Fracking sites raise risk to babies, study says

Women living within half-mile of operations affffffffffffected.

Living within a half mile of a hydraulic fracturing site carries a serious risk for pregnant women, a new study says. The drilling technique, also known as fracking, injects high pressure water laced with chemicals into underground rock to release natural gas.

Women who lived within that distance to fracking operations in Pennsylvania were 25 percent more likely to give birth to lowweight infants thanexpecting motherswholivedmorethan two miles beyond the sites.

Thefifififififive-yearstudyofmore than 1.1 million births in the state, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, also found lower birth weights, although not as low, in infants whose mothers livedbetweenahalf mile and two miles from a fracking site. Beyond2miles, there was no indication of any health impact to newborns, a signifificant drop offffffffffff, the study said.

“I think I was surprised by themagnitude of the impact within the halfmile radius,” said Michael Greenstone, a professor and director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, and one of three authors of the study.

There are about 4 million births per year in the United States, and according to the study’s research, about 30,000 births are within a half mile of a fracking site and 100,000 births arewithin twomiles. “Idon’t think that’s an insubstantial number,” Greenstone said.

Greenstone said it’s important to not read too much into the study’s con- clusion. “I like to joke that there’s a little bit for everyone to hate in this paper,” he said. “There’s a big effffffffffffect withinone kilometer of sites, which the oil and gas industry dislikes, but the impact on the population beyond that may not be massive, which opponents of fracking won’t like.”

When Greenstone and his co-authors — Janet Currie, a Princeton University economics professor and Katherine Meckel, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles — embarked on the research, he said, the aimwasn’t tocondemnfracking, which is a relatively new method of drilling vertically underground, then switching to a horizontal direction to reach gas trapped in shale rock formations.

The practice has come under scrutinybecause of the potentially toxic chemicals used to crack the shale and the amount of water used to force out natural gas. State health offifficials and residents near fracking operations have complained thatwastewater from fracking taints local drinking water. Companies in some cases have been forced to provide bottled drinkingwater for residents who relied on underground wells. A number of states, such asMaryland and New Jersey, have banned fracking.

A U.S. Geological Survey study in 2014 said pumping wastewater into deeply buried storage wells was probablywhyOklahomawas experiencing more small earthquakes than California. The sites are also known to leak methane, a gas that’s up to 100 timesmoreharmful than carbon dioxide in causing global warming in the atmosphere.

But those drawbacks are offffffffffffset by the benefifits of natural gas, Greenstone said. Hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas “has led to a sharp increase inU.S. energy production and generated enormous benefifits, including abruptly lower energy prices, stronger energy security and even lower air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions by displacing coal in electricity generation.”

Theauthorshopethatpolicymakerswilluse the study’s fifinding as a talking point in a robust debate over fracking. They chose to study Pennsylvania because they got access to birth record data that identified “the exact locations of themothers and the wells,” Greenstone said. “This was like a great success of big data.”

Most drilling operations sit in remote areas where they have little chance of harming pregnant women.

But some sites in Pennsylvania are near Pittsburgh, and others in Texas are inside heavily populated Fort Worth.