water testing

There was some concern expressed at the café concerning the quality of drinking water sources with fracking permits moving ahead locally.

I promised to do some research on the topic, and I'll keep track of the information here.

First I looked at the Ohio and West Virginia EPA websites.

West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is not geared for use by citizens.
http://www.dep.wv.gov/Pages/default.aspx

Ohio has much more information
http://www.epa.state.oh.us/home.aspx

and in fact has a six page list of local water testing laboratories and lists the types of chemicals that each is equipped to measure
http://www.epa.state.oh.us/Portals/28/documents/labcert/Chemical%20Labs.pdf

Here is National Testing Lab in Cleveland that seems to know a bit about frack testing, but their pdf brochure download stalled my computer

http://www.watercheck.com/gaswelldrilling.html

The tests are not cheap.

If FracFocus isn't a front for the O&G industry, it's website contains very valuable information.

"FracFocus is managed by the Ground Water Protection Council and Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, two organizations whose missions both revolve around conservation and environmental protection."

https://fracfocus.org/

They show 6 wells registered in Washington County OH since 2013 and none yet in Wood County, WV. They give precise latitude/longitude and a list of all chemicals used during the drilling process. (You have to be patient after you enter the state, to allow the counties to load.)

Wow! Just playing around with the map feature at FracFocus, checking out counties I've got family. Allegheny County, PA (that's Pittsburgh) has 3 pages of wells. Doddridge County, WV, which is rural and poor has 17 pages of wells. (Twenty wells to a page)

So, the question in Marietta, I would think, is whether the municipal water system has upgraded their testing of water samples to cover the potential chemicals that may show up. We should ask the same questions on the WV side of the river as well, since the drilling goes down below the river bottom.