“For me, the higher risk for the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black women is an important signal and it makes me want to ask more questions,” Gonzalez said. The negative impact of living near a well appeared strongest among women who were Hispanic, Black or had fewer than 12 years of education. Of about 225,000 birth outcomes analyzed over a 13-year period, 28,000 were spontaneous preterm births. Therefore, the researchers excluded multiple births and women who had medical conditions associated with early delivery, like maternal preeclampsia. The analyses focused on how exposure to wells may affect spontaneous preterm births. “We’re getting a sense that this does potentially have an adverse effect on health outcomes of pregnancy.” “There’s some evidence that environmental exposures increase risk of preterm birth, but this particular exposure – oil and gas – has received very little attention in California, despite having millions of people living in close proximity to wells,” said lead author David Gonzalez, a PhD candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). About 17 million people in the United States live within one mile of an active oil or gas well, including 2.1 million in California. The study, published June 5 in Environmental Epidemiology, adds to a small body of population-based research aimed at better understanding how environmental factors may affect the health outcomes of pregnancy, and it is among the first to investigate a potential link between residential proximity to oil and gas operations and spontaneous preterm birth in California. Spontaneous preterm birth, in which a pregnancy ends before 37 weeks of gestation, is the leading cause of infant death in the United States. The results show that women who lived near wells in the first and second trimesters were 8 to 14 percent more likely to experience a spontaneous preterm birth – one that would otherwise be unexplained – at 20 to 31 weeks. Researchers examined 225,000 births from mothers who lived within about six miles of oil and gas wells in the San Joaquin Valley from 1998 to 2011.
In the San Joaquin Valley, where pumpjacks are also in close proximity to houses, researchers found living near oil and gas development is a risk factor for spontaneous preterm birth. Strong heterogeneity across states can be observed, suggesting that an improvement in disclosure laws in other states, that would make similar analyses possible, is of great importance.A pumpjack operating a well in the Signal Hill neighborhood in Los Angeles County, California. We find robust evidence that minorities, especially African Americans, disproportionately live near fracking wells, but less consistent evidence for environmental injustice by income or educational attainment. We explain the distance to the nearest well within a county with fracking activity or within a buffer zone by race/ethnicity, income, educational attainment, various land-use control variables, and county fixed-effects. Different buffer zones around fracking wells are applied to capture effects at different spatial scales and to compare only areas with similar geological properties. Geo-coded well data from the FracFocus registry are merged to blockgroup-level socio-demographic data from the 2006–2010 American Community Survey and population density and land use data from EPA's Smart Location Database 2010. states with mandatory disclosure between 20 - Colorado, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas - this paper analyzes the socio-demographic characteristics of people living close to fracking activity. Using data on the geographic location of fracking wells in four U.S.
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