On February 22, front line community groups throughout the Ohio River
basin received notification that the U.S. Coast Guard has determined
that no new rules are needed to barge shipments of toxic, radioactive
hydraulic fracturing waste. The Coast Guard instead decided to proceed
using 40-year-old regulations that fail to address unconventional oil
field waste from hydraulic fracturing. Fracking wastes contain such
toxic chemicals as benzene and are laced with radioactive materials like
water soluble radium-226, which is linked to leukemia and bone cancers.
The Coast Guard will instead allow shipment of waste fluids from
hydraulic fracturing to be determined on a case-by-case basis.
The proposal being considered by the Coast Guard would have required
new rules and guidelines to transport highly flammable, explosive
hazardous waste on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to currently
undisclosed locations.
Terry Lodge, a Toledo attorney for the Fresh Water Accountability
Project, was blunt, “This is disastrous. The Coast Guard proposes to
regulate shipment by shipment, and they will do no such thing. They have
very limited scientific staff, the lab testing of cargoes will not
become Coast Guard records (if they do testing at all), and the
information will remain the proprietary property of the shipper. The
Coast Guard backed down and accepted an alternate means of classifying
the shipments based on an oil and gas waste cargo definition that was
implemented decades before horizontal hydraulic fracking was invented.”
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