Pitt’s Environmental Law Clinic gets real-world experience

Pitt law students will be getting some real-world experience when they represent a Cambria… Pitt law students will be getting some real-world experience when they represent a Cambria County couple who has filed a lawsuit against a Marcellus Shale drilling company.

Pitt’s Environmental Law Clinic will represent Chester Slesinger and his wife Edith, who have filed suit against Pittsburgh-based Marcellus Shale drilling firm T&F Exploration LP, claiming that the company’s activities contaminated the Slesingers’ well water.

Emily Collins, one of the supervising counselors on the case, described Pitt’s law clinic as a place where students can gain real-life experience — like a medical school residency for law students.

Collins did not release information about which students are involved in the ongoing case.

“It’s a place where law students are able to work on client representation matters as they would in the real world,” Collins said.

Collins explained that she picks cases the clinic will represent based on whether they meet certain criteria, such as whether the case involves environmental issues and if the clinic has the resources and competence to handle the case.

She explained how this particular case satisfies these requirements.

“This is a case that involves experts like geologists, and it’s one of my educational objectives that students have the opportunity to work with technical experts in their cases,” she said. “I want to make sure that we are choosing cases that allow students to work in an interdisciplinary way.”

The lawsuit seeks compensation not only for the couple, but also for the costs of remediation of alleged hazardous substances under the state’s Hazardous Sites Cleanup Act.

The problems for the Slesingers began in December 2009 after the company drilled a vertical well 2,650 feet away from their home’s water-supply well.

The couple began noticing the high dissolved-solid content in the water, made up of chlorides, barium, salts and other hazardous material, after their granddaughter complained of salty-tasting water.

“It tasted so salty you couldn’t swallow it,” Chester Slesinger said. “You couldn’t take a shower in it; it was unusable.”

The Slesingers’ complaint alleged contamination and loss of use of their water well caused by the conduct and activities of T&F Exploration. The complaint accuses the firm of releasing, leaking, injecting, spilling and discharging cement, drilling fluids and other hazardous substances from its oil and gas drilling facilities and exploration activities.

“At times the water didn’t seem too bad, but when they test it, it still comes up over the maximum contamination levels for safe drinking water,” Slesinger said. “At other times it has gotten really bad. The second time it tasted like garbage. It was just foul. It tasted rotten.”

Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection has conducted several tests, and Slesinger said the state agency told him that the contamination in the water didn’t meet the criteria of gas-well pollution. But Slesinger said he felt that the tests that the DEP ran were not adequate.

“The people that sampled the water over the last 15 months, no one had ever told us we could drink the water but the DEP,” Slesinger said.

Representatives from the DEP and T&F Exploration did not respond to requests for comment.

Dana Rizzo, water-quality educator at Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences’ Cooperative Extension Office, had worked with the couple and said that test results convey “classic gas-well contamination.”

“The main sign is elevated levels of total dissolved solids which are usually salts found underground near the gas and oil deposits,” Rizzo said.

“Chlorides and barium often associated with gas wells tested high.”

According to Rizzo, the bottom of an aquifer — an underground layer of rock that stores water — contains a layer of solid rock or clay that seals groundwater from naturally occurring salts, barium and other unhealthy minerals. Gas drilling can affect groundwater by bringing minerals up and letting them seep into the ground.

Slesinger said that the company was using a vertical well even though horizontal wells are widely considered safer for the environment. However, horizontal wells can cost up to 80 percent more, according to NaturalGas.org.

Companies are required to give notice to property owners within 1,000 feet of the drilling site, but because of the distance, the Slesingers were never informed of the drilling.

Slesinger, who has to haul clean water to his house for drinking, bathing and cooking, among other things, is confounded by the DEP’s decision and primarily wants one question answered:

“If it’s not coming from the gas well, where is the contamination coming from?”