Early last year, an army of workers at a remote
natural gas operation in northern British Columbia set a world record
for hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” a procedure that is rapidly
becoming the norm in the global gas industry.

They pumped nearly
400 Olympic swimming pools worth of water along with 500,000 kilograms
of sand underground to fracture deeply buried shale rock, thereby
releasing its trapped gas.

As fracking becomes more common, people
living in natural gas-rich northeast B.C. are increasingly alarmed over
the associated public health and safety risks.

The pressure at
which water, sand and undisclosed chemicals is pumped below-ground is so
intense that it triggers tiny earthquakes. In using such brute force,
unforeseen and unwelcome problems can -and do -surface elsewhere,
problems that may include dangerous releases of gas containing hydrogen
sulphide, also known as sour gas.

Long before fracking arrived on
the scene, the health threats posed by chronic exposure to sour gas with
low levels of hydrogen sulphide were well known and ran the gamut from
irritated eyes to miscarriages. But it was the uncontrolled releases of
gas containing 300 parts per million or more of hydrogen sulphide that
filled people living in B.C.’s Peace River region with dread. Such
releases killed or seriously injured industry workers; caused deaths,
birth defects or miscarriages in cattle; forced people to abandon their
homes by dead of night; and led at least one school district to station
buses outside an elementary school in case sour gas escaped from a
nearby well site, forcing an emergency evacuation.

These and other
uncomfortable realities of living in the heart of B.C.’s natural gas
development zone, recently prompted a local citizens group -the Peace
Environment and Safety Trustees Society (PESTS) -to call upon the
provincial government to launch a formal inquiry under B.C.’s Health Act
to delve into the health risks associated with sour gas. The
justification for such an inquiry was laid out in chilling detail with
the assistance of Calvin Sandborn, at the University of Victoria’s
Environmental Law Clinic, and Tim Thielmann, an environmental lawyer.

The
initiative has since snowballed. Letters of support for an inquiry have
come from the Peace River Regional District, public health officers,
first nations and others. A common refrain in the correspondence is that
when it comes to key decisions on oil and gas industry activities -for
example, the locating of gas wells and pipelines that can release toxic
gas -public health officials are cut out of the loop. Yet it is they,
and the public they serve, who are forced to respond when things go
wrong.

Things most decidedly did go wrong in November 2009, when
failed piping at a gas well in the Peace region spewed 30,000 cubic
metres of gas into the air. Hydrogen sulphide levels in the escaping gas
were six times above lethal levels. The estimated eight-hour gas leak
forced the evacuation of 18 residents living near the community of Pouce
Coupe, killed a horse and resulted in at least one emergency
hospitalization.

B.C.’s Oil and Gas
Commission (OGC), which approved the well owned by Encana Corporation,
later concluded that frack sand corroded the pipes and caused the
potentially fatal leak.

Over the past three decades, at least 34
workers in B.C. and Alberta have been killed in sour-gas related
incidents and hundreds more disabled. By sheer luck, massive
uncontrolled sour gas releases in B.C. have often occurred far away from
local communities. In 2003, residents near Gao Qiao, in Chonquing,
China, weren’t so lucky. A sour gas leak there forced the evacuation of
64,000 residents and killed 243 people in what became a
25-square-kilometre death zone.

Escalating fracking activities
increase the likelihood of such leaks. As a recent OGC “safety advisory”
notes, high-pressure fracking operations have on at least 18 occasions
resulted in what are euphemistically called “communications” between
northern B.C. gas wells.

What this means is that fracking at one
well causes unwanted problems at another. In one such event, the same
type of corrosive frack sand linked to the Pouce Coupe disaster was
blown between two gas wells spaced 670 metres apart.

Under the
circumstances, members of the Peace Environment and Safety Trustees
Society should be lauded for being “pests.” By highlighting the public
health and safety risks associated with sour gas, they may force the
provincial government to do the right thing: Call an inquiry that is
clearly in the public interest, but most particularly in the interests
of the women, children and men who call the Peace River region home.

Ben
Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the B.C. office of the
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of Fracture Lines:
Will Canada’s Water be Protected in the Rush to Develop Shale Gas?, a
report for the Program on Water Issues at the Munk School of Global
Affairs.