Purple Water – Purple Squirrel Bromide Poisoning ? Arlington’s Barium

December 2015 uPDATE on Barium….

“Dartmouth Professor Mukul Sharma and his colleagues find that chemical reactions between injected freshwater and hydraulically fractured shale could play a major role in generating toxic metal barium in fracking wastewater”.

Credit: Dartmouth College

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The Video of a Jersey Shore squirrel is getting media attention. Sadly this may be linked to bromide posioning from nearby fracking activity.“Zinc bromide high-density brines are widely used in well completions,…” “This is not good at all. That color looks very much like Tyrian purple. It is a natural organobromide compound seen in molluscs and rarely found in land animals. The squirrel has too much bromide in its system possibly from all the bromide laced frack water it’s been drinking. I would raise the alarm. This could mean bladder cancer for humans down the road.” said Krish Pillai, a professor at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania.

I recently blogged about a story entitled “SOS Butler County Black Water + Purple Water = A Fracking Nightmare”  that linked an animal and a human death to the water contamination.

The purple squirrel, who was released back into the wild, has a twitter account, https://twitter.com/#%21/purplsqurl,  a Facebook account called “The Purple Squirrel” and has it’s own Wikipedia page that covers prior sightings in 1997 and 2008.

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LETS TALK BARIUM NOW>>>>barium is used in case-hardening of steel, and in the oil and gas industry as a wetting agent for drilling mud (4, 5).
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/en/2edvol2p2b.pdf13.6.1
“Barium is present as a trace element in both igneous and sedimentary rocks. Although it is not found free in nature (1), it occurs in a number of compounds, most commonly barium sulfate (barite) and, to a lesser extent, barium carbonate (witherite).”

In the City of Arlington’s annual drinking water report Barium was tested in 2002 and was scheduled for testing again in 2011 and then they reported the 2012 results. Gee I wonder in the peak of all that drilling that started around 2007 how bad our exposure was to Barium…we will never know. Especially since 2007 was the beginning that we had to report an almost illegal amount of Bromate.

That doesn’t sound protective of public health if you live in a drilling town. I spoke to council about this many times and was glad to see Barium was tested for in two consecutive years albeit after our drilling boom went bust.