(Bloomberg)— When tap water burns, it’s probably time to admit there’s a problem. Yet not everyone agrees, which is one of the more disturbing messages of “Gasland,” a uniquely unsettling but entertaining HBO documentary about pollution caused by the expanding search for “clean” natural gas within the United States. The film, which airs June 21 at 9 p.m. New York time, is the work of Josh Fox, who may go down in history as the Paul Revere of fracking – short for hydraulic fracturing, the process by which natural gas is extracted. He tells a profoundly alarming story yet does not come across as a mouth-breathing alarmist. Instead, he’s funny and passionate though, to be sure, no fan of Dick Cheney. The film won the 2010 Documentary Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Fox became suspicious when energy companies began offering large amounts of money for natural gas drilling rights to residents of the Delaware River Basin, where he lives. He could have enjoyed a signing bonus of around $100,000, he says, but a 24-state road trip to see what he’d get in return for his money confirmed his original decision: no sale. Fox traces the problem to the Cheney-backed Energy Policy Act of 2005, which exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act and other environmental regulations. This unleashed a massive gas grope, according to the film. There are now some 450,000 gas wells in 34 states. Fracking fluids, which help release gas deposits trapped in rocks, contain neurotoxins and carcinogens. Trillions of gallons of contaminated water, he estimates, have been produced by the process and largely left to seep back into the earth, or evaporate. Fox heads west, where he finds a new type of firewater. In rural Colorado several residents turn on their kitchen sinks and light the water afire. The roaring flames make you wonder if they might be able to fuel their cars with their gas-contaminated tap water. In other drilling areas in Colorado and Wyoming residents complain of persistent headaches, loss of smell and taste and having to buy their drinking water from Wal Mart. Fox manages to maintain his sense of humor. During a trip through the Jonah Gas Fields in Wyoming he exits his car (wearing a gas mask) and plays “This Land is Your Land” on his banjo, a poignant choice since he’s on public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management that’s been leased out for exploration. Perhaps the most memorable disaster area is DISH, Texas (RICK – TOWN NAME IS SPELLED IN ALL CAPS), where the air is not only thick with neurotoxins and carcinogens but perhaps flammable as well. Mayor Calvin Tillman muses, darkly, that “some guy is going to be cooking his hamburger one day and blow up the town.” The film shifts back to the Marcellus Shale Field, which stretches from the Catskills of New York to West Virginia and is called the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” This area is also the country’s largest unfiltered watershed, supplying 16.5 million people, including residents of New York, with drinking water. In a gotcha moment, John Hanger, Pennsylvania’s secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, downplays pollution dangers yet when Fox offers him a drink of water from Dimock, PA, where animals have begun losing their hair he declines. In Congress, Fox finds lobbyists and energy executives trying to derail a bill that would regulate some of the chemicals used in fracking. Sen. Dan Boren, D-Oklahoma, accuses critics of “searching for a problem that does not exist.” This will come as news to residents of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where gas well explosions on June 3 and 7 did immense damage; in Pennsylvania toxic chemicals spewed into the air for sixteen hours. Pennsylvania has halted construction of 70 wells pending environmental review. Meanwhile, maybe Rep. Boren would like a slug of that high-octane tap water. It might change his perspective.
