When a chemical spill contaminated the water supply for thousands of West Virginians, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at West Virginia University quickly sought – and received – a National Science Foundation grant to collect and analyze samples with an eye to ensuring such hazards do not turn into disasters.

“There is a dire need to assess the extent of contamination in both drinking water and riverine systems in order to take proper immediate measures to remediate the contamination and devise intelligent strategies to handle such disasters in the future,” said Jennifer Weidhaas, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering in WVU’s Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources.

About 10,000 gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or MCHM, plus about 300 gallons of a second chemical – PPH, a mixture of polyglycol ethers – leaked into the Elk River on Jan. 9 from a storage tank owned by Freedom Industries. The site is about a mile upstream from a West Virginia American Water Co. treatment facility providing water to about 300,000 people. Citizens within nine counties were encouraged to not use their water for days and distribution of bottled water continued through this past Monday (Jan. 27).

The grant “will help our faculty to develop more comprehensive, interdisciplinary and innovative research approaches that could, for example, lead to cost-effective, remote, and largely autonomous cyber physical systems monitoring of infrastructures that would protect our water supplies from such chemical contamination,” said Pradeep Fulay, Statler College’s associate dean for research.

“We also hope that technologies that could make use of chemicals/surfactants that are environmentally more friendly could be developed so as to minimize the impact on the availability of fresh water resources,” he said.

The $50,000 grant comes from the NSF’s Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems division’s Environmental Engineering program.

“This is one of the largest human-made environmental disasters in this century. In instances such as this, where the situation is still developing and public health is involved, timing is everything,” said the NSF Program Director William Cooper. “RAPID grants give researchers the support they need to be on the ground and to collect data immediately.”

Little is known about the extent of the contamination and potential risks to public health and the environment, so under the NSF grant, WVU scientists immediately traveled to the area to begin sampling the water to determine concentrations of the chemical in the water, how effective flushing the chemical from home systems is and how to prevent an incident in the future.

“Ultimately, the purpose is to develop more resilient water infrastructure systems and enhance our ability to respond to these types of disasters in a timely manner to that the human health and environmental impact is minimized,” Weidhaas said.

The research team will be led by Weidhaas and Lian-Shin Lin, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. Collaborators are James Anderson, director of the Environmental Research Center, housed in the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design Leslie Hopkinson, hydraulics/hydrology; Antarpreet Jutla, hydroepidemology; Radhey Sharma, sediment pollution; Kung Wang, organic chemistry in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Stuart Welsh, fish and wildlife services; and Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute. Sample and data collection will be coordinated with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the Bureau for Public Health.

Intensive sampling efforts have already begun and will continue daily at the affected water treatment plant and various locations of the water distribution system, including cold water taps, water fountains and hot water systems of public buildings such as hospitals, schools, nursing homes, hotels and gas stations. Exterior water spigots at private residences will also be sampled

“In addition, water and sediment samples will be collected at various locations of the Elk River including near the water intake structure,” Lin said. “Given the chemical properties of MCHM, samples at both the river surface and different depths will be collected.”

Sampling frequencies will continue for an extended period of time to be determined after the results from the initial effort are generated and analyzed.

Once the sampling is complete, a geographic information systems-based map of chemical exposure throughout the water distribution system will be produced from the estimations. These exposure evaluations are a first step toward a full-risk assessment to the affected population.

The team will also assess the chemical fate and removal results throughout the water treatment processes. The results will be used to develop short- and long-term treatment strategies in the event of similar chemical spills, such as switching to an alternative water source, implementing a temporary treatment measure and building in redundancy.

-WVU-

mcd/01/28/14

CONTACT: Mary C. Dillon, Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

304.293.4086, [email protected]

Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.

The latest news articles featuring West Virginia Water Research Institute Director Dr. Paul Ziemkiewicz regarding the Elk River chemical spill:

Newsweek - January 30, 2014
Experts want everyone to stop panicking over ‘off the wall’ formaldehyde scare in West Virginia

Charleston Daily Mail - January 28, 2014
Expert says tank leaked for at least 20 hours

WWVU U92 - January 22, 2014
Elk River Chemical Spill (Radio Interview)

New Republic - January 22, 2014
West Virginia can’t get its story straight on the chemical spill

The State Journal - January 20, 2014
Legislative committee hears more about chemical spill from water experts

The Register-Herald - January 18, 2014
Joint committee has started its investigation

WV Metro News - January 17, 2014
Lawmakers begin water emergency probe

West Virginia Public Broadcasting - January 17, 2014
Senate commission begins leak investigation

WOWKTV.COM - January 17, 2014
Questions remain about when crude MCHM started leaking

The Charleston Gazette - January 17, 2014
Legislators start hearings into chemical spill

Charleston Daily Mail - January 17, 2014
Water expert says chemical likely was leaking for awhile

WV Public Broadcasting - January 10, 2014
What is Crude MCHM?

WVU Today - January 10, 2014
WVU advising caution after chemical spill in southern West Virginia

The Register-Herald - January 10, 2014
Unknowns plague officials’ concerns about chemical spill

Charleston Daily Mail - January 10, 2014
WVU researcher says water use precautions are necessary

Metro News - January 10, 2014
Water tests continue, still no guess when do-not-use order will be lifted

The State Journal - January 10, 2014
WV Water Research Institute Director Explains Chemical

WOWKTV - January 10, 2014
WV Water Research Institute Director Explains Chemical

Salon - January 10, 2014
Little is known about the chemical contaminating West Virginia’s tap water

The natural gas boom continues to sound in what have become the northern gas fields of West Virginia. State lawmakers are working on ways to take maximum advantage of the economic benefits that are coming with it. The other byproduct authorities are grappling with is an excess of waste products, which, without proper disposal, can threaten public health.

The Horizontal Well Control Act of 2011 allocated funding to study the impacts of horizontal drilling. Legislators reached out to West Virginia University’s Water Research Institute. Director Paul Ziemkiewicz managed a study that looked at liquid and solid waste streams.

Liquid Waste

Horizontal wells produce two kinds of wastewater: flowback, and what’s referred to as “produced water.” Ziemkiewicz explains, once a well is fracked—meaning once operators take fracking fluid (5 million gallons of water mixed with sand and additives) and blast it deep into this hard, black, non-porous rock called Marcellus shale—the pressure is released and the first thing that happens is a regurgitation of some of that fluid.

“The stuff that comes out over the initial 60 days or so is called flowback,” Ziemkiewicz explains. “You have to get that flowback out of the system before you can start producing gas. You start producing a little bit of gas as soon as you release the pressure but when it gets to the point where you can start commercially producing gas you switch over to something called ‘produced water.'”

Ziemkiewicz goes on to explain that the longer the fracking fluid mingles with the rock formation the more stuff from that formation flows back out with the fluid like organic compounds, lots of salts, and yes, radioactive material.

“Sodium chloride, bromide, mainly chloride salts of one kind or another,” Ziemkiewicz says. “Strontium chloride, barium chloride. These things start pushing back up out of the hole and the concentration of those salts almost everything, including radioactivity starts to go up during the flowback cycle. So the longer you go into flowback and then produced water the higher the concentrations get.”

Ziemkiewicz adds that while many people seemed to be very concerned with the initial fracking fluid being injected into the wells, he is much more concerned with the produced water that comes up afterward.

“The stuff that comes back out is almost always more concentrated,” he says.

Ziemkiewicz says in some cases this briny water produced a concentration of about 250,000 milligrams per liter of dissolved solids-which he explains is essentially 25 percent solid.

Where does it go from there?

Well Ziemkiewicz says about 25 percent of the fluid is pumped back into deep wells classified as injection waste disposal wells, while the other 75 percent of flowback is being recycled. That recycled portion has to be processed. Solids like clays, metals, and rock are filtered and precipitated out, leaving cakes behind. These cakes are then dumped into solid waste landfills, the same place that the mud and rock produced during the drilling process are dumped.

Solid Waste

Under the Resource Conservation Recovery Act (RCRA) hazardous waste is differentiated from industrial solid waste based on tests that determine chemical properties. Interestingly, federal laws exempt drilling waste from regulation as hazardous waste. But the WV Department of Environmental Protection is proceeding with some caution, nevertheless.

Scott Mandirola Director of the DEP’s Division of Water and Waste Management explains horizontal well operators were just sort of spreading this waste on properties, or dumping it, burying it, whatever, wherever. By all estimations, a bad idea. The Horizontal Well Control Act of 2011 specified that instead the waste should be disposed of in appropriate landfills. That’s when municipal landfills started accepting the waste. And we’re talking about a lot of waste.

So DEP Cabinet Secretary Randy Huffman sent a memo out to solid waste landfill operators in July of last year saying that they could continue accepting waste if they took one of two actions: apply to expand their operation, or construct separate cells specifically for these waste products.

Bill Hughes is the chairman of the Wetzel County Solid Waste Authority. He’s concerned about new practices.

“Wetzel County which is legally permitted for up to 9,999 tons, round it off to 10, times 12, 120,000 tons per year? Our landfill last year took in about 330,000 tons. Of that, about a quarter million tons was drill waste, drill cuttings.”

Mandirola says Wetzel County—one of the most heavily drilled counties in the state—has seen one of the largest influxes of waste because of its proximity to so many well sites. This concerns residents for reasons such as the amount of space available in landfills, and also because there’s still so little known about the chemical characterization of the waste.

Enter Paul Ziemkiewicz, who, again, was tasked to look into that.

“I don’t think we’ve characterized this material adequately enough to determine whether or not it really belongs in solid waste landfills or whether it belongs in a higher standard landfill,” Ziemkiewicz says.

Ziemkiewicz did look at drilling mud. But he explains that a combination of bad luck, low response times from companies and the WV Department of Environmental Protection, bad weather, and an aggressive timeframe to report results contributed to the lack of access to drilling samples from the actual rock formation where Marcellus gas exists—the shale. So unfortunately, it’s still something of a mystery.

“They’re black shales,” Ziemkiewicz explains. “And black shales tend to accumulate uranium. Uranium breaks down into radium.”

While Ziemkiewicz wasn’t able to test drill muds from the Marcellus itself, he says the tests results from drilling samples of vertical sections turned up exceeding amounts of toxins considered safe by federal drinking water standards.

“Whether or not [comparing to federal drinking water standards] was the right approach I’m still not sure. Nevertheless, a lot of these drill cuttings and muds came out being well excess of drinking water standards.”

Recommendations

Ziemkiewicz is calling for an additional study to test these solid waste streams.

“By the time this stuff gets to the landfill and is diluted it may or may not even be a problem,” he says. “It may be that we’re focusing on radioactivity when that’s not a problem at all, but the real problem is organic contamination like benzene.”

Ziemkiewicz’s other recommendations include what he calls common sense measures like proper containment of drill sites to guard against spills, and thorough inspection and enforcement by well-trained authorities. He also suggests tracking liquid wastes to have clear knowledge of where it ends up.

Ziemkiewicz and other experts say it’s hard to predict the future of oil and gas development, but everyone seems certain that significantly more drilling is the most likely scenario, and therefore, more insight into the science and practices of the industry is the best course of action to safeguard not only communities, but also employees and first responders.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Water testing continued in parts of nine West Virginia counties on Friday, the day after West Virginia American Water Company issued a do not use order for its customers in Kanawha, Putnam, Boone, Jackson, Clay, Logan and Roane counties along with Culloden in Cabell County.

On Friday morning, Jeff McIntyre, WVAW president, still could not provide an estimate on when the order may be lifted. “We have run some tests and we can detect the material, there is the material present, but we don’t know how to quantify it,” McIntyre said.

The material was an undetermined amount of a chemical, identified as 4-methylcyclohexane methane, which is used to scrub coal. It leaked into the Elk River, which feeds the Kanawha Valley Water Treatment Plant, from a nearby plant, Freedom Industries, on Thursday.

McIntyre said his company was first notified of the potential problem around 12 p.m. Thursday and more than five hours before the do not use order was issued for an estimated 200,000 West Virginians.

“It’s very miserable not to have drinking water,” said Kent Carper, Kanawha County Commission president, who was working with state and local officials to coordinate water distribution in Kanawha County.

As of Friday morning, McIntyre said there were still many questions about the chemical.

WVAW was working with toxicologists with the manufacturer of the chemical that was being stored at the facility to try to understand the risks that could be associated with the chemical. “In other words, what kind of quantities can be present in drinking water and not pose harm to our customers?”

State officials were also involved. “Our emergency response team has worked to develop a testing protocol and a sampling plan on the chemical at issue. Initial samples have been taken and additional sampling and testing will continue throughout the situation,” said Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin on Friday morning.

Those with West Virginia American Water Company, the state Bureau of Health and emergency responders were coordinating the sampling effort. “This process will take time, but we continue to work quickly to provide information related to the ability to life the ‘do not use’ order by West Virginia American Water Company,” Tomblin said.

Paul Ziemkiewicz, a West Virginia University professor, had been looking into the composition of the chemical. He said it does pose some health dangers. “If you breathe it, in its pure form, it is a lung irritant. In its pure form, on skin contact, it will cause irritation. If you drink this stuff, you have to drink quite a bit of it in order to die,” said Ziemkiewicz.