Reporter Kiley Bense spoke with The Allegheny Front\u2019s Julie Grant about what she and her colleagues found: lax oversight, increased radioactivity in frack waste and evidence of water contamination.<\/p>\n
Listen to their conversation<\/p>\n
https:\/\/s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com\/media.alleghenyfront.org\/010926_FrackWaste_Kiley_2way.mp3<\/a><\/p>\n Julie Grant: What is this material [and] what does it contain?<\/p>\n Kiley Bense: Solid waste that\u2019s created from fracking can cover a pretty wide range of materials, including things like drill cuttings. We\u2019re talking about rocks. Some of this stuff is contaminated by chemicals and by radioactive elements that are coming from deep underground.\u00a0 This is one of the reasons that it can be contaminated with things like heavy metals and radioactive elements like radium.\u00a0<\/p>\n Investigation: The fracking industry\u2019s waste problem<\/a><\/p>\n Julie Grant: How much of this waste is produced by fracking companies and other drillers in Pennsylvania?<\/p>\n Kiley Bense: \u00a0We found that over the past eight years, there have been millions of tons of this waste being produced because DEP, the state Department of Environmental Protection in Pennsylvania, is very understaffed. They don\u2019t have the resources to do regular audits of these numbers. And so while we can give kind of a ballpark figure, we can\u2019t say definitively how much the waste is.\u00a0<\/p>\n Julie Grant: In your investigation, what did you uncover about the state\u2019s efforts to track where this waste is going?<\/p>\n Kiley Bense: It was one of those situations where the more you learn about it, the less you feel like you know [laughs]. The state has a number of different ways of tracking the waste. So, one is this database that operators submit their own numbers to; it\u2019s being updated all the time because operators submit monthly.<\/p>\n There\u2019s not really anybody looking at the big picture and making sure that all the numbers correspond to each other and make sense.\u00a0<\/p>\n But then there are also a number of other databases and programs that are doing some parts of tracking this waste. One of my sources referred to this as a \u201clogistical mess.\u201d It\u2019s unclear where and how each piece of waste is being tracked because we have different departments within the Department of Environmental Protection tracking the waste. There\u2019s not really anybody looking at the big picture and making sure that all the numbers correspond to each other and make sense.\u00a0<\/p>\n Julie Grant: Why is it important, do you think, to track [solid waste from fracking]?\u00a0<\/p>\n Kiley Bense: When there\u2019s a spill or a leak or something goes wrong at a well pad or we have an instance of like illegal dumping, it\u2019s a lot harder to figure out where that waste came from, who might be doing it, to enforce regulations around those things if you don\u2019t know what the waste is or where it came from or if you have accurate numbers to compare these things to. <\/p>\n Julie Grant: You report that more information is coming out about the radioactivity of this waste. Can you talk about that?\u00a0<\/p>\n Kiley Bense: I talked to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh who have done research, new research using DEP records, where they found that the radioactivity in the fracking waste that\u2019s being produced over the last few years is much more radioactive than the DEP\u2019s earlier numbers.\u00a0It\u2019s also much more radioactive than numbers that were used by the federal government in 2011.<\/p>\n They found that the radioactivity in the fracking waste that\u2019s being produced over the last few years is much more radioactive than the DEP\u2019s earlier numbers.<\/p>\n I think this is important because a lot of the state\u2019s positions, or how they\u2019re thinking about regulating the waste, is based on those older numbers, that older data. And now we have new information that the waste might be a lot more radioactive than we previously thought. <\/p>\n So we might want to rethink how we are regulating it. We\u2019re going to make sure that workers are safe, for example, because they\u2019re the ones who would be most exposed to it. And it\u2019s just really crucial information to have when you\u2019re thinking about how do we handle the waste.\u00a0<\/p>\n Julie Grant: You also talk about the radioactive monitors going off when trucks containing oil and gas waste are coming into landfills. Can you talk about how often that\u2019s happening and what we should take from that?<\/p>\n Kiley Bense: These are special alarms that are at the entrances to landfills; they go off when the truckload exceeds a certain amount of radioactivity. In 2023, alarms at landfills in Pennsylvania went off more than 500 times because of oil and gas waste. Pennsylvania actually is kind of ahead of other states on this. Like we have stricter regulations than other states do for our landfills in this particular instance. And so that\u2019s useful for giving us some data about what type of waste is coming into the landfills and how radioactive it is.<\/p>\n In 2023, [radiation] alarms at landfills in Pennsylvania went off more than 500 times because of oil and gas waste.<\/p>\n Read More<\/p>\n Julie Grant:\u00a0And you spoke with some activists who have been watching waterways near the Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill [30 miles south of Pittsburgh], where there have been some problems. What are the dangers here?\u00a0<\/p>\n Kiley Bense: The people who have been really watching the Westmoreland landfill in Belle Vernon and are really concerned about water contamination. There have been a number of violations and issues at that landfill over the years. It\u2019s also a landfill that has taken a lot of oil and gas waste over the years, and residents nearby have complained about odors or just impacts of that waste they\u2019ve noticed from living nearby. <\/p>\n \t\t
<\/p>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_2921-scaled-e1721327852176.jpg\")
\t\t\t<\/a>