulate matter as bad as Mexico City; and soil air, which is polluted with carcinogenic gases such as benzene and harmful emissions from oil and gas wells. In fact, the pollution in this rural bowl was so bad that it was breaking new ground in climate science. The basin, bordered on all four sides by mountains, is a perfectly shaped trough for winter inversions, in which the 20-below weather is wedged into the valley and sealed there by warmer air above it. During these periods, when the haze is visible and the air in the lungs is a cold chisel, the sun’s rays reflect off the snow on the ground, boiling the volatile gases into ozone. The worst time of its kind in the recent history of the basin was the winter of 2012/13, when almost all Uintah mothers whose babies died were pregnant.
When the study was published, the deaths were labeled “statistically insignificant”. The epidemiologist who conducted the study told citizens to shift the blame for the deaths on maternal health problems such as smoking, diabetes and prenatal neglect.
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Rolling Stone answers:
That begs a question you might be asking yourself in a state whose lawmakers are so ruthless on oil and gas money that they have put millions aside to sue the federal government for the right, near Moab and the desolation Canyon, some of the most sacred places in the state, to drill: How many dead babies does it take to accept that there is a problem?
While the deliberate, furious denial of the citizens of Vernal, whose livelihoods depend on the fracking industry, is understandable what will upset the reader, the background the Rolling Stone provides on the wild west fracking boom that the Prefer oil and gas exploration to the lives of young children. It goes back to the early days of the Bush / Cheney administration and, for those who have forgotten, re-enacts the Cheney-led closed-door meetings where fossil fuel barons essentially rewrote the U.S. energy bill for their own benefit the public drilling has massively expanded the country and freed itself from environmental regulations.
In essence, Cheney’s program turned the Home Office into a boiler room broker for big oil and undermined the power of the Environmental Protection Agency. Cheney’s plan was such a transparent coup for Big Oil that it took four years, two elections, and the Republicans’ capture of both Houses of Congress to land on Bush’s desk as legislation. Along the way, the bill received a crucial addition to what is now known as the “Halliburton Loophole”: a free pass to an emerging technique called fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The effects of these far-reaching changes affected the daily lives of people in cities like Vernal.
“Fracking has moved the oil field to people’s backyards and has significantly increased the pollution they have breathed in small towns,” said Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Rolling Stone. “Basically, it has industrialized rural areas and brought them many of the related health problems that we are used to in cities.”
And Rolling Stone describes the official silence on growing health problems as reaching far beyond Vernal, as wells in formerly pristine areas have been leaking, blown out and methane torches have been put out in a bill banning them from regulating the growth of fracking in their cities.
Rolling Stone says:
Whatever Cheney is doing, he has to look at his work and smile. OPEC has lost its hand on oil prices, SUVs are being sold out again and Obama is doing winning laps because we now produce more oil than we import. Good news for everyone – except for the people in more than 30 states who wake up to the rumble of fracking rigs. For them, the message from Washington was tacit but final: you people out there are on your own.
After four of her five clients recently miscarried, Donna Young has the water tested in their homes. Rolling Stone Reports:
Most of the lots tested were positive for extreme toxicity from hydrogen sulfide, H2S, one of the deadliest gases released when drilling. Contact with it has killed a number of oil rig workers over the past few decades. If the concentration is high enough, one breath is enough. In much smaller quantities is H2S can cause miscarriages – and the levels Young found were more than 7,000 times the EPA safety threshold.
“I know I have to call someone, but who?” Young told Rolling Stone. “Who can you trust in this city?”
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