Madisonians among those speaking out against frac sand mining

This fall, Midwest Environmental Advocates [1] brought a petition to the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board in Madison asking the Department of Natural Resources to conduct a broad study on how frac sand mining affects the environment and health of affected areas.

According to Stacy Harbaugh, communications and outreach Coordinator at MEA, frac sand mining companies are interested in Wisconsin because of the geological makeup of the state’s western region. Large deposits of silica harvested from western Wisconsin provide ultra-hard sand which ‘prop open’ small holes in the method oil companies use for extraction. While Iowa and Minnesota’s geology also has this sand, Wisconsin makes up two-thirds of its total volume.

Midwest Environmental Advocates is a Madison-based nonprofit environmental law center that ‘works for healthy water, air, land and government for this generation and the next.’ It provides legal representation to those affected by environmental issues throughout Wisconsin. More recently, they have heard concerns from Wisconsin citizens affected by frac sand mining. 

This includes many in Madison, who believe that while the city may not host any mining operations, the effects will touch everyone.

 “The people who live around frac sand mining feel like they don’t have a voice. They feel like they don’t have a way of controlling what happens in their local community,” said Harbaugh. “People don’t feel like they have anything to do about it. They feel powerless.”

That changed when Preston Cole, Chairman of the Natural Resources Board, used his power to force the DNR to review the 29-page petition, a report of ‘questions and concerns and complaints’ the MEA, a law center based around health and environmental concerns, has received over the past three years from people living in areas affected by frac sand mines.

“The chairman of the board used his power tell the DNR to review our petition, so it’s in their court right now,” said Harbaugh. “If there’s a mining company moving into your town, creating a lot of dust, that affects air quality and ultimately the health of the town. We need our DNR to consider all these things.”

Frac sand mining companies are interested in Wisconsin, Harbaugh said, because of the geological makeup of the state’s western region. Large deposits of silica harvested from western Wisconsin provide ultra-hard sand which ‘prop open’ small holes in the method oil companies use for extraction. While Iowa and Minnesota’s geology also has this sand, Wisconsin makes up two-thirds of its total volume.

According to Harbaugh, as mining companies break down rock, the process creates crystalline silica dust, which has a similar effect to asbestos on the human body. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, crystalline silica dust is a carcinogen. If this dust lodges in a person’s lungs, she said, it leads to a disease called silicosis, also known as grinder’s asthma.

What allows these mining practices to continue are the permits given by the state to the mines, which supposedly verify that the mines are utilizing technologies and practices to avoid creating runoff in local air and water. The problem, said Harbaugh, is that these permits are outdated.

“The permit just requires that the facility use ‘best management practices’,” said Jimmy Parra, Staff Attorney at MEA. “The permit that was issues to these facilities were designed to address runoff from small gravel quarries, and now it’s being applied to an industry that’s on a completely different scale. This permit doesn’t work well with this new industry.”

“So far the DNR has been permitting and looking at each mine as an isolated thing, but what they’ve never done is an environmental assessment to see what this industry has done to impact the whole region,” Harbaugh said. “In one area there will be not one mine but three. We can’t just keep rubber stamping these mines, we have to look at the big picture.”