My name is Deb Thomas and I live on Line Creek in Clark, WY, which is on the Eastern side of Greater Yellowstone ecosystem along the Montana-Wyoming border. We’ve lived on this property for 21 years.

Tell us about yourself, and why is this land special to you?

My mother's parents came to this country from Italy to work the coal mines, and my father's family have been on the Beartooth Front for 4 generations. This place is my home, I have a very strong relationship with this area. Wyoming is a very beautiful state. It's very diverse. Dick and I have spent a lot of time in the outdoors, of course, because we both grew up in Montana and spent a lot of time tromping the hills, hiking and camping. When we had our son, Quinn, it was really important that we give him the kind of childhood that we had, with a creek and a lot of wildlife. To have clean air and clean water, appreciate the outdoors.

The wind blew and our whole horse pasture, 8 acres, and the whole creek bottom was just full of shredded plastic. And nobody cleans it up, there's no oversight. The state doesn't come out and say, "You gotta clean this up." It's left to the people that are living there. By the time they drilled the 4th well on that pad, they were using a closed loop system for the drilling and fracking fluids. They had a series of 6 or 7 pits that they opened and closed as waste pits, and they weren't lined. They just dig a hole and dump whatever chemicals, then they close it back up and open it again to dump more in it. I think that's when we started to realize this wasn't only a threat to the surface water, but also to the groundwater.

We asked that they test the well. The state wouldn't test it, and neither would the company. We kept asking for disclosure of the fluids that they were using because we were so worried about the water. Those days they wouldn't give you anything. The company already had a notice of violation, they tried to do a directional well. We have a lot of naturally occurring seismic activity, a lot of small earthquakes and fractures moving through this subsurface. So it was literally impossible for them to do that drill. They lost circulation of their drilling fluids and it all came up off the site. So, they drilled these sump holes in the side of the county road and brought in vat trucks to collect all the liquids. And then, they dumped it on the horse pasture of a man who was working for them. He let them do that! That’s how they got their first violation.

What was the seismic operation that occurred?

I should explain that in Wyoming, the oil industry can use the state's eminent domain laws, and at that time there was no surface zone or agreements at all. There's now a law that says they have to try to negotiate with the surface owner. We're on “split estate,” which means that the surface owner doesn't own all the minerals. Somebody else owns those mineral rights and the mineral estate has the right to produce the minerals. The surface owner can't stop the mineral owner from developing, they have the right to come in. A lot of people buy property in Wyoming not realizing that they don’t have any control over those minerals underneath their surface. The only right you have as a surface owner is to pay taxes. Part of exploring the minerals is seismic. There are different ways of doing seismic, in this area there was explosives. They map out a grid, and set charges along the lines of it every so many feet and then they set those off in succession. This shows them what the subsurface looks like. It's called a “3D seismic.”

What was life like with all the oil and gas development going on around you?

When the first pad was put in and the first four wells were drilled, all the wildlife just took off. One of the interesting things that you find in every area under development, is that it puts everybody on hold. Your life becomes put on hold. We were ready to put a house up, but that stopped because we didn't know what our property value was going to be. We didn't know what our water quality was going to be. We didn't know if we'd be able to get any money out of this beautiful piece of property. You don't know if your kid is sick because of the industrial development around you.

Then they put the second pad in. When they hit their target depth, they hit a really high pressure pocket reservoir of gas. The well kicked back and the gas pushed all of the drilling fluids and naturally occurring liquid hydrocarbons through the drill stem, out through the casing and into the highly fractured and fissured area in this drainage. That happened probably 8 or 9 in the morning, and in the early afternoon they started to see blowholes all around the pad. It looked like the mud pots in Yellowstone Park. By the time it was over, there were 35 of those blowholes as far as 350 feet out from the wellhead in every direction. Late in the afternoon they released the plumbing on the rig to allow the gas to come back up through the drill stem. They had to do that or the whole area would have exploded because the gas got into those fractures, and then just started pushing everything to the surface. It had nowhere to go. That was by far the most serious event that has happened up here. Everybody in the drainage had to be evacuated. We were out of our homes for 3 days while they tried to get control of the well. All of the groundwater was contaminated.

The company knew they had a huge problem, now they had drilling fluids and condensate flowing down the county road, all across the pad, into the creek. They evacuated 25 households and still hadn't called the state. When we evacuated, we couldn't take anything, even our horses, because they were worried it was going to ignite and they were going to have a real disaster on their hands. Now think about that. An industrial development has basically exploded, spewing highly explosive gas and really dangerous liquid chemicals all through a subdivision and a creek bottom, and they hadn't even called the state. They were issued their second notice of violation. As part of that violation, they could either be subject to the state taking them to court over the damages that they'd created, or they could join the state's voluntary remediation program. So, of course, they joined the voluntary remediation program, which allows them to monitor the contamination with the state's oversight.

How common are these blowouts and hazards during oil and gas developments?

This whole mess that happened here, happens all the time where oil and gas is developed. I've been working these issues for 20 years. I go in to evaluate contamination and try to help communities understand what they should be looking at and how to address it. I've gone all over the United States looking at contaminated areas. I've never seen it done right. In the old days, they didn't happen this close to where people live, and so they happened, and nobody paid any attention. Now, as the easy stuff has been harvested, they have to go a lot deeper, into a lot tighter geologic formations to get the product. They have to use more extreme technologies, like hydraulic fracturing. More chemicals are used, way closer to where people live. You hear about these incidents more, but they've always happened. This is highly industrialized development, it's not easy to do. It's very complex. And now, they're literally going 12,000 feet down through shale rock and blowing it apart to get fossil fuels.

What happened to the water quality in your community?

After the Windsor Energy’s Crosby blowout, they knew they were going to have to monitor water around the area that had been impacted. At that time they said, "Oh, the contamination will never cross the creek, never get into anybody's wells." Um, it took a year to the month to hit the first water well. And now, almost 10 years later, this area has not been remediated. When you start talking about contaminating aquifers, there's no easy fix. They have tried to do some “pump and treat” up there now. They did a couple of pilot projects to try to establish how they could clean up the deeper zones. The verdict’s still out.

What motivated you to start monitoring air quality?

The first 15 years that I worked on this stuff, I was driven by pure anger. I was so pissed off by what was happening to us. I couldn't believe that our government wasn't there to help us, that nobody that would do anything about what was happening to us. And if I had a nickel for every time someone said, “Oh, they can't do that, you just have it wrong.” I would be a millionaire. Because nobody can believe this, until you live through this, you can't believe it.

Most people recognize water contamination before they recognize air because you can see the changes in your water. We were very concerned about what had happened during the blowout because that was a lot of gas. My eyes and nose were running, but there was a lot of traffic on the road that day. So I thought it was from the dust and those truck fumes. When I finally ran outside, I realized I'd been working in my office all day. It was the gas, it was palpable.

That made us conscious of the fact that there was something going on with the air emissions. And the state didn't even come up to monitor the air until about two weeks later. I started going to other places, and we recognized that there were emissions coming from production fields, from tanks, separator equipment, venting. We were noticing emissions, and there were many episodes of stuff catching on fire on the pads, gas blowing out. You'd see big plumes of black smoke coming off or big clouds of what we thought was steam. During well stimulations, which were actually frack jobs, you'd have these big clouds of stuff come off. So you start to really pay attention to that.

We asked the state to monitor and, of course, they wouldn't. They didn't have any money to do it. And so, we decided to do it ourselves. I called Denny Larson at Global Community Monitor and said, "Hey, what would it cost for us to start doing some air monitoring in these fields?" At that point, he was just starting the 6 state study on air quality around fracking sites, and he said, "Well, if you want to do Wyoming, you can do it, and we have the funding to actually do the analysis if you can get people to do it." All the people that I was working with were like “YES, we want to do it!” And so, we started our own Bucket Brigade.

We looked at the production phase of oil and gas development, we didn't do any sites during drilling or fracking. The average person on the street considers fracking to be the whole development of oil and gas. Industry and the regulators look at fracking as the hydraulic fracturing of those shale formations deep in the ground. I continually encourage people to talk about the full lifecycle of oil and gas development, not just fracking. We do know from looking at areas like Clark, Pavillion, and Deaver, that this development is the gift that keeps on giving. After you've drilled and fracked, all of these areas go into production, and that's when the infrastructure starts to fall apart. Then you see contamination because it takes a little while for it to move. Five, ten, twenty years down the line the whole area is one big stinking, contaminated mess with everybody sick from it.

What do hydrogen sulfide and benzene do to your health?

Benzene causes leukemia, it's very well documented. These compounds are very dangerous for human health. A lot of the stuff we found wasn't even regulated. One thing you have to keep in mind is the oil and gas industry has exemptions to the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and Clean Air Act. They don't have to comply with those federal environmental laws. They’re allowed to vent and use chemicals that no one else can, because the oil and gas industry is the most powerful industry in the world.

Hydrogen sulfide gas is a whole other beast because it replaces oxygen. Basically, if you're in an area with high levels of hydrogen sulfide, it will make you pass out because you're not getting any oxygen. At low levels, nobody really knows what it does, there's been very little study. In Wyoming, hydrogen sulfide is not monitored at the wellhead or in any discharges. Nobody even knows what the levels are. The people who live there, or farm in those areas, are just out walking around. If you don't have a detection badge, you don't even know when to get out. You can smell hydrogen sulfide gas at low levels, but once it reaches an extremely dangerous level you don't smell it anymore, and then you're dead.

Everybody I know that lives and works in these areas has experienced all kinds of upper respiratory problems: nosebleeds, nose polyps, headaches, rashes, neuropathy. There’s a lot of weird cancers, strange conditions, kidney problems, and urinary tract issues. You can't pin any of this on that development because none of it is monitored and recorded. So you're getting all these exposures, you're sick as a dog, and you go to the doctor. You don't even know what you're exposed to. The doctors have no idea. They look at you like you have two heads.

I worked with Powder River Basin for 15 years, we did a lot of policy work to change regulation. I came out of that experience recognizing that that's really important, but the people who live with this cannot wait for regulation to change. Regulation moves at a snail's pace, and industrial development is increasing faster and faster, exposing more and more people. I left that organization and decided that I wanted to get data to the people on the ground so they could make educated decisions about what to do in their lives. All these people on hold, living with this crap can decide whether they should leave, whether they need to get their kids out of the area. It's a human right to know whether you have clean water or air.

Do you think the peer review legitimized your efforts?