On June 2nd the public meeting entitled “Public Meeting on the Adverse Impacts of Marcellus Natural Gas Activities: Where Are We, Where Are We Going” was held at the Skyview Elementary School, near the Marcellus well site at the Morgantown Industrial Park. One of the significant themes of this meeting was the public health risks to the public water supply, to the regional air quality and from the very large increase in truck traffic. The minutes of that meeting have been posted to the UMRA web site.
More recently, the health secretary in Pennsylvania has recommended a plan to study these public health risks. Health Secretary Eli Avila told Governor Corbett’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission that creating a health effects registry is the timeliest and most important step the Department of Health could take given the level of Marcellus drilling underway, and that his agency is not aware of anything like it in other drilling states. This story is in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Collecting information on drilling-related health complaints, investigating them, centralizing the information in one database and then comparing illnesses in drilling communities with non-drilling communities could help refute or verify claims that drilling has an impact on public health, he said. The aggregation of data and information also would allow the Department of Health to make its findings public, in contrast to the privacy that surrounds its investigation into individual health complaints and the findings that may result, according to the Wheeling Intelligencer.
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