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Spotlight PA: Little Information Made Public About Free Water Testing Ordered As Part Of Mariner East Natural Gas Liquids Pipeline Settlement To Criminal Charges By Attorney General

This article by Lilly Riddle was first published by Spotlight PA on April 4, 2024--

As part of its 2022 plea deal with the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, natural gas company Energy Transfer agreed to fund the testing and remediation of residential water supplies polluted by the construction of its Mariner East II pipeline.

But in the nearly two years since that agreement was announced, little information has been released to the public by the state or company about how many households have had their water tested, how many had their water treated if it was contaminated, and the overall status of the testing process, which is run by the state attorney general’s office.

At the time, the deal was touted by the agency, then led by Josh Shapiro, as a way to hold Energy Transfer and Sunoco accountable for leaking thousands of gallons of drilling fluid into groundwater, lakes, and streams from 2017 to 2021, and address residents’ concerns about whether their water was safe.

“Today we’re upholding our oath to our constitution and holding Energy Transfer accountable for their crimes against our natural resources,” Shapiro said in a news release at the time.

The conviction, in which Energy Transfer pleaded no contest to 14 environmental crimes, found that the company’s subsidiary Sunoco polluted waterways and “failed to report the losses of fluid to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) numerous times, in spite of the legal requirement to do so,” according to a news release.

Energy Transfer did not respond to a request for comment.

As part of the deal, affected residents were offered free water testing funded by the company.

In June, ahead of the August 2022 announcement, the Office of Attorney General sent out letters detailing the testing program to people living within 450 feet of the right of way of the pipeline.

Residents who received a letter were told about the criminal case and asked to indicate whether they wanted their water to be independently evaluated, free of charge, by a professional and independent geologist.

The Office of Attorney General did not establish a way to publicly track who was contacted and how many people signed up.

The office has said this information cannot be disclosed because it relates to a criminal investigation, which makes the records exempt under Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law.

Some residents who asked for testing say the process to receive it has been long and arduous, and have expressed confusion over the terminology used by the attorney general’s office, which in documents reviewed by Spotlight PA called the testing requests “complaints.”

“This process is a mammoth undertaking involving multiple agencies and coordination with homeowners, so it will naturally take time,” Brett Hambright, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, wrote in an email to Spotlight PA. “The Office of Attorney General has received one complaint from a homeowner frustrated with the process. Additionally, we have received a few timing inquiries and we provided those homeowners with a status update on their individual investigation. Most were happy to have that information.”

The number of tests done so far, the results of those tests, and how many residents have been provided water supplies by Sunoco have not been publicly disclosed by either the attorney general’s office or the Department of Environmental Protection.

Spotlight PA submitted open records requests to both agencies, but was told that either the information was exempted as part of the Office of Attorney General’s criminal investigation or the records didn’t exist.

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said it received “just under 800 requests” for tests by Aug. 19, 2022, the deadline set by the agency. However, there isn’t a way for the public to track how many of those requests were granted or how many resulted in an independent geologist evaluation.

Hambright told Spotlight PA that professional geologists hired by the state are tracking this data. “We hired professionals to handle this task and the data is with them, not with the Office of Attorney General,” he said.

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-- AG Shapiro: Energy Transfer/Sunoco Convicted Of Criminal Charges Related To Construction Of Mariner East 2 & Revolution Natural Gas/Liquids Pipelines In PA [PaEN]

-- AG Shapiro: Free Water Evaluations Begin For Homeowners Affected By Construction Of Mariner East 2 Natural Gas Liquids Pipeline [PaEN]

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