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In the press call, retired Youngstown Fire Battalion Chief Silverio Caggiano, a HazMat specialist, pointed to documents obtained through a public records request, saying they show the U.S. EPA has found many chemicals used by Ohio’s oil and gas industry for fracking have health risks.

“They found that of 206 chemicals that they looked at, EPA had health concerns for about 109 of them, including irritation to eyes, mucus membranes, blood toxicity, developmental toxicity, kidney effects, liver toxicity, neurotoxicity, and mutinization from the radiation,” he said.

Caggiano especially highlighted dangers from radium and the development of cancers, specifically bone cancers in developing children.

“They (state regulators) have no idea how much of these chemicals are actually being put in,” he said, pointing to industry confidentiality claims around fracking waste solutions. He called the ODNR’s recent attempts to revamp regulations “a joke.”

Athens County Commissioner Lenny Eliason was also on the call, and counted a win in local officials now being able to call upon the ODNR to hold public hearings for injection wells that were previously at the agency’s discretion.

“The problem with the hearing is that even though the public provides input on safety issues and concerns with injections, the ODNR director has no discretion. As long as the permit is correctly filled out, the permit gets granted,” he said. “Why involve the public in a sham process when you’re not going to do anything about acting on the information that’s provided during that public hearing?”

The other question Eliason said he had is why it’s so much easier to get an injection well permit in Ohio as compared to other states regulated by the national EPA.

“The third thing you deal with, with ODNR, is that enforcement is slow or non-existent,” he said. “We’ve had some open wells for a number of years that were supposed to be closed down and covered up, and they never got covered up because ODNR lacked inspectors.”

Ohio has capped severance taxes, so ODNR is stretched thin and doesn’t have the funding to hire more inspectors, he said. Removing a 500,000 barrel cap on taxes collected would help fund the ODNR to do proper inspection and enforcement, he added.

Eliason further pointed to high trucking traffic from the injection, and wear and tear on township roads that strain county budgets.

Washington County resident George Banziger said his home county is first in the state for injection waste being put into its ground, with 8 million barrels injected just in 2019.

“People in Washington County are frustrated, disappointed, and angry,” he said, and criticized ODNR as ignoring residents’ concerns while granting new well permits. Banziger also noted the irony of the destruction of oil and gas production wells due to excessive fracking waste injection.

An ODNR spokesperson did not respond to a Monday morning email requesting an interview or comment. 

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