the Monongahela at Pittsburgh
This American Life, an award-winning National Public Radio news series hosted by Ira Glass and produced by Sarah Koenig, ran an hour-long pair of stories about gas drilling in the Monongahela watershed last week entitled “Game Changer”. The stories concern two professors, the Monongahala River, Dunkard Creek and a small town in the Monongahela watershed, Mount Pleasant.
The first segment features the aforementioned professors– one from Penn State, and one from the University of Pittsburgh– both of whom have come to national prominence on the issue of hydrofracking the Marcellus shale. Here is how they are compared in the promotion for the show:
“A professor in Pennsylvania makes a calculation, to discover that his state is sitting atop a massive reserve of natural gas—enough to revolutionize how America gets its energy. But another professor in Pennsylvania does a different calculation and reaches a troubling conclusion: that getting natural gas out of the ground poses a risk to public health. Two men, two calculations, and two very different consequences.”
The first professor, Terry Engelder, a geologist at Penn State, estimated how much natural gas might be recoverable from the Marcellus shale. His answer: 50 trillion cubic feet. Engelder’s announcement of his findings will bring him national acclaim.
Once the drilling boom was underway, Dan Volz, at the University of Pittsburg, estimated how much toxic waste from the fracking process might be getting into water supplies. He calculated that if the 13 water treatment plants in the upper Monongahela watershed acceped their full allotments of drilling waste, they would be putting 800,000 pounds — or about 16 dump truck loads – of solid toxic waste (such as strontium, bromide & barium) into the Monongahela each day. Volz’s announcement of his findings will bring him national notoreity and eventually lead to his leaving the university.
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