What is killing the infants in the Uintah Basin? That’s what Donna Young wanted to know.
Young, a midwife in Vernal, Utah, had been working for two decades, and birthing hundreds of infants with a spotless reputation. In 2013, things took an awful turn. Within a fifteen-month period, four of the babies delivered by Young suffered birth defects. Another infant was stillborn. At the funeral for that child, an acquaintance pulled Young aside and told her that other infants had also died that year. Young did some research, and learned that an astonishing 10 infants in the area had died in 2013 alone. For a small town like Vernal, such a high infant mortality rate was shocking. In the summer of 2013, Young raised the issue with Joe Shaffer, director of the TriCounty Health Department. It had to be fracking, she said.
According to an explosive feature article in Rolling Stone, that’s when the trouble started.
In 2014, TriCounty Health announced a study in response to Young’s concerns over the infant mortality rate, but the county merely counted up infant deaths, ignoring alarming levels of air pollution in and around Vernal: Ozone readings that rivaled the worst summer days in New York City or Los Angeles, particulate matter as bad as Mexico City, ground air fraught with carcinogenic gasses such as benzene.
Despite numerous studies linking mothers’ exposure to toxic air with fetal disasters of all kinds, TriCounty found no connection between the infant mortality rate and fracking. When pressed on possible causes for the deaths, the epidemiologist who worked on the study cited the health problems of mothers, such as smoking, diabetes, and prenatal neglect. While disappointing, TriCounty’s findings were unsurprising. Vernal is a town literally built by oil, and anything that might challenge the oil and gas industry is unheard of.
When the local newspapers began publishing full-page stories about Young’s inquiry, the entire town turned on her. She says someone attempted to poison the animals on her ranch. She began receiving death threats. Local nurses and doctors warned pregnant women that Young’s “incompetence” had killed babies, and would likely kill theirs, too. Young’s practice suffered. Before the backlash, Young typically had between 18 and 25 clients a year. Now, she’s down to 4 or 5, and doesn’t know how she’ll be able to continue to feed her animals.
In most places, detecting a grave risk to children would inspire people to name a street for you. But in Vernal, a town literally built by oil, raising questions about the safety of fracking will brand you a traitor and a target. “Me and my kids are still cautious: If someone kicked in my front door tonight, it’d take an hour for the sheriff to get here,” says Young, whose house on 60 acres is well out of town and a quarter-mile clear of her closest neighbor. “The first person they’d meet is me on the staircase, pointing that .45 dead at ’em. And I know how to use these things — I can nail a coyote in the pasture from 100 yards.”
When Young’s clients complained that their water tasted bad, she decided that she would have to act herself. Young tested the water with the same monitoring device used by fracking drillers. Most of the batches that she tested came up positive for extreme toxicity from hydrogen sulfide — one of the most deadly gasses released by hydraulic fracturing. The amounts Young says she found were 7,000 times the EPA threshold for safety. Four of her five clients who complained about their water suffered miscarriages. Still, the leaders of Uintah County take pride in approving an unprecedented number of drilling permits, refusing to acknowledge any negative effect of fracking.
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