Imagine a physician caring for a child whose illness might have been caused by long-term exposure to a proprietary fracking chemical while playing near a drill site. Assume that after signing a legally binding nondisclosure agreement, the physician is given the identity of the chemical and comes to believe it caused the illness. What can the physician tell the families of other neighborhood children who play in the same field?
Under the newly enacted law, copied almost verbatim from a controversial Colorado law, a physician may receive information about a proprietary chemical used in the fracking process, but the physician must agree to not reveal this information to the public. The law also allows the company to keep secret from physicians information about agents that come up from the ground during drilling, such as natural gas constituents -- which themselves can be toxic -- and naturally occurring toxic agents such as arsenic, barium, brine components and radioactive compounds dissolved in flowback water. Nor can public health authorities begin with knowledge of a secret chemical and ask whether there is an increase in an illness that the chemical is known to cause.
Drillers should have an affirmative duty to know what dangerous chemicals they are introducing into the environment. Instead, the bill is laced with excuses: "the vendor didn't tell us" or "it was unintentional" or "it must be due to a chemical reaction." But chemicals inherently react with each other -- that is their nature. By making ignorance an excuse, the law absolves drillers from doing their homework.
TVNL Comment: Important Read: the Top Ten Myths about Pennsylvania’s "The Mad Rush to Frack Act" - The Biggest Gas Industry GiveAway Yet.
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