The big news is that we were able to trap the feral mama cat and her
kitten on our front screened in porch last Tuesday. We’d been feeding
them deeper and deeper into the porch for the past couple of weeks and
creating a maze to get to the food bowls so there wasn’t a straight shot
to the door. I’d hooked up a rope to the screen door that went to the
shop where I sat and waited for Molly’s signal since I couldn’t see into
the porch to make sure both cats were at the other end. She gave the
signal, I gave the rope a yank, and the door closed shut.
Both cats freaked out, cannoning into the screens to get out. We opened the door to the house, Bobo went out onto the porch, and the mama cat and kitten both immediately calmed down. It took an hour or so for them to venture inside the house and that’s where they’ve remained since then. Eventually we’ll get both neutered and, if they prefer, they can go back outside full time. But I think with winter coming, and the company of the other cats, they’ll decide they like it inside sometimes.
Mama cat is watching from the step down into the addition. Blondie can’t be easily seen, but he’s lying and looking out the window to her right.
All of the cats have been having a great time with each other. Little Blondie seems to be special friends with the feral kitten. Both the kitten and mama cat remain hidden for most of the day, but as time has gone on they’ve ventured out more and more — to scamper and hide if we walk by or come too close. Getting them into carriers to take to the vet is going to be a challenge.
In West Virginia, under the current General Permit,
wastes from fracturing a well can be land applied. This waste comes in
two forms — unused fracturing chemicals dumped into the pit and
fracture flowback discharged from the well into the pit.
According to the General Permit unused fracture chemicals cannot be dumped into a pit but it’s hard to tell if the operators’ crews know this. The state’s Discharge Monitoring Report (DMR) shows the decision tree for determining under which pit category pit waste falls and indicates that chemicals and flowback can be in a pit:
Only category 1 pits do not have fracture flowback or chemicals. Of the
small number of DMRs we’ve examined, all have been for category 2 or 4
pits.
The EPA’s exemption
of oil and gas wastes does allow the land application of drill waste,
flowback, and even chemicals, but the exemption does not allow the
addition of unused chemicals to production waste that is covered by the
exemption (drill waste and flowback) if the chemicals exhibit certain
hazardous characteristics and if the pit waste then assumes those
characteristics. These hazardous characteristics are reactivity,
corrosivity, ignitability and toxicity. Or, if the chemicals are listed
in 40CFR261, subpart D, then the waste is no longer exempt.
Almost
nothing is known about the chemicals used for fracturing in West
Virginia. The Office of Oil and Gas website publishes an incomplete list of chemicals.
The list is incomplete in that it does not show all the chemicals used
in a typical fracture job (the biocide is missing, for instance), nor
does it show the proprietary chemicals which manufacturers won’t
disclose. For the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) I’ve seen, these
proprietary, unnamed chemicals, can form 10% to 60% of a product.
Proprietary
chemicals may be innocuous or they may be toxic. They may be those
listed in 40CFR261, which makes disposal costly because the waste is no
longer exempt.
These unknown proprietary chemicals must be
assumed to fall in a worst case scenario — are hazardous in one way (by
their characteristic) or another (are listed).
The Office of Oil
and Gas has allowed this waste to be land applied without knowing what
makes up this waste — the products or chemicals used. But even if the
Office had full disclosure from the operators, it would not be getting
full disclosure from the manufacturers.
It’s our belief that
fracture flowback should not be land applied and that fracture chemicals
should not be dumped into drill waste pits. Unused fracture chemicals
should be disposed of otherwise and properly.
The MSDS evidence
is, as I mentioned above, sparse. Three products known to have been used
in West Virginia create particular concern. These Halliburton products
(though Halliburton is not the only company making fracturing and
drilling products) are: BC-140 (a cross linker); BE-3S Bactericide; and SP Breaker (a post-fracture gel breaker). Clicking on the product names will produce the applicable MSDS Adobe Acrobat document. We have a page on our website that explains the purpose of some of these chemicals.
These
products weren’t used in exceptionally large quantities. Their hazards
are noted on the MSDS sheets (sections 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12 and 15)
and include ecological, human health, storage and regulatory issues.
Only the SP Breaker exhibits a hazardous characteristic (two in the MSDS
version when the product was used — ignitability and reactivity).
Waste should, if exposed to this product, according to the EPA
exemption, be tested to determine if it is still exempt.
Blondie and Grey are fully weaned and are eating up a storm, probably
twice as much each day as the big guys Bobo and Kitty Boy. Their area of
exploration is slowly encompassing the whole house and they are
interacting well with the big guys. Kitty Boy is utterly entranced with
the idea of new playmates and he can’t wait for them to get bigger (we
have to watch him so that things don’t get too rough). He’s taken to
bringing toys up from the addition to show the kittens and to let them
play with and he’s been giving demonstrations on how to play best with a
ball.
Blondie and Grey love our book piles and exploring the book shelves (they can only reach the lowest shelves for now). They are junior book goats!
