Looking Toward the Future

By Kirk Jalbert, Manager of Community-Based Research and Engagement

In October 2014, FracTracker launched The Knowing Our Waters project (with the support of the Colcom Foundation) in order to highlight the important role of non-governmental water monitoring programs in the Marcellus Shale. Since the widespread emergence of this monitoring community, which began around 2010, many dedicated volunteers and nonprofit organizations have worked tirelessly to protect our watersheds from the potential impacts of oil and gas extraction—often in their own spare time and supported by their own personal resources.

The Knowing Our Waters project offered a window into this community through interactive maps, rich photographs and videos, and, most importantly, through the stories of those who spend their time collecting data in the region’s many watersheds. In this final installment of the Knowing Our Waters series, we interviewed four leaders in the water monitoring community to hear their perspectives on how this field has evolved, what its present challenges are, and where water monitoring in the Marcellus Shale is headed.

Featured Leaders

Julie Vastine

Julie Vastine is the Director of the Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (ALLARM). ALLARM, based out of Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, has provided capacity building assistance to Pennsylvania communities to monitor, protect, and restore local waterways since 1986. ALLARM encourages communities to use science as a tool to investigate the health of their streams and to use the data they generate for aquatic protection and restoration efforts. Since 2010, ALLARM has hosted more than 60 training workshops across Pennsylvania, New York, and West Virginia, to assist communities in monitoring the potential impacts of shale gas extraction.

Melissa O’Neal

Melissa O’Neal is the Program Manager for Three Rivers QUEST (Quality Useful Environmental Study Teams), or 3RQ, based at the WV Water Research Institute at West Virginia University. 3RQ manages a program of bi-weekly water quality sampling in the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Upper Ohio river basins with research partners at Wheeling Jesuit University, Duquesne University, and the Iron Furnace Chapter of Trout Unlimited. 3RQ also assists dozens of community-based water monitoring programs in collecting and managing data on conductivity, pH, and water temperature. Collectively, these programs provide a better overall picture of the health of the three river basins.

Melissa Reckner

Melissa Reckner is the Director of the Kiski-Conemaugh Stream Team, formed in 1998 by the Conemaugh Valley Conservancy. The Stream Team’s goals are to educate and engage citizen stewards in maintaining, enhancing and restoring the natural resources of the Kiski-Conemaugh River Basin, which encompasses portions of Armstrong, Cambria, Indiana, Somerset and Westmoreland counties of Pennsylvania. Supported by strong partnerships with watershed organizations and citizen volunteers, the Stream Team manages over 230 sampling sites, monitors 40 AMD treatment systems, provides technical assistance to partner organizations, and works with schools on connecting students to nature.

Ben Stout

Dr. Ben Stout is a Professor of Biology at Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia, and a FracTracker board member. As an ecologist, Dr. Stout’s focus has been on understanding the interrelations between aquatic organisms and their environment. He is particularly interested in wetlands and headwater streams, home to valuable but also threatened ecosystems. Dr. Stout is also a long-time vocal advocate for monitoring these watersheds for the potential impacts of oil and gas extraction. Much of his research is dedicated to identifying high levels of bromide, a substance that can contribute to the formation of carcinogenic trihalomethanes, in streams and rivers near fracking operations. Dr. Stout also spearheads the water quality monitoring effort of 3RQ in the Upper Ohio River Basin.

Dr. Kirk Jalbert

The field of water monitoring has changed pretty dramatically as result of shale gas extraction. What do you think are some of the biggest lessons that water monitoring groups have learned in these last few years?

Julie Vastine

Pennsylvania had hit a lull in terms of communities being engaged in collecting scientific data on streams after a significant boom from 2000-2007. Shale gas, as an issue and a water quality concern, really helped to mobilize renewed interest in thinking about how a particular industry impacted our local waterways. It not only brought to the table the people who have been invested in collecting the scientific data on streams historically over several decades, but also different audiences that, I think, the water monitoring movement had only dreamed of reaching. It really brought diverse stakeholders to the water monitoring fields to monitor some of the potential impacts from shale gas. You know, the shale gas monitoring protocols are very, very narrowly focused on very specific questions. So, what is the impact? Is flowback water making its way into small streams? We are looking at conductivity. It can indicate different things about water quality and it can also be challenging because it’s not specific enough to tell you exactly what is causing water quality changes. That inevitability leads to asking more questions. For a number of volunteers the shale gas program is their introduction to assessing stream health and the water monitoring movement, it helps to give a taste of what water quality monitoring is all about—a taste of how to learn about the quality of your streams based on two very simple but informative indicators.

Melissa O’Neal

That’s a really good question. A lot of the groups we are involved with were initially very focused on monitoring for shale gas development—particularly in trying to mobilize quickly to gather baseline data. Fortunately, these folks obtained training through programs and were able to get a lot of boots on the ground. The biggest challenge faced is trying to find ways to compare amongst groups that are all doing things a little differently. A lot of the groups we work with have all modified their training programs to include additional data—not just focused on shale gas. While they started out very focused on shale gas development, they’ve realized there are a lot of other potential causes for stream degradation and have modified their protocol and data collection to suit their needs. So, for us at 3RQ, it’s been a challenge to find ways to include the variety of data collected in our database. We’ve been focused on developing tools for reporting and graphing for groups so there is a way they can compare the data they’ve collected with another group. It just isn’t realistic that all groups collecting data are following the exact same protocol (i.e. some collect flow measurement others do a surrogate stream flow). So we have had to find ways to incorporate various forms of data being collected. In the end, we hope the commonality is found on the reporting side of things, such as in using graphs from collected data to spur conversations over the health of our watersheds.

Melissa Reckner

There are things that are happening in our streams that we had no idea, or we might have suspected, but at least now we have documentation of what is going on. I’m thinking of Roaring Run out in Armstrong County, which is a beautiful stream, very well promoted, it’s kind of the jewel of that watershed, but the life in it left a little bit to be desired, which was interesting. So our (data) logger was picking up these pulses of conductivity spikes and we deduced, through some grab sampling that we sent to a lab to analyze for things much more than the logger could do, that there is aluminum that is coming out of, we suspect, mine discharges that only discharged after a heavy storm event. So that was an interesting lesson, something that we are working with the Armstrong Conservation District and the local watershed groups to investigate further and to see if there is anything that can be done to remediate.

Dr. Ben Stout

The most pressing concern is still a lack of knowledge. Hydraulic fracking is not something that has been going on for 50 years; it’s not dropping a glass bottle of nitroglycerin down your grandmother’s old well. The most beautiful thing I have seen is these people working together to boost themselves up by becoming citizen scientists. Maybe not experts, because they don’t have the background and the training, but they have the ability to learn and teach themselves and each other. A lot of times they know more about it than some of the regulators. Sometimes they have misconceptions too, but that is why I want to be involved, to answer those questions and try to keep them on the right path.

Dr. Kirk Jalbert

Water monitoring groups have had to overcome all sorts of challenges at different stages of their development, from recruiting and training volunteers, to selecting stream sites, and then keeping people mobilized to collect data over the course of many years. What do you think are the most pressing challenges that the water monitoring community faces today?

Dr. Ben Stout

It’s a real challenge to figure out—okay we had these limited resources, how should we best apply them? I think we have done that pretty well. At least we are a little bit more involved in what should be the federal government’s work. But bromide in our rivers and the association with migratory methane in our water supplies is undeniable. It’s also very complicated and not well understood. Nobody has ever studied bromide in fresh water systems much. Unless you are in a coastal or marine habitat, maybe in Sierra Nevada or something like that, you might get it off the ocean. Hell, I had never heard about that being a contaminant in water before. The science is difficult. It’s difficult for people like me that have a lifetime of training in science, and a lifetime of experience and solving the problem. So, that’s the biggest challenge that they face. And the key is to work with experts to pull stuff apart until they have the answers they want. Not the answers they want, the answers they need. Nobody wants to find out that their water is polluted.

Julie Vastine

The shale gas monitoring protocol that ALLARM created was really for pollution reporting. It’s supposed to be a red flag to regulatory entities that there is something wrong and there needs to be action. I think a lot of people came to training workshops and participated in this program with the anticipation that they were going to be seeing a lot and reporting a lot. That was not the case. To date, we have only had 45 violations reported by volunteers over the course of a five year program, and all of those are based on visual indicators. When you have people coming to a program where they think they are going to be doing pollution reporting, and actually they are going out and not seeing much happening with their streams, that provides a challenge for volunteer engagement and longevity in programs. Baseline data collection is not always fun for people. Some people have gotten tired, the issue doesn’t seem quite as gross and inflammatory as it did when they first got engaged. And so, you see people saying, “you know what? I have collected three years of data, I’m good with that.” Another part of our volunteer audience are those people who have gotten engaged and it’s led to them to connect to other environmental issues in their community, to connect with other stakeholders, and to start broadening their lens of community civic engagement. A third kind are those monitors that are starting to ask additional questions about the quality of their streams and wanting to develop their own scientific studies to answer their very specific questions. With those volunteers, it’s been a lot of fun for us to take them to that next level.

Melissa O’Neal

I think the sustainability, keeping people engaged even if there is not a pressing issue going on. It’s a pretty significant time commitment and some of these volunteers have been out there for a couple years now. If they are part of the routine, and they enjoy doing it, they are going to keep doing it. Or they will feel like they have put their time in and they will move on to something else.

Melissa Reckner

I would say big-river monitoring. I would love to see the USGS gauging stations retrofitted to do parameters more than just discharge and stage. Discharge at a USGS station means the volume of water flowing through the river at that point—how many cubic feet per second. I think it would be fantastic if we could get temperature and conductivity sensors installed on those. We investigated that possibility, but the USGS wanted an arm and a leg to do it, and we just couldn’t afford to pay them. Not only for the initial setup, but for the yearly monitoring and maintenance fees that they expected. I think that is something that the state should pick up because this is a statewide issue.

Dr. Kirk Jalbert

How do you see the water monitoring community changing as a result of these learned lessons and present challenges? Are you seeing new methods and technologies being used? Are people asking different kinds of questions now that they know much more about their watersheds?

Julie Vastine

ALLARM turns 30 this year. Acid rain was our inception. Watershed baseline monitoring was our second wave and we have been doing that really well since 1996. It is really exciting to have this new audience of people who are concerned about water quality and have an interest in collecting scientific data, to be able to actually introduce them to all of these fantastic resources and tools to better understand their streams. So, macroinvertebrate surveys, you are seeing a great interest in that. You are seeing people asking questions and we get to think through what chemical and other visual indicators can help them understand that. Also, one of the things that the shale gas monitoring movement helped with is establishing a relationship with the Oil and Gas Division at the Department of Environmental Protection. That was a pretty big win for us. That was a department ALLARM and other service providers hadn’t really reached out to as a potential data user for volunteer monitoring data; being able to establish that relationship and the understanding that the oil and gas inspectors would respond to volunteers who have been trained on our protocol. That was really cool.

Melissa O’Neal

I think a lot of the groups have started moving towards the continuous data loggers versus sending volunteers out. They are able to collect a lot more data with a lot less time commitment and a lot less volunteers, which could be good and bad. I mean, you are getting a lot of data, but then that is a lot of data to look at. And because you are not using as many volunteers, you don’t have quite as many people engaged continuously. There is an upside and a downside to it all. The other thing too that I think is kind of interesting is a lot of these groups really started out focused on shale gas development—we saw it a lot whenever we were collecting everybody’s visual assessment data sheets—it was really surprising how focused they were on shale gas development, but they didn’t have any opportunities for a volunteer to write down if there was maybe a severe erosion problem due to logging activity or residential construction, which can also be sediment loads that are contributing to pollution. So when we finally settled our visual assessment forms, we did so in a way that it would encompass all types of activities and it not be so focused on just shale gas. I think people now have time to kind of plan it out a little bit more in terms of where they want to collect some baseline data, because they understand the systems to know more to look for permits and to anticipate things before they go in. I think people are starting to realize that perhaps the biggest threats are from transportation and not necessarily from like, a leakage event.

Melissa Reckner

I know a lot of folks are still utilizing volunteers and field kits for the weekly, or twice a month, or however often they are doing it, for that kind of monitoring. I know some other organizations that are looking to build their own (data) loggers, their own sensors that are a little more tailored to the parameters that they are looking for. The use of telemetry, I think, is increasing, because the annual service costs of utilizing cell towers, or satellites, or whatever service to garner those data, those prices are coming down and it’s becoming more affordable. I think it’s some of that and I think it’s increased awareness. The educational efforts that so many groups have been doing for years and years is paying off, you know, as people recreate more outdoors and become more connected to nature. I think more and more folks want to unplug and enjoy the outdoors because that’s just healthier for you physically and mentally. They are becoming more aware of the threats to these resources and recognizing that they are limited. So something has to be done to protect them.

Dr. Ben Stout

I think the most important thing is that community based participatory research is a new way of doing business in this nation. And it might be the most powerful science that is going on at all right now, in terms of protecting communities from environmental degradation. As academic researches, we live in ivory towers and publish peer reviewed journal articles and, yeah, we go out and take samples and stuff, but if you are not talking about people in the community—the only way you are going to get really powerful data is at the household level, and then scaling it up to the community level. So the federal government, unless they are collaborating on a project, they are not going to Mrs. Jones’ house, and seeing her and witnessing the indoor and the outdoor air quality and the water quality and so forth, and then doing that multiple times within a community. When you go to a house and take a sample, you are not just going to take a water sample and then leave. You are going to talk to these people, and you are going to budget an hour per sample for taking that sample, even though actually taking the sample only takes about five minutes. And they get to know us and we get to know them. We got little bits of information that way, they get little bits of information that way, and we build these relationships. The most important part of this is trust and that is something the industry never tried to do and they are never going to.

Dr. Kirk Jalbert

Looking toward the future, what will water monitoring in the Marcellus Shale will look like in five or ten years? How do you think people will think about this particular time in the history of citizen-driven environmental stewardship?

Melissa O’Neal

I think that it will continue. I mean, whenever I look at the historic mine drainage issues that we have here in our area of West Virginia, you know, it’s something that a lot of these watershed groups have been working on for a very long time. And while their focus may have shifted to include shale gas development, I think that they will continue down that path. I think they will continuing to monitor to see what changes may take place. And we don’t really know, because of something that is pretty new to this area, what may happen around some of these sites if they go back in and try to re-frack in five or ten years. The fact that there is a legacy with coal mining, having that prior knowledge of large industry coming in and doing something, I think that that is encouraging folks to collect more baseline data, to get out there and be pretty diligent in collecting data so that they have something to go back on if things go wrong.

Melissa Reckner

I don’t know, I don’t really think about the future a whole lot because I’m more worried about present day. I would imagine it will continue similar to how it is today. You will always need people power behind any kind of technology that you do end up utilizing. I’m excited to see what kind of technology is developed, the progression that has been made that, you know, I never really considered up until this point. That means the possibilities are endless. People as a whole are very smart and creative and I think we will see some good things. I’m an eternal optimist. But I think, at the same time, we need more involvement, especially from a younger generation, in our watersheds, because a lot of the watershed associations, they have an aging population. People are getting tired and somebody else has to take the reins and sometimes that’s easier to do if you have funding in place to help with the basic, general operating expenses. I think it will come down to a funding and man power, like most things in the world. I just would encourage involvement. A lot of the watershed groups are strictly volunteer based. They operate on virtually no budget and they do tremendous work that benefits the whole community, even if the community doesn’t recognize it, because clean water is essential to life. Financial donations can make a big difference, or even getting out there and helping to solicit donations or organizing a fundraiser, be it a basket party or a bake sale or a night hike. It gets you involved and it is really appreciated by the monitoring groups.

Dr. Ben Stout

Well, here is the beauty of the thing. Okay, federal government, you are not going to protect us. So we are going to. We can do this ourselves, and we have to. So I think it’s a new way of doing business in the country right now, making for some really strong science and policy in the long run. I would like to see citizens testify in front of Congressional subcommittees and having supporting scientists there to back them up. And that’s the only way you are going to do policy change. It takes time, it takes organization, it takes money. The communities I have been working with in West Virginia, they have done some great stuff already and, I will tell you what, they have got the ears of the West Virginia DEP. They have really good communication, and they are armed with data. I have to think that a lot of those DEP people applaud their efforts, because they know that they can only go so far. They know they are kind of hamstrung.

Julie Vastine

There is a lot of positive energy coming out of Harrisburg right now with the change of leadership. Both as a state and also at the Department of Environmental Protection. Secretary John Quigley, for the first time in 12 years, is talking about bringing back a state-wide water monitoring council and broadening the lens of participation with that. And that is 1000% exciting because a number of us have been badgering him by saying that, if he does have a monitoring council, he has to have volunteer monitoring at the table, and it sounds like that is something that he is committed to doing. It’s super timely given some of the energy in the state to engage diverse stakeholders and produce data on the quality of Pennsylvania waterways. I just feel awe-inspired by the possibility of where this movement can go. Shale gas monitoring has played a crucial role in the Pennsylvania watershed field. The issue came at a time when the state had just defunded its own citizen monitoring program. You saw a lot of watershed associations feeling really disgruntled with the lack of resources, and here comes this extraction industry into our state, exempt from all these different federal regulations, and it’s just so new and different to anything that has happened in Pennsylvania. I love the fact that a portion of the people who are concerned about shale gas extraction, in terms of science, came out to help answer those questions. I think that when we look back at Pennsylvania’s watershed history over the past several decades, shale gas will be seen as something that has been a tool in revitalizing the movement and bringing new and diverse partners to the table and that is really exciting.

For more information, please contact Kirk Jalbert: jalbert@fractracker.org