Source: HBO Documentary Films
Every Monday at 9 PM/8c this summer, HBO Documentary Films will be showing a new award winning film. Tomorrow, they kick off the series with the controversial film Gasland, winner of the “Documentary Special Jury Prize” at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
No matter where you stand on the issue the documentary explores, it looks like it will be an interesting and informative film either way. Check out the official trailer as well as audio interviews with film’s creator Josh Fox and photos from the film after the jump!
Plot Synopsis:
When filmmaker Josh Fox received an unexpected offer of $100,000 for the natural gas drilling rights to his property in the Delaware River Basin, on the border of New York and Pennsylvania, he resisted the urge to accept. Instead, he set off on a cross-country journey to investigate the environmental risks of agreeing to the deal.
Official Trailer:
Audio Interviews with Filmmaker Josh Fox:
Gasland – Interview_with_Josh_Fox – What is Fracking?
Gasland – Interview_with_Josh_Fox – What Should We Do?
Gasland – Interview_with_Josh_Fox – Should New Yorkers be Concerned?
Gasland – Josh Fox Full Interview Transcript (Word doc.)
Photos (Click for larger versions):
Can you light your water on fire?
Wyoming Tanks
Water Sample
Official Press Release:
For Immediate Release May 27, 2010
SUNDANCE AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY GASLAND
EXPOSES THE POSSIBLE HAZARDS OF DOMESTIC NATURAL GAS DRILLING
WHEN IT DEBUTS JUNE 21, EXCLUSIVELY ON HBO
When filmmaker Josh Fox received an unexpected offer of $100,000 for the natural gas drilling rights to his property in the Delaware River Basin, on the border of New York and Pennsylvania, he resisted the urge to accept. Instead, he set off on a cross-country journey to investigate the environmental risks of agreeing to the deal.
GASLAND is Fox’s urgent, cautionary and sometimes darkly comic look at the largest domestic natural gas drilling campaign in history, which is currently sweeping the country and promising landowners a quick payoff. Debuting MONDAY, JUNE 21 (9:00-10:45 p.m. ET/PT), this shocking exposé shows that America’s zeal to produce homegrown natural gas, often touted as “clean burning,” may be poisoning the water and air. The timely documentary won the Documentary Special Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
Other HBO playdates: June 24 (1:00 p.m., 12:30 a.m.), 26 (noon) and 30 (9:45 a.m.), and July 5 (3:30 p.m.) and 9 (4:00 p.m.)
HBO2 playdates: June 23 (8:00 p.m.) and 29 (4:45 p.m.), and July 21 (2:15 p.m.) and 25 (7:45 a.m.)
HBO Documentary Films presents another weekly series this summer, debuting a provocative new special every Monday, June 7 through Aug. 9. Other June films include “Smash His Camera” (June 7), “For Neda” (June 14) and “Kevorkian” (June 28).
Beneath the continental U.S. lies a vast underground ocean of natural gas waiting to be harvested, with the potential to supply energy to millions of Americans. However, as Fox discovers, the drilling process, called hydraulic fracturing or fracking, was exempted by the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy Act of 2005 from the United States’ most basic environmental regulations, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Across the country, in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Dallas-Ft. Worth, where drilling is slated to take place or is already occurring directly in water-supplying areas nearby, a crisis looms that could affect millions.
Part verité road trip, part exposé, part mystery and part showdown, GASLAND follows director Fox on a 24-state investigation of the environmental effects of hydraulic fracturing. What he uncovers is mind-boggling: tap water so contaminated it can be set on fire right out of the tap; chronically ill residents with similar symptoms in drilling areas across the country; and huge pools of toxic waste that kill livestock and vegetation.
Among the stops on Fox’s journey:
Dimock, Pa., the town closest to the New York City watershed, where residents’ animals begin losing hair after drilling started, presumably from drinking contaminated water.
Wyoming, where Fox visits ranchers whose water well erupted with a geyser of natural gas for three days.
Tiny DISH, Tex., where emissions from natural gas wells and pipelines measure 55 times the acceptable public health level for cancer-causing benzene and 107 times the health standard for carbon disulfide, a neurotoxin.
Dallas-Ft. Worth, Tex., where approximately 10,000 gas wells produce air emissions from gas drilling that are greater than all the air pollution from all cars and trucks in that metropolitan area, the fourth largest in America.
Gas companies have now turned their attention to the massive Marcellus Shale Field, where Fox’s Pennsylvania home rests. Stretching from the Catskill region of New York State to West Virginia, the so-called “Saudi Arabia of natural gas” is also home to the country’s largest unfiltered watershed, supplying water to millions of Americans, including the residents of New York City. Thousands of leases have already been purchased by drilling companies, prompting a public controversy.
Fox reveals alarming facts about America’s natural gas industry. In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, championed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, which exempted fracking from numerous long-held environmental regulations such as the Safe Drinking Water Act. Natural gas companies have installed hundreds of thousands of rigs in 34 states, drilling into huge shale fields, tight sands or coal bed seams containing gas deposits trapped in the rock. Each well requires the use of fracking fluids – chemical cocktails consisting of 596 chemicals, including carcinogens and neurotoxins, as well as one to seven million gallons of water, which are infused with the chemicals. Considering there are approximately 450,000 wells in the U.S., Fox estimates that 40 trillion gallons of chemically infused water have been created by the drilling, much of it left seeping or injected into the ground across the country.
GASLAND features interviews with: ordinary citizens whose lives have been irreparably altered by hydraulic fracturing; scientists like MacArthur “Genius Award” fellow Wilma Subra, who warns of the dangers of arsenic poisoning from drinking groundwater affected by fracking fluid; and government officials on both sides of the issue, including John Hanger, Pennsylvania’s secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, who minimizes the effects of fracking, but refuses to drink a glass of water from an affected well, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who laments the possibility that New York City’s safe, great-tasting water will become a thing of the past.
The public remains largely unaware of the potential dangers of hydraulic fracturing, while state and local environmental agencies do not have the resources to fully investigate or regulate the gas industry. In many instances, residents have received huge tanks of water to replace their water wells, but the smell and lingering illnesses of people and livestock attest to the damage done. Anyone able to secure compensation from the gas companies must sign non-disclosure agreements that prevent them from bringing lawsuits or informing others of their experiences with natural gas drilling.
The fight against hydraulic fracturing has now moved to Congress, where lobbyists are trying to prevent legislation that would require the chemicals used in the fracking process to be subject to the Safe Drinking Water Act once again.
GASLAND is an HBO Documentary Films presentation of an International WOW production; a film by Josh Fox; edited by Matthew Sanchez; produced by Trish Adlesic, Josh Fox and Molly Gandour; written and directed by Josh Fox.
Gasland will be shown on HBO tomorrow night at 9 PM/8c.
