Your predecessor approved Marcellus drill cuttings to go into regular household

Dear Mr Martens,

Your predecessor approved Marcellus drill cuttings to go into regular household landfill in Chemung County.. Now Steuben County wants to follow that precedent..Angelica NY is also accepting Marcellus drill cuttings in private dump operated by Casella waste management but of course surrounded by public property which could be affected.

UNLIMITED AMOUNTS of drill cuttings are permitted now to go into the Chemung County landfill which was not designed for this purpose. That landfill was not sited for such hazardous waste as it is a couple of hundred feet from the Chemung river which according to documents filed is used for drinking water for Elmira.

Very limited testing of the drill cuttings showed that these few samples were slightly above background radiation and no specifics regarding radium chemical tests were done.
Radium is especially cancer causing if ingested or if radon is inhaled due to alpha particles emitted. These alpha radiations are not the ones that are sounding any alarm on a Geiger counter .

BY NY state law, "processed" NORM also called TENORM by the EPA which concentrates the amount of radium in the rock is supposed to be treated as hazzardous waste not household garbage. These drill cuttings qualify as "processed" by anthropomorphic means because they are transported from 1 mile under our feet not only on top of the earth but all concentrated and focused into a couple of locations only and then permitted to receive unlimited amounts. In addition they are "processed" by containing lubricants and or liquid that is much more radioactive than the rock was by itself and that could be about 20% of the drill cuttings. These liquids qualify as hazardous. The EPA will not permit the rock cuttings to be landfarmed in Pa according to Vince Spangoletti because of the lubricant on the rock cuttings. .

At any rate, Pa should dispose of their own created hazard. If we in NY ever have hydrofracking-- is Pa taking NY hazardous rock drill cuttings?

Citizens in Elmira sued the Chemung county landfill in 2010 and only after the suit was filled did Casella Waste management even bother to take some sample and pay Cophysics to test these sample with a counter - not by chemically testing for Radium.

The data collection was flawed. This was verified by three experts speaking for the citizens group in the law suit. Dr Ingraffea, Dr Resnikoff and Dr Volk made the same observations that the data did not prove a chain of custody. I As an informed citizen I could also see easily when I read how Casella employees I presume collected the samples without documentation as to who collected, where was it collected, how were these persons qualified to choose the site of collection and the way to handle the specimen and were there any witnesses. Did they swear that they did not manipulate the samples by for example passing a Geiger counter over the rock and lowballing the samples..

Dr Conrad Volk recommended that the rock drill cuttings be tested chemically for Radium. His recommendation was disputed by DEC attorney Lisa Schwartz Esq on the basis that it was presented a couple of days too late and besides the DEC did not have the staffing to do anything about that. (The entire permission to run this dump was all started after Casella waste management was accepting drill cuttings of Marcellus into the Chemung landfill for some time in 2009 but did not report it to the DEC until the high holiday of Christmas time 2009 and they were never fined for running a new process without a permit.

All these documents regarding how the Chemung Landfill was permitted by the DEC now leads to other landfills to also follow along- .
The significant Chemung landfill lawsuit documents are here, thanks to a citizens law suit filed with the leadership of Dr Robinson, a medical doctor from Elmira and Gary Abraham Esq, the citizens lawyer has these documents on his website::http://www.garyabraham.com/ChemungLF.html

In addition I am concerned that the landfill in Angelica NY after accepting Marcellus drill cuttings ran into a problem: Rumors had it that the methane gas production in the landfill went down to only 10% of were it had been before. This was never reported by the press and most citizens knew nothing about it. One landfill worker was concerned but seemed not well informed by management. I was able to verify that this happened because I spoke with the quality assurance manager of the Steuben County landfill , Mr Bils (sp?), at a Forum about Marcellus drill cuttings in Bath NY to a packed Fire Hall in early June 2011..//www.the-leader.com/features/x1162604915/More-than-200-show-up-for-forum-...
He confirmed that this problem of not capturing the expected methane was going on in Angelica. He said they at Steuben was going to take in less drill cuttings and avoid this problem.

However, I question that it is at all the right solution to capture methane at all ALONG WITH RADON!!!! Where was the DEC responsible for overseeing this going on for most of 2010 and 2011 in Angelica NY and is that not putting the landfill workers at risk and others ?.

Why was this happening? some say it was the clay blanket that EPA told them to put on the drill cuttings and that it inhibited the methane also. Others say that it was the toxic liquid which accompanies the drill cuttings and could have killed the beneficial bacteria in the landfill that digest the garbage into methane.

The public should be informed about problems and solutions. We do not even know if these problems were reported or noted by DEC or EPA. We are aware that the EPA and DEC are interested in harnessing the methane and making use of it in landfills and I would think that drill cuttings if they are an opposing focus or material deserve a separate cell treated in a different fashion and that landfill workers are properly informed why things are done or not..

Radon should be staying down under and NOT be encouraged to bubble up and be captured above ground along with methane. We know it has a 3.8 day half life but one of the radon progeny Lead 210 has a 11 year half life and then it also radiates alpha particles as the polonium 210 decays to stable lead 206 -- which is still a heavy metal that causes permanent brain damage especially to fetus and children.

If the drill cuttings are declared to be deposited in a hazzardous landfill, then a new liner would be used and the plumbing would be the latest and best suited for liquids that contain not only radioactive but also heavy metals that cause permanent brain damage especially to children. :Waste management is making huge profits. They should also be endemnified with a fund to be used when workers or neighbors get too much cancer or other health problems.

.I was told that DEC tested only two samples of Marcellus drill cuttings from vertical wells in NY. - that is insufficient number of samples for a admittedly variable black shale and the decision resulting from these tests is a significant one and connected with building a land fill or not and how much to accept in the fill. They should have cooordinated with the DEP of Pa and gotten a wider range of samples under chain of custody from their partners in Pa from horizontal wells..

Radon gas causes 21,000 lung cancer death per year according to EPA and is more than drunk driving deaths . We in NY have about 4 unites in the soil ( sorry, forget the unit ) which is the safe limit of Radon in the soil in the Southern Tier and this Radon will add more into the unsafe level.

I attended the Steuben county legislature meeting June 27, 2011 .These legislators were briefed earlier in the year about drill cuttings in their landfill using a written document presented by the county Public Works Commissioner Vince Spangoletti. He confirmed that this document was not handed to the legislators to examine themselves. That document was paid for by the Casella waste management company who have a clear conflict of interest. Vince said he gave his copy to Rachel. When she was asked she as a member of the Sierra Club asked for that document using the FOIA request and after she got the document, she also got a formal letter from Casella warning her that she was not privy to distributing the document. So you have here a publicly elected officials not being given a copy that will be used to decide how to vote on the issue of enlarging the public landfill and it is based on a document that is not in the public domain..

Transporting Marcellus drill cutting should be labeled as hazardous on the roads. A dump truck with this material spilled on the road near Corning http://www.the-leader.com/features/x863066667/Truck-carrying-well-drill-... and because it was not labeled properly, police could not call the HazMat team. The cuttings were picked up by volunteer fire fighters. They have inadequate training do this. The NY legislature refused to pass legislation about hazardous waste transportation.

On another important request, I ask you Mr Martens to remove Bradley J Field from his position as head of Division of Mineral Resources DMR as he has been lying to the public for so many years saying that there was never a well that had a problem in the state of NY -- he has burned all credibility and political capital and is less that useful to the state , its people and the environment and he cannot possibly be a good leader to that critical department.

Lastly before allowing drilling on NY State forest, make an assessment of the loss of habitat to fauna and flora due to direct loss of habitat and fragmentation . Also make an assessment how much these trees contribute to sequestering carbon dioxide before they are felled and contrast that with all the fugitive methane and other gases which will be spilled into the atmosphere considering that methane is twenty times as strong a green house gas than carbon dioxide and eventually will turn into carbon dioxide and hang around for a total of 100 years. Also contrast that with the Keeping curve of where we are heading in the planet on total carbon dioxide parts per million and will the NY state policy of hydrofracking to the max do for speeding up the tipping point expected to arrive when we hit 400 ppm.?

Consider the legal issue of drilling in the forest when the property was acquired from citizens during the FDR era under the understanding that forest was being created not drill pads and pipelines crisscrossing. . Also make an assessment of how many fauna and flora will perish just sampling the brine, the drill fluid and holding ponds as you cannot keep the free living birds and bees and hopping frogs out of a containment. Please remember your own name: Department of Environmental Conservation. You are not by your charter in charge of energy policy and actually it seems that nobody is in charge of energy policy to decide that even if drilling occurs, the fast and quick removal of all possible natural gas is of course unsound as it is a nonrenewable resource and also should be conserved for the next generation not only for this day. The day we have solar and wind power and we will need natural gas to tide over when the wind does not blow and you cannot shut a nuke power or a coal power plant on and off like the spigot of a gas well.

Preserve and don't burn the furniture.
Conserve our natural resources of all kinds including the water and the clean air.. Be grateful for the beautiful state of New York will soon see more people moving here due to its clean water and great beauty and lack of crime in Western New York that is very unique. I moved to NY and have not regretted it, but would I move here if we have an aggressive hydrofracking .going on?
Have you counted how many property taxpayers would move out?

I am just listening to the radio and Ken Adams from Empire State Development is being interviewed and he said he is NOT wrting a letter to the DEC at this critical time to give an assessment of how the wine industry, the organic farmers, the tourism industry etc will be losing out if hydrofracking is promoted instead. Assemblyman Engelbright has stated that the tourism industry alone is a 42 billion dollar industry alone.

I am a retired RN and worked at Roswell Park and NIH as oncology nurse as well as in hospice. I also have a BS degree in Chemistry from the U of Wash in Seattle and worked in research labs prior to my nursing career. I have lived in NYS as property taxpayer on 250 acres for over 40 years.

Sincerely

Gudrun S