EPA tells Wyo. town the water isn't safe to drink

The Environmental Protection Agency has told residents of a small Wyoming town near extensive natural gas drilling not to drink their water. "The announcement accompanied results from a second round of testing and analysis in the town of Pavillion  by Superfund investigators for [EPA]," Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublica reports. "Researchers found benzene, metals, naphthalene, phenols and methane in wells and in groundwater. They also confirmed the presence of other compounds that they had tentatively identified last summer and that may be linked to drilling activities."

"Last week it became clear to us that the information that we had gathered was going to potentially result in a hazard -- result in a recommendation to some of you that you not continue to drink your water," Martin Hestmark, deputy assistant regional administrator for ecosystems protection and remediation with the EPA in Denver, told a crowd of about 100 gathered at a community center in Pavillion (pop. 174) Tuesday night. "We understand the gravity of that." EnCana, the oil and gas company that owns most of the wells near Pavillion, will "contribute to the cost of supplying residents with drinking water, even though the company has not accepted responsibility for the contamination," Lustgarten writes. (Read more)

"What I believe is we need to find the source. We need to get this shut down now before it just keeps spreading," Pavillion-area resident Louis Meeks told Dustin Bleizeffer of the Casper Star-Tribune. EnCana officials at the meeting refused to connect the water quality with drilling operations. "While there's been a full year of additional testing, the science remains inconclusive," EnCana spokesman Randy Teeuwen told Bleizeffer. He said the EPA's findings "further confirms there is bad water in the area. But we've known that for a long time. It still does not point to oil and gas operations." (Read more)