The Truth About Who Has Damaged Water Quality and It's Not the Natural Gas Industry

A few days ago, I was struck by the news a few days ago that the usual suspects are, more than a decade and a half later, still trying to make fractivist hay out of Dimock, Pennsylvania. It’s all so yesterday. Then, as I was surfing the internet a bit this morning, I came across a Pennsylvania DEP site called the 2024 Integrated Report Viewer, which provides data the Commonwealth assembles for the purposes of annual water quality reporting. It’s very interesting.

Here, in fact, is a section of the map the site used to present the water quality data and it covers the Dimock area:

The light blue lines are streams and the color indicates the stream water quality of all streams in the vicinity support aquatic life and are not impaired. That’s not the narrative being pedaled by so many, but it’s a fact.

And, here is where I grew up in Damascus Township, Wayne County, in the Upper Delaware River Valley where the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) has, exercising Chevron deference, banned fracking for now:

This map shows the same blue lines and reports the same conditions; stream water quality supporting aquatic life with no impairments. The same situation applies in both instances, except that the same governing majority running the DRBC allows the hydraulic fracturing within the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) region that is banned by the DRBC, with no justification for the disparate treatment whatsover.

But, the most powerful evidence the DRBC ban is nothing more than an act of raw political power, is found in this map section from the Philadephia region:

Notice there’s almost no blue on this map but there’s a spaghetti network of yellow lines. Those are streams with impaired water quality and if we look closer and focus on a part of Northeast Philadelphia know as Bridesburg we see this:

This is a former industrial site once occupied by chemical manufacturer Rohm & Haas. It is located along Frankford Creek before it dumps into the Delaware River. When one clicks on the yellow line, it is also learned why the water is impaired; because it is contaminated by PCBs very likely used on the Rohm & Haas site.

Why is this important? Well, the trust-funder generations of the Haas family put much of their inherited fortune into a private foundation (a NGO) called the William Penn Foundation, that has granted money to the DRBC and groups such as the Delaware Riverkeeper that were simultaneously suing the DRBC and fighting fracking, pipelines and all sorts of development in the Upper Delaware region, instead of working to clean up the Lower Delaware. So, we have the perfect example of NGO and government corruption; a case of the polluters attacking the preservers to divert attention away from the sins of their fathers. That's what they do.

#Pennsylvania #DEP #ImpairedStreams #Fracking #DRC #SRBC #Chevron #DelawareRiver #Dimock