Creation Care Corner
This month we present another cost of our country’s addiction to fossil fuel:
The Department of Transportation has not been enforcing their hazardous-materials (HAZMAT) rules for hauling oil and gas waste. This puts both communities and truck drivers in danger. The hazardous waste results from fracking, which has increased the US output of oil in recent years. Water containing undisclosed chemicals is forced down through wells into shale rock deposits containing oil, causing fissures in the rock and releasing oil. The unfortunate part of this is that it produces several barrels of wastewater for every barrel of oil. This wastewater is hauled to “disposal sites”, and contains chemically-contaminated water, and can also contain drilling fluids, sludge, sands, brine, lead-210, benzene, and radioactive materials (radium-226, radium-228) which were locked in the underground rock formations.
Exposure to these substances is linked to bone and other cancers, blood disorders, liver damage, kidney disease, neurological damage, acute myeloid leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and reproductive defects. Hydrogen sulfide gas exposure from the industry has killed workers and people living in the vicinity of oil and gas production. Other impacts linked to oil and gas waste include respiratory, skin, and eye irritation and organ damage.
The oil and gas companies are required to test their waste for hazardous materials before loading it onto trucks, but drivers and operators report that they often do not. In some cases, a single truck load can contain more than 2,000 times the Department of Transportation’s legal cargo limit for radioactive materials. Drivers are routinely sent out without the necessary training, certification, insurance, and protective equipment required, and are underpaid for the risks they are taking. Some don’t even know they are hauling toxic or radioactive substances.
An organization called Truckers Movement for Justice (TMJ) represents about 15,000 owner-operators and company drivers from Mexico and the U.S. who are demanding that the DOT enforce its rules to improve their working conditions. The organization’s leader said, “You bring (oil and gas waste) home. You’re going home in work clothes. You’re sitting in your car to drive home. Your wife might use that for the weekend to go shopping. What do you think – that stuff just disappears?” “(Drivers) don’t even know what the h–l they’re trucking.”
TMJ’s attorney says, “The oil and gas industry enjoys so many legal loopholes that deprive workers and communities of information about the toxic exposures they experience from oil and gas waste.”
-Sandy McKitrick