THE CAMPBELL'S CONTAMINATED WATER CASE:
ANOTHER ENCANA FRACKING TEST TUBE

Two days before U.S. ProPublica published a rare investigative article about fracking in Canada, Oh, Canada's Become a Home for Record Fracking, Alberta's Red Deer Advocate newspaper published an article on December 26, 2011, Couple Claims Energy Exploration Contaminates their Water. It concerns a more than six-year old well-water contamination case in the Ponoka area just north of the town of Red Deer, located between Alberta's main city centres of Edmonton and Calgary.

Click here for the Red Deer Advocate article, and four other early newspaper articles - Water grief brings cowboy to tears: Rancher fights contamination (Calgary Herald, May 2, 2007); Gov't ignoring tainted groundwater problems: rancher (Edmonton Journal, May 2, 2007); Alberta accused of ignoring water well contamination by oil and gas drilling (Canadian Press, May 1, 2007); and Complaint prompts well tests (May 17, 2007, Camrose bureau).  

Shawn and Ronalie Campbell's well water was contaminated shortly after Encana Corporation reported Severe Lost Circulation accidents on May 31, 2005 and July 5, 2005 from two coalbed methane drilling sites located just northwest of the Campbell's residence, where unknown volumes of unidentified toxic drilling chemical fluids escaped into shallow regions of the underground geologic formation. The attached CBM well reports (click here), provided by Encana to the Alberta government, include data describing, under TYPE - LOST CIRCULATION, and the category of CIRCULATION SEVERITY, that the two incidents were both determined as SEVERE. This data has never previously been posted on the internet nor presented to the public. 

The ERCB (Alberta's oil and gas regulator) commissioned a report the Campbell's have a copy of, and it shows that the groundwater flows from the area of Encana's Lost Circulation drilling incidents and Encana's shallow fracks toward the Campbell's water well.

United States investigative toxics scientist Dr. Theo Colburn, renowned for her website The Endocrine Disruption (www.endocrinedisruption.com), and for her investigation of toxic chemicals used by the fracking industry fraternity, had her report published by the Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: an International Journal in September 2011, Natural Gas Operations from a Public Health Perspective, wherein she states in a June 2010 pre-published version (available on her website). In the report, Colbern states that drilling chemicals can be equally, if not more dangerous than chemicals used for fracking, chemicals released into surface and subsurface water-based environments.

For more recent information about the numerous hazards related to unconventional drilling and fracking, click here for Anthony Ingraffea's power point presentation (25 megabytes) presented on December 2, 2011 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Unconventional Gas Development from Shale Plays: Myths and Realities Related to Human Health Impacts.