National Nurses United

COURTESY OF AL GRANBERG AND PROPUBLICA the natural gas industry gave more than $1 million to Gov. Tom Corbett���s campaign���his single largest contributor. After being exempted, hydraulic fracturing wells popped up like crazy, especially in areas of the country thought to be sitting on huge gas reserves, such as Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. About 80 percent of Pennsylvania is positioned over what is called the Marcellus Shale, a formation believed to hold North America���s largest natural gas repository. By 2010, gas wells were operating in at least 30 states, and 20 of those had more than 1,000 gas-producing wells, according to a July 2012 report by the nonpro���t open government group OMB Watch. Texas has more than 60,000 wells, and Pennsylvania has more than 30,000. Yet little is known about these fracked wells. Most importantly, what exactly and how much of it are these gas companies pumping deep into the ground? The industry, including corporations such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Chesapeake Energy, and Williams, has long argued that this kind of information is a trade secret, and forcefully fought back against efforts to make them disclose this data. In recent years, though, public backlash to the energy industry���s secrecy has intensi���ed so much that industry-friendly legislators in many states have introduced and passed so-called fracking chemical disclosure laws to address the issue. A close reading of the laws, however, reveals that they allow ���broad ���trade secrets��� exemptions and other provisions so that state legislatures can claim they are acting, while providing very little in terms of real oversight,��� wrote OMB Watch in its July report, titled ���The Right to Know, the Responsibility to Protect: State Actions are Inadequate to Ensure Effective Disclosure of the Chemicals Used in Natural Gas Fracking.��� Even worse, some of these disclosure laws additionally specify that if healthcare professionals become privy to the chemical composition of these fracking ���uids during an emergency, they must keep that information to themselves and may be made to sign a con���dentiality agreement afterward. This is the type of provision included in Pennsylvania���s Act 13, and other states, including Ohio, O C TO B E R 2 0 1 2 Colorado, and Montana have some form of these ���gag clauses��� in their disclosure laws, according to OMB Watch���s report. The similarity between these states��� laws, and the fact that 17 states have adopted disclosure rules, is no coincidence. This is the handiwork of the American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, a Washington, D.C.-based group that provides conservative legislators with boilerplate legislation on a wide range of topics to advance corporate, right-wing interests, and encourages them to introduce these bills in their states. In this case, ALEC had cooked up some model fracking chemical disclosure bill language in December 2011. Common Cause ���rst revealed that Randy Smith, a government affairs manager of ExxonMobil, proposed the model bill. Texas took up the mantle ���rst, then Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and New York all introduced versions of ALEC���s bill, wrote Todd Wynn, director of ALEC���s energy, environment, and agriculture task force in a March 1, 2012 blog post on the website AmericanLegislator.org. Wynn goes on to say that ALEC supports ���state sovereignty��� over hydraulic fracturing and that its model chemical disclosure bill ���aims to preempt the promulgation of duplicative, burdensome federal regulations��� from the U.S. EPA. While the model bill does not explicitly say that health professionals and emergency responders should be gagged about fracking chemicals, it says the state should ���prescribe a process��� for disclosing this kind of information to them. It���s not a far leap, given the industry���s obsession with secrecy, to lobby lawmakers to write the enforcement of con���dential agreements into the bill. ���I think it���s outrageous that toxic chemicals are a secret while somebody might be mortally ill,��� said Patricia Eakin, an emergency department RN at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, president of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP), and a CNA/NNOC board member. ���There are still so many questions about what these largely unknown chemicals are doing to our water, our air, our watersheds.��� In April 2011, PASNAP passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on fracking until research proved it could be done safely, and it has been holding continuing education courses on the subject for its members. When Alfonso Rodriguez, a nephrologist in Dallas, Pa., ���rst read the paragraphs in his state���s Act 13 requiring con���dentiality from health providers, he got mad. ���The purpose was to safeguard the company, not the patient,��� said Rodriguez, who is also board president of the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, an anti-fracking group. Rodriguez already understood ���rst hand how hard it was for medical providers to squeeze information about fracking chemicals from these well operators. Since last winter, he has been treating a man suffering from kidney failure. When the patient ���rst came, he complained of being tired, listless. Lab work showed he had almost no white cells, no red cells, and no platelets. What could have caused this? After further discussion, Rodriguez learned that the man was a trucker who delivered water to W W W. N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N AT I O N A L N U R S E 13

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