SAVE VITAL FUNDING AND PROGRAMS FOR PHILLY NEIGHBORHOODS

Philadelphians instinctively know, and research shows, that a well cared for lot is better for communities than a neglected one. That’s why Next Great City identified cleaning and greening vacant lots as one of our ten action recommendations for the city. And Philadelphia residents and business owners agree.

Next Great City coalition partner, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS), is a national leader in vacant land stabilization.

PHS’s vacant land program has cleaned and greened thousands of vacant parcels in Philadelphia, creating well-managed open space for communities to enjoy and attracting private investment. But now, because of a significantly reduced city budget, $2.4 million in funding for PHS’s vacant land program, which supports community revitalization and employs more than 300 people in full- and part-time green jobs, is on the chopping block.

While these are difficult times, cutting funding to this program will hurt neighborhoods and remove a vital tool for economic development.

Please contact Mayor Nutter today to urge him to continue his support for the valuable work PHS is doing to revitalize our city one vacant lot at a time. Don’t delay, email the Mayor at Michael.Nutter@phila.gov or call the Mayor’s Office at 215-686-2181.

A CALL FOR ARTISTS!

Friends of the Manayunk Canal & the Schuylkill Project, thanks to funding from WREN, is looking for artists interesting in blending art and conservation. The Art on a Rain Barrel Design Contest is open to any adult or child willing to exercise their creativity on behalf of water conservation and stewardship! Artists wishing to enter the Art on a Rain Barrel Design Contest must submit a registration form and a sketch of their proposed rain barrel design by Friday, June 30, 2010 to fmc@manayunkcanal.org.

Our expert panelists will choose the top design sketches from the registrants for inclusion in the Art on a Rain Barrel Design Contest. Artists whose sketches are chosen to participate in the contest will receive a rain barrel (a $150 value) to keep. Notification will be provided to the artists of the designs selected by the judges to participate in the contest by July 16th and rain barrel distribution will begin on July 19th. Artists will have until August 20, 2010 to complete their designs and return the rain barrels for judging. The completed rain barrel designs will then be installed along Main Street in Manayunk for thousands to see and vote on.

Artists are expected to be present at the EcoArts Festival on September 26, 2010 on Main Street in Manayunk for the announcement of the winners, who in addition to receiving a rain barrel will also win a generous prize basket stuffed with local goods.

We will be holding a refundable deposit for each rain barrel distributed to participants to insure that rain barrels are returned for the contest. Remember registration forms and a sketch of your proposed design must be submitted by June 30, 2010 to fmc@manayunkcanal.org in order for your design to be considered for the contest.

Not an artist? Visit www.manayunkcanal.org to sign up for one of the Do-It-Yourself Rain Barrel Workshops in October, where for $25 you can walk away with your own 100% recycled rain barrel as well as learning how to install, maintain and use your rain barrel!

Thursday, October 14 & 28, 6:30-8:00pm
Art of Recycling Rain Do It Yourself Barrel Workshops
(Location: Tenatively Venice Island Recreation Center)

Friends of the Manayunk Canal & the Schuylkill Project, thanks to funding from WREN, will be engaging the public to act with interactive do-it-yourself rain barrel workshops. For a $25 registration fee, workshops participants will not only receive a 100 percent recycled rain barrel of their own, they will also learn how to install, maintain and use their rain barrels. Additionally, workshop participants will be empowered with the tools they need to tackle other simple stormwater controls at home, like how to build a rain garden.

Email us at fmc@manayunkcanal.org to register for one of the Do-It-Yourself Rain Barrel Workshops in October, where for $25 you can walk away with your own 100% recycled rain barrel as well as learn how to install, maintain and use your rain barrel! Tickets will be first come, first serve.

Pennsylvania environmental officials on Monday suspended some operations of a Marcellus Shale natural gas operator whose well blew out last week and spewed natural gas and 35,000 gallons of drilling fluid in a remote part of Clearfield County.

Department of Environmental Protection Secretary John Hanger ordered EOG Resources Inc. to suspend its natural-gas well drilling activities in Pennsylvania until DEP has completed a comprehensive investigation into the leak and the company has implemented any needed changes.

“The Clearfield County incident presented a serious threat to life and property,” said Hanger. “We are working with the company to review its Pennsylvania drilling operations fully from beginning to end to ensure an incident of this nature does not happen again.”

Read the whole article here.

American Rivers Names Upper Delaware River Most Endangered in U.S.

Philadelphia Leaders to DRBC: Cease Construction on Exploratory Wells; Deny Water Withdrawal, Drilling Permits

Industry Response:  Unconventional Drilling, Conventional Obfuscation Strategies

Iris Marie Bloom

Philadelphia:  June 3, 2010

The Upper Delaware River, the drinking water source for 17 million people across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, is at risk from shale fracking for natural gas, a process that poisons groundwater and creates toxic pollution.  This threat landed the Upper Delaware in the number one spot in America’s Most Endangered Rivers 2010, a report released yesterday by the national nonprofit group American Rivers.

In Philadelphia yesterday, American Rivers spokesperson Liz Garland opened a press conference at City Hall, “In shining the spotlight on gas drilling in the Upper Delaware River, we chose a time when preventive action is still possible.  The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) is making major decisions right now which will affect the fate of this river, and the people who drink this water have a chance to weigh in on that decision.”

Maya van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper, said, “The Delaware River is the longest free flowing river east of the Mississippi, much of it designated Wild and Scenic.  Many, many people have worked and billions of dollars have been spent to bring the Delaware back to life after decades of abuse.  As we face the advent of gas drilling in the Upper Delaware River Watershed, we face the possibility of losing everything.”

Philadelphia City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, who introduced a successful resolution earlier this spring calling on the DRBC to ban shale gas drilling until an Environmental Impact Statement is assessed for the Delaware River Watershed, drew parallels to the Gulf disaster. “The BP rig which blew up was an exploratory well.  It had special exemptions.  We have to learn something from this.  The DRBC is exempting exploratory wells right here in our watershed, which supplies our drinking water.  The have to stop letting companies drill without a DRBC permit, and they should deny the Stone Energy water withdrawal permit, and all drilling-related permits, until we have the Environmental Impact Statement.  We don’t need a disaster here.”

Albert Appleton, former Commissioner of New York City Department of Environmental Protection, asserted, “If the true environmental costs, including construction, extraction, and cleanup, were included in the cost of drilling, this fossil fuel would be unaffordable and drilling impractical.  This is not something we need, and it’s not something we want.  This stuff is not clean-burning at all.  This is not green, and if it goes forward, it will make it even harder to get to the green energy economy.  We can build that economy right now.  We are being asked to risk our clean water, environment, and public health, and for what?”

“If the Delaware River Basin Commission does not carry out its mandate to protect the waters of the Delaware River, New York and Pennsylvania will have an economic, social, and public health disaster of unprecedented dimension,” Appleton concluded.

After elected representative, officials, and professional environmentalists concluded their remarks, community leaders had their say.  “As we know from the coal mine and Gulf disasters, accidents happen, particularly when short cuts are taken to increase profits, and those accidents will endanger Philadelphia’s drinking water,” commented Gerry Kaufman, a spokesman for Protecting Our Waters.

Dennis Mulligan, a lawyer, commented, “BP said the environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico would be ‘very, very modest,’ and the gas companies are giving us the same empty assurances.  We don’t want bottled water advisories telling us we might not want to drink our tap water, as already happened in Pittsburgh due to Marcellus Shale waste.”  Mulligan lives near the Delaware River in New Jersey and directs a agency serving immigrants and refugees in Philadelphia: “I count on clean Delawre River water in both states,” he said.

Reverend Jesse Brown, a longtime public health advocate, emphasized, “This gas drilling presents an unacceptable risk to public health, and it also puts us on exactly the wrong road: extracting even more fossil fuel instead of investing in renewable energy.”

“Let’s wait til the studies are in,” concluded speaker after speaker at Philadelphia’s press conference responding to the American Rivers designation yesterday.  State Representative Gregory S. Vitali, Philadelphia Water Department Director of Watersheds Howard Neukrug, Cliff Westfall of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, Jim Black of Clean Air Council, and Robert J. Ryan, Ph.D, P.E., of Temple University’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, also spoke.

Unconventional Drilling, Conventional Obfuscation Strategies

Gas industry public relations spokespeople responded to the designation of the Upper Delaware River as endangered by providing assurances of the industry’s long experience and clean record.

“I don’t know how they can conclude that, when hydraulic fracturing has never harmed a drop of drinking water,” said Jim Smith, spokesman for the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York. “In 60 years of hydraulic fracturing across the country, more than a million wells have been fracked, including 14,000 in New York,” he said in a Times-Leader story by Mary Esch on June 2.

In fact, the Pennsylvania DEP slapped a $240,000 fine on Cabot Oil and Gas for contaminating drinking water in Dimock, PA, this spring.  Cabot was ordered to cap several wells and provide drinking water permanently for fourteen of the affected families, who had been forced to buy their own drinking water for over a year after unconventional gas drilling began.  The DEP action was one of the most punitive in Pennsylvania history.

Last year, a New York Times series documented hundreds of incidents of water contaminated due to drilling; ProPublica and Toxics Targeting have also reported on water contamination incidents.  Filmmaker Josh Fox’s documentary, GASLANDS, shows health impacts from gas drilling out West and in Pennsylvania.  Because the industry is exempt from major provisions of federal environmental regulations including the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Superfund Law, Safe Drinking Water Act, and wastewater treatment laws, the EPA has had difficulty studying the safety of hydraulic fracturing.  The EPA has now launched a new two-year study of hydraulic fracturing, acknowledging that their 2004 study, which only looked at fracturing in shallow, or conventional, formations, was flawed.

The industry claim that “we’ve been fracturing for 60 years” is technically true but clearly designed to obfuscate a more important truth.  Fracturing in unconventional formations such as shale only began in 2002, and only began in earnest after the Halliburton Loophole of 2005 granted the industry multiple exemptions from federal environmental laws.  Compared to conventional drilling, unconventional gas drilling uses about 67 times more water and toxic chemicals, and the flowback waste from deep underground is much more dangerous and difficult to treat.  Unlike conventional brine, flowback contains, in addition to the original toxic fracturing chemicals, arsenic, Radium 226, and is five times saltier than the ocean due to ancient ocean deposits underground.

Because much of the toxic contamination comes from inevitable spills and accidents, creating fish kills and wildlife deaths as well as long-term contamination of streams and wetlands, the industry public relations spokespeople parrot the phrase, “hydraulic fracturing,” to mean the fracturing process itself rather than other aspects including fracking chemicals transportation, mixing, other stages of drilling, flaring, waste storage, flowback reuse, transportation, and disposal.  Aside from direct toxic chemical contamination and methane migration, there are cumulative negative environmental impacts to air, climate, land, and ecosystems as a whole.

The industry’s success in winning exemptions, delaying studies, and ensuring that permits are expedited at breakneck speed in Pennsylvania has puzzled some.   Common Cause released a study, “Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets,” on May 11, 2010, elaborating on the campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures of the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania.  The report sheds light on the industry’s sheer might.

“This industry has an enormous financial incentive to exaggerate their confidence, minimize risk, and provide unrealistic assurances to the public,” commented Brady Russell, another of the speakers in Philadelphia yesterday.  Russell, Director of Clean Water Action’s southeastern Pennsylvania office, gave an anecdote of receiving a public rebuttal from a Chesapeake Energy spokesperson who said that Russel’s account of the 17 cows who died in Louisiana after drinking fracking fluid was wrong.  “That wasn’t fracking fluid, that was ethylene glycol,” the Chesapeake Energy spokesman claimed.

Brady Russell, being a fact-checker, went back and did his research.  Official Louisiana state documents showed that the cows died, bellowing and bleeding from the mouth, after drinking fracking fluid.

In Pennsylvania, farmers in Clearville and Hickory have reported losing over 100 head of cattle due to drilling operations (Weekly Press, April 2010: “Shale Shame.”  Out  West, veterinarians and ranchers report losses of goats, and mares have difficulty reproducing due to the endocrine disrupting impacts from gas drilling (Amy Mall, NRDC columnist; GASLANDS footage).  In Dimock, Norma Fiorentino reported that local wildlife disappeared after drilling started.  “They’ve all left, rabbits, deer, they’re all gone from here now,” she told a reporter last month, on May 15th.

Senator Casey, Congressman Sestak Speak Up for Delaware River

Senator Bob Casey, co-sponsor of the FRAC Act, a bill which would restore the Safe Drinking Water Act and require drilling companies to disclose exactly which chemicals they are using and injecting underground to fracture the shale, releasing natural gas, sent a representative, Kurt Imhof, to the gathering.  Congressman Joe Sestak issued a statement, which read in part:

“I would first like to commend the work of American Rivers, Protecting Our Waters, Delaware Riverkeeper Network, and Damascus Citizens for Sustainability for their efforts to educate the public on this important issue.  The Commonwealth is blessed with an abundance of natural resources. We should never have to sacrifice our health and safety, clean air and water, natural lands, and communities to companies seeking access to our natural wealth. I applaud efforts, such as this, to bring to light the very real risks of underregulated development.  I am not convinced we currently have strong enough environmental, health, and property safeguards — and I am not satisfied that people will have the access to just compensation should even the best safeguards fail.”

The event was inspiring. It was great to see so many environmental and community organizations working together to celebrate our city and help it become as sustainable as possible. Often times, in a big city with an old infrastructure like Philadelphia, it can seem like positive environmental change happens very, very slowly. We hear the complaints all the time: “Nothing is happening!” “Where are my tax dollars going?” “Why isn’t Philadelphia as ‘green’ as other cities?”

Well, change IS happening all around us. It will take some time, but Philadelphia has already made some really great strides in the realm of greening. Read the report here and check out all the amazing progress that’s been made citywide in just one year!

This article from the Philadelphia Daily News spells out some of the achievements:

Divert 70 percent of solid waste from landfills - In other words, increase the recycling rate. And it is ticking up. Over the past year, the diversion rate was 16 percent of waste, compared with 12 percent during the previous year. Officials expect it to go even higher now that the recycling-rewards program is set to go citywide.

Provide park and recreation space within 10 minutes of 75 percent of residents – The plan is to add 500 acres of public space. Gajewski said the city is working with neighborhoods to figure out what they want.

Plant 300,000 trees – This is one of the more ambitious goals. Since Greenworks started, 2,846 trees have been planted. In April, the Department of Parks and Recreation kicked off a tree-planting campaign called “Green Philly, Grow Philly.” It is seeking partnerships with private businesses, nonprofits and other organizations to increase the number of trees. But Nutter last week said he would cut $2.5 million the city budgeted to tree-planting, due to financial constraints, which will undoubtedly slow this effort.

Double the number of green jobs – Last year, the city said it wanted to increase the number of green jobs – loosely defined as jobs with an environmental benefit – from 14,379 to 28,800. So far, it has created at least 520 jobs, largely through stimulus funding for types of construction work.

Of course, here at TTF, we are most excited by all the great progress made in the arena of stormwater management, thanks in large part to the Philadelphia Water Department’s Green City, Clean Waters plan. We’re looking forward to the 2011 progress report. In the mean time, we’ll keep doing our part to help make Philadelphia the greenest city in the country!

State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.

For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.

The article explores how many people take their water infrastructure for granted, and rate increases have been fought tooth-and-nail in cities around the country, including Philadelphia. The article ends with this powerful quote: “This is the fight of our lifetimes. Water is tied into everything we should care about. Someday, people are going to talk about our sewers with a real sense of pride.”

Read the whole article here.

Drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale is growing at a breakneck pace – often destroying water supplies and damaging local communities, with no tax in place to restore and repair the damage and reimburse our citizens – it’s clear that taming the Marcellus Shale drillers is Job 1 for next year.

National gas drillers from around the world are coming to Pennsylvania to tap one of our most valuable natural resources – natural gas in the vast Marcellus Shale formation that underlies most of the state. Some of the drillers are conscientious about protecting the environment, but many are not. This brings tremendous risks to our land and water. And right now, those risks are being shouldered by local communities and environmental treasures.

In almost every state that has substantial natural gas deposits, drillers must pay a severance tax on the extraction of the resource to compensate for the depletion of the resource and for damage done to the environment and public infrastructure.

But not in Pennsylvania. This past year, we successfully pushed for a vote in favor of the tax in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, but the Republican-controlled Senate and the oil, gas and drilling industries blocked any consideration in the Senate.

We are determined to push the tax through in 2010…

Visit PennFuture’s website to learn how you can help! Also check out our past posts on Marcellus Shale to learn more about the issue.

Enact mandatory recycling of electronic gadgets and computers. There is nothing to prevent people from simply dumping electronic gadgets, computers and televisions into landfills, even though many are classified as hazardous waste and often contain toxic materials. Legislation being considered by the House and Senate will protect our environment and grow Pennsylvania’s green economy. The proposed law requires the manufacturers of electronics to arrange for them to be responsibly recycled, usually bylocal e-cycling businesses. Enacting e-cycling legislation will be yet another win for the economy and the environment.

Contact your state legislator to make sure that Pennsylvania adopts the right resolutions!

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.

In “Sewers at Capacity, Waste Poisons Waterways,” Duhigg explains the problem with combined sewer overflows, with a brief mention of how Philadelphia is addressing the problem through the Green City, Clean Waters program.

Duhigg explains the problem in a nutshell:

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.

But despite those upgrades, today, many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according to a New York Times analysis of environmental data. As a result, sewage — including human excrement and dangerous industrial chemicals — is spilling into waterways.

In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems — including those in major cities — have reported violating the law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency.

You can read all of the articles in the series here. Don’t forget to check out the accompanying videos as well!

From the article:

Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.

Scientists say the garbage patch is just one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered around the world’s oceans. Abandoned fishing gear like buoys, fishing line and nets account for some of the waste, but other items come from land after washing into storm drains and out to sea.

Plastic is the most common refuse in the patch because it is lightweight, durable and an omnipresent, disposable product in both advanced and developing societies. It can float along for hundreds of miles before being caught in a gyre and then, over time, breaking down.

But once it does split into pieces, the fragments look like confetti in the water. Millions, billions, trillions and more of these particles are floating in the world’s trash-filled gyres.

Yikes! Read the whole thing here.