Reply All - #71 The Picture Taker

Episode Date: July 28, 2016

Rachel was a faithful user of a photo storage website called Picturelife, until one day all of her photos disappeared. As she investigated, she realized that every Picturelife user was having the same problem. Alex tries to find out if there's any hope of getting her photos back. Also, a preview of the new Gimlet show, Science Vs! Subscribe to Science Vs. by clicking this link. Become a Gimlet Member by clicking this link. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vote. And I'm Alex Goldman. Yes. Before you worked in podcasts, you were an IT man. Yes, I was. And sometimes on the show, people write to us with technical support questions, and we try to solve them for them.

Specifically, typically, you try to solve them for them. Right. It's called Super Tech Support. There's a theme song. You have one this week. You have a Super Tech Support case. Yes. So I got an email from a listener named Rachel.

She lives in New York City. Uh-huh. And she's having a big problem with this app that she uses called Picture Life. Picture Life. Yeah, it's this app that automatically backs up all the pictures you take on your phone or put on your computer to the cloud. Its tagline is, hold on, let me find it. Its tagline is, forget hard drives, give up on organizing file names.

There's a better way to find and share pictures. And Rachel's got these two little girls. They're one and three. And she takes millions of photos of them. So when she found Picture Life, she absolutely loved it. This sounds totally like I'm a lunatic, but I'm not organized. And it really was this good feeling of I am being so responsible that I am paying for this really lovely service that's doing this amazing thing for me.

And it just worked. It just worked. Rachel also really liked this feature that Picture Life had called Memories, where every once in a while I would send you an email which was like, hey, here are some photos from this date. like from a year ago or two years ago. It has nostalgia built into it. Right.

Yeah. And I think that that's very appealing to people, people who... It's appealing to people with kids. Because it's like, oh, my God, they're growing so fast. Yes, that's exactly what's appealing to. Yeah. I was trying to dance around that for some reason. You're tired of identifying as a father all the time?

I'm tired of being pegged so quickly as a father. Like, I'd like for people to think, like, oh, Alex Goldman is a guy, he has a radio show. he's really into music. He has a guitar. People are like, Alex's is dead. He also has a radio show. Podcast. Anyway, picture life.

So the problem is that one day she goes to log into Picture Life and it's just not working. The site is down. And it stays down for a couple of days. Like it's just she can't access it. No one can access it. It's just gone. And then after those couple days, the site comes back up. but when Rachel would go into picture life,

what she would get is not her images. She would get this very strange, what looked like where the photos were supposed to go, but instead of photos being there, it was just like colors. Solid colors. Here, I'll show you a picture. Yeah.

This is the interface. Oh, wow. Yeah, it looks like paint swatches. Yeah, and she keeps going back to the website, clicking around to see if there's a way to download her photos, just get them off of the service. That's not working. She tries contacting the company, a company that she said used to have really good customer service

and she's just not getting any response. It's just like a black hole. Oh, God. Was she freaking out at this point? Yeah, she was totally freaking out. Let's say all of your pictures are gone. What have you lost? The idea that they're gone is so horrifying.

I have created this incredible record of the lives of these two little girls up to this moment. And so to lose it would just be truly heartbreaking. I would lose my mind if I were in your position. I have a 16-month-old son. If I didn't have a million pictures of that kid, I'd go crazy. This is so hard. This sounds so, I feel like I'm turning into a hallmark card whenever I say this,

but like childhood flies by. And the thought of not having the hundreds upon hundreds of photos I have of my son, it makes me feel like a little, it like makes me choke up a little bit. That's exactly it. It's almost, there's this crazy thought I have where I think, what are the photos that I don't even remember taking that are now gone? Because I love these kids so friggin much that I just, I don't want to, I want it all saved.

I want to be able to look at it. I want to remember it. it. And the idea that it is gone or that that it was carelessly lost, I just, oh, it's the, I'm, it's beyond the worst. I feel like I know how she feels. When I was a kid, I was really excited about recording

things, like recording songs off the radio, recording Simpsons albums off TV. Simpsons episodes? Yeah, I was sorry, Simpsons episodes off TV. And I recorded over like a not-integrated different amount of our like irreplaceable family home movies with like tree house of horror seven or whatever and it makes me feel so bad that like I can't think about it wow because it's gone it's just gone yeah and that was like this is so much worse because it's not they had every reasonable expectation that the pictures would be where they left them yes exactly it's like if you pay for the

service you expect it to do what it says it does and like this service and like this service has just swallowed everybody's photos whole. So I'm going to go see what's going on. Okay, so Alex, what did you decide to do? So the first thing I did was I just wanted to see if Rachel was the only person having this problem or if everybody who was using Picture Life was having the same issue.

And yes, everybody is having the same issue. If you go to Twitter and search Picture Life, at about the beginning of April, you start to see people who are saying that they're having the same problem as Rachel that they can't see their images. and that they can't download their pictures. And then if you keep scrolling,

people just start getting more and more panicked and more and more angry. And they're saying that Picture Life is not responding to their customer support tickets. There's no way to download their photos. People are just totally stuck. And for the most part, Picture Life is just not responding at all.

So it's like everybody who's lost their photos is like standing outside the castle and they're screaming at the photo service inside the castle will please help them. And whoever runs the photo service is just like an impure. curious king who's like not even listening to the cries of the commenters below. Right.

So that's the way it was for quite a while. And then on May 5th, Picture Life tweeted, all caps, important message. And then in lowercase, we have an issue with our hosting company. Your photos are safe. We'll keep you posted. Sorry about the silence. That is so not calming. Like you don't acknowledge the problem.

You just say it's not a problem. It feels like someone trying to cover their body. But. Yeah. So I decided to look into this company, and the first thing that I found out was that Picture Life was founded by three guys a few years ago, like 2011. And then in January of 2015, it was sold to a company called Stream Nation. Uh-huh.

And then in March of this year, Stream Nation basically said, we're closing down, but we promised that Picture Life will keep going. Oh. So. So they said that in March. And in April, everything stops working. Right. And this is where it gets really interesting.

Okay. When I was looking into this issue, I found a Facebook group, which is all people who are having the same problem that Rachel's having called Picture Life users. There's about a couple hundred people in there. And all of them are just sort of commiserating, asking each other what's going on, seeing if anybody's heard back from the company. And one of the people who is in that Picture Life user's group is this guy Charles Foreman, who was one of the original co-founders. So Charles has over 20 years worth of digital photos. And the reason he was on this Facebook group is because the only place where a bunch of those pictures are saved is on picture life. Unfortunately, the majority of the photos that I have are exclusively on picture life. And how many photos is that? 93,000.

Oh, my God. 93,000. Yeah. Yeah. It's the worst feeling because these are memories that you captured, and you can go back and look and they evoke so many memories. These things are priceless, and now they're gone. And so I asked Charles, like, what are you going to do with your pictures from now on? I'm going to save them to a hard drive on a raid system, which means it's like a physical set of discs. in my apartment.

I just feel like I cannot, I cannot trust, I can't trust cloud services anymore. As a person who founded a cloud service, that's like a really big thing to say. That's like a really big statement. Well,

you can't count on really anything in this life, but to place your trust in a company, that doesn't have your best interest at heart, I think, especially when it pertains to, you know, memories that you have and the photos that you have, is not, it's not the best idea right now. So when Picture Life went down,

Charles, who, remember, is the founder and former CEO of Picture Life, was having the exact same problem and same anxieties about his photos that thousands of other picture life users were having. But what Charles had that no other picture life users had was the contact information for the current CEO. Got it. So Charles contacted the current CEO, who was basically like,

oh, we're having a little trouble, but everything will be fine. It was like exactly the same as the tweets they were sending. You just got like the handcrafted personal. Don't worry about it. So I said to him, I was like, can you forward me the correspondence you had with the CEO? I'm shooting the moon here, but I'm going to send the guy an email, see if he'll talk to me.

And 10 minutes later, he got back to me. Can you do me a favor and tell me what you had for breakfast? For breakfast, I had a coffee. I had a waffle with Nutella. I see. That sounds pretty good, honestly. I'm having the same breakfast as my three other kids. I see. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Any time and anything for our users. This is Jonathan Benesiah, the guy who bought Picture Life, and the one person who might be able to provide us some answers. And? Let me tell you the story from the very beginning. So first, as you can hear, I'm French. Yes. I had the chance to found the music service called Deezer, which is one. one of the most famous in Europe.

And Jonathan told me that after this big success he had with Dizer, he moved to California, and he started this company called Stream Nation. And Stream Nation was a site where you could store your movies, like, in the cloud and stream them from the cloud. But he always wanted a picture component to the site. So when he found out about Picture Life, he was like, great, I'm going to buy this company, I'm going to integrate it into Stream Nation. It will become the one location where people will store all their movies and their photos. like the one thing that you need.

So PictureLife is trucking along. He's got like 18 employees. But then in February, a round of funding that Jonathan thought was basically a sure thing fell through. So Jonathan ended up having to shut down Stream Nation. But Picture Life already has like a built-in user base. It's been going for a couple of years. So he decides to keep Picture Life going.

The problem is the place where all of Picture Life's pictures are stored, which is a data center called a Kolo, Picture Life is in debt to this data center, and they want Jonathan to pay up. And this is when things started to go south. So I had to pay the debt. The company had not enough money to pay the debt. So I have personally loaned money to the company to pay the outstanding debt. But then he got bad news from the people who were in the data center.

Then they asked us to decrease the footprint of the platform by two-third in 60 days. What does it mean? It means that Picture Life was running on 120 servers, and we had to bring it down to 40. And so he had this decision to make, basically, which was he could either put up a thing that says, hey, I'm shutting down Picture Life. You have 60 days to get your stuff. Otherwise, it will be totally deleted. Or he could try to save the company. So he crunches the numbers, and he says, I think I can do this. I think I can move everything down to just 40 servers. If you said that to me, if you said like the place where you store all your memories, I think I can save it. I'd be like, give me my money back, give me my pictures back.

But imagine that you're a picture life user that has 50,000 photos on there or something, and you check in on it once every 90 days. There's a great chance that you would have missed that window and you would not have been able to get your photos off. That's true. So Jonathan furiously got to work trying to move all of these pictures. The problem is he had to move everything. so fast that he couldn't update the database that said where the photos lived. I don't understand.

So imagine a library loses its lease and it has like a couple of days to move to a new space. And so in order to move in time, they just toss all of the books in the back of a U-Haul without any concern for order, and then they move to the new space. It's like all the books are still there, but they're totally

out of order. So if you ask the librarian like, hey, can you help me find to kill a mockingbird? The librarian doesn't know where to look. The librarian is basically the database in this situation. Like, it knows the pictures are all still there. It just doesn't know where to look for them. So when you go to the website, what you're seeing are just blanks or just these color swatches.

So you basically have to break the service to save the service. I got to say, though, and like, you know, he sounds like he's doing the right thing or whatever. I, my nightmares are more people who are like, I got this. I don't need to explain it. I'm going to fix it. I'm not going to tell you what you would need to do to protect yourself because I got this. Like, I actually think those people, not that he's doing a lot of damage here, but I think those people often do. Yeah, I agree.

And at the very least, he could have just, like, let people know what was going on. I definitely didn't do a good job communicating with users, but there is no more employees in the company. I am the only one. And I was so focused on trying to find solutions that I forgot to deal with the daily routine. And this is going to be changed pretty soon. What does it feel like to be in that situation, trying to keep this company that you just bought afloat with this sort of massive technical issue that you're dealing with? Well, the feeling is that people are trusting you with their memories and you're not able to give them a straight answer. And on the other hand, you have to make sure that they are not shutting down the server and deleting all the files.

And on the other end, you need to fund the company with your personal money while you have three kids at home. And you need to make sure you don't take too much risk with your family. and you try to find a solution to find a new home with the company. So I would say, to be honest with you, it's been a nightmare for me. And I am now in a position where I know that picture life will be back in a couple of weeks the way it was before. Jonathan says that it's going to take about four weeks. Four weeks and all the photos will be restored. I guess that what I'm thinking right now is you have a user base that's been unable to access their photos for two months.

They're frustrated, they feel like they haven't been communicated with. What makes you think that once you get everything back to normal, they're not just going to migrate off of your service? That's fine. I mean, life is a trade-off. And I prefer those guys to live with all their content than they're. them living without their content. I see. One thing, Alex, that I think would be also a lesson for everyone.

We always need a backup. In any case, we always need a backup, a backup plan. And for my case, beyond picture life, I use a service which costs me $5 a month. It's unlimited. It's on all the computers of our. home. It's like a dumb storage. Everything is there. And it's my backup. So, I mean, the thing that I guess as a consumer seems strange to me is like Silicon Valley

does not advertise as like, use our service, also use a backup. You know, the Silicon Valley is always sort of advertising, this is the only solution you'll need. Should we just be more skeptical than that? Yeah, I mean, you need to always be skeptical about marketing in general. I'm telling you that because I am the ones telling you that you only need one thing. What do you then say to Rachel? Like the person who actually wanted you to fix this. I got in touch with her and I told her what Jonathan told me.

I'm curious how you feel about. this guy and about picture life after hearing everything I've told you? The comforting thing to me is that there is a human being at the center of this. So I would say that hearing all of this makes me cautiously optimistic. The other thing that he said, which I found fascinating, was basically don't trust the service. Don't trust any service. Any of these services that we use. Google Drive, Amazon, whatever.

Yeah, I mean, that's totally insane. that is not, that makes no sense to a normal human being. You pay for a thing because you trust that the thing is the thing that you're paying for. That actually just taxes my sense of the world in a way that's not. I don't want to live, like, I'd rather go to the drugstore and print them all out, I guess. You know what I mean? Like, come on with this three backups. That's so stupid.

It's like all good advice. It's like, yes, you should use the cloud and also have a redundant back. up on an external hard drive. And then you should take that external hard drive and put it in a safe deposit box and put that safe deposit box in the care of a private army. Like, I'm going to save stuff on my desktop. And when it goes away, I'm going to be angry and sad. Right. I lost a file this morning. No one is, no one is that well organized. I mean, there are people who are that well organized and they're like, you're idiots. But whatever, they're probably drunk drivers or something. It's messed up, man. I just mean everybody, everybody thinks the risks that

they take are fine and the risks other people take are obviously stupid. And I think everybody in this story acted pretty reasonably and, you know, a bad thing happened anyway. Yeah. It's been about four weeks since I talked to Jonathan. So I decided to call him and check in on the progress he was having with Picture Life. And he sounded a lot less stressed out than he did in our first conversation. Yeah, so thank you, Halecks, for reaching out. Progress moving forward. Consolidation is done. Now we are fixing the database.

Already millions of files have already been fixed. Everything is working smoothly. Slower than expected, but it's moving forward. And he said, we're about 20% finished. 20% with fixing the database. But he says, really, don't worry, the photos are. definitely on their way, everything is going to be fixed. I feel good about the future of these things, so stay tuned.

All right. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. Well, we started this relationship, so that's the way it should be. I feel skeptically optimistic about this, and I would like you to keep keeping track of it. I totally will. Rachel, all you picture life users out there, I will stay on top of of this, I will let you know if there are any updates. After the break, a lake that is on fire. Yeah. Stick around.

Welcome back to the show. We have a special guest in the studio with us right now. It is Wendy Zuckerman, who is the host of the new Gimlet podcast, Science Verses. Hi, Wendy. Hello. Hi, Alex. So this is a big week at Gimlet. Everybody's very excited because last year you were making Science Verses in Australia.

It was a popular thing that people really liked. You were kidnapped by Gimlet, brought to America. What was the weirdest part of American culture that, like, you were not prepared for? Waffle fries? What's weird about waffle fries? It's just so American. You know what? Waffle fries?

Like, it's so good. Somewhere, like, a bunch of Australians are like, yeah, this makes sense to us, too. Because you already have a waffle and you already have fries. Why would you need to mix them? You guys have animals that have pockets on them. Here's a point. Unrelated. Unrelated.

Yeah, but I feel like that totally robs you of the ability to talk about what's weird and what's not. So, science versus, I feel like it's a show where your culture shock about America actually comes in handy. Yeah, I think that's true. I think being an outsider in this strange land of extreme opinions in the middle of an election is a very fun and interesting time to be peeling away politics and looking at facts. Because what you do is like you will take topics that everybody argues about without knowing very much about and like actually walk through the facts of them. Yes. Yes. And we and that is one thing.

I may not be the best at a lot of things. I'm definitely not the best of a lot of things. but I am very good at knowing where my biases are coming in and just kicking them out and just saying this is, we just need to talk about the science. And that is something that I feel like is missing from a lot of the discussion that we have about the topics that we're hitting. Hopefully it's things like fracking, gun control, organic food, pesticides in general, big chemical corporations, things like that.

At one point you were trying to convince me that it probably wasn't a good idea that I drink 10 Diet Coke a day. Yeah, we're definitely going to look at artificial sweet as something. point. There's some really interesting sides there. And how they're good? Ah! I'll skip that one. Okay, so the one we're going to hear a preview of today is fracking.

Yes. Which is a thing that I think I have been at arguments. I've sat through, I don't like to argue about politics, basically. But see, fracking shouldn't be politics. Why? It's an engineering, like there is science. they're about the risks and the, and I guess the only politics is where we want to invest our money. The fact that your first connection to fracking was, I don't like to get involved in politics

is an interesting thing in itself. I've had arguments in my family that started about fracking and ended with people mailing people, mailing other people Chernobyl pictures. Wait, emailing or... That is exactly, that is exactly where science versus fits in. That is, like, what was... the link between fracking and Chernobyl? Was it just when industry goes awry, when we don't put money in renewables?

I could see these tenuous connection, but I could also see how this big domino effect of opinion and little fact might have kicked into your family's conversation. As a person who sent the pictures, I cannot remember why I sent the pictures. I was just waiting. I just really wanted to ask who it was who sent them. Of course, of course, of course. You knew. You knew in your stupid hearts.

I can't even remember what's that I was on. Do you land on it, it's good or it's bad, or do you land on a, like, if you think it's anything, here's why you should think it. Well, I think when there is, I don't want to give it away, but when there is a lot of science for something or not a lot of science for something, then we come away telling you exactly what that situation is. With fracking, I guess you've got to wait and see and see how you take the science. All right. So this is science versus fracking. Thanks, Wendy. No worries, guys.

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Verses from Gimlet Media. This is the show where we pit facts against your greatest fears. On today's show, Science versus Fracking. Is Fracking really making us sick and ruining the environment? When we hear stories about fracking, they often go like this. A gas company comes to town, starts drilling wells, and then terrible things start happening. James Hughes says this is exactly what happened to him when the fracking company Seneca Resources

came to his town in Pennsylvania. Seneca shows up in my doorstep and says we're drilling wells on your property. It was the biggest nightmare I ever went through. They moved into my property, knocked out my water well. This is from a town hall meeting held in 2014 when a local township was so freaked out about Seneca's operations that they were deciding whether or not to hire a lawyer to fight them. They knocked out my water well, knocked out my neighbor's water well,

turned upon pink, by the time they gave me my new water well, it was on fire for six months. My family couldn't visit, couldn't have running water, and it broke my heart. So meanwhile, during this time, I composed a song called Chief Numberc. Please. We've got an attorney on the phone. Just tell us, give us a result. This is what fracking has driven Americans to do. Write more folk songs. Actually, I think this is more prog rock. Just the lack of acoustic guitar.

But this song, of course, is not peer-reviewed research. And neither is a lot of the conversation happening around fracking. Fracking is a disaster unfolding across Pennsylvania of unprecedented proportions. Hydronic fracturing is spreading across the globe. Whoa, Jesus. Unbelievable. A river on fire. Whoa! The river's on fire!

Oh, jeez. The thing is, the anti-frakers love to use hyperbolic statements and halved truths, but they aren't. On the other side of this debate, the pro-frackers are pulling their own kind of crap too. And to demonstrate, here's a conversation that I had with fracking company Seneca Resources. This is Doug Kepler, the vice president of environmental engineering and Rob Bullware, who works in media relations. I don't think they're ever, I don't believe there has been a problem with fracking. The problems that you hear in the media, those all related back in some fashion to something that had to do with the actual drilling of the well, not the fracking of the well.

So when we say fracking as journalists, as the media and in the public, we mean the entire process of getting gas from underground to your home. I spend a lot of the time trying to correct it because that's an incorrect use. Am I the problem? You are. No, seriously, you have created an unbelievably serious problem with this perception thing. They are answering the question, has there ever been a problem with fracking, to only address the very specific and very technical definition of fracking?

Cracking the rocks. Not the whole process of fracking, which would include drilling a well, getting the gas out of the well, and all sorts of stuff that most people think of when they think of fracking. If you want to have a process talk, then you can have a process talk. But the whole negativity on fracking is what becomes so wary.

No, we want to have a process, chat. So the entire process of fracking has there ever been water contaminated as a result of the entire process of fracking? You're talking about from drilling. But see again, surely. So if you're going to say drilling but not fracking. Ugh. So that's Seneca Resources, the very same company that inspired Chief Thundercloud.

Whatever happened. No, there's no need to play that again. Enough with the folk songs. Enough with the Wagner soundtracks. And the shady definitions, we're here to look at the science. Today we're looking at how fracking affects four major things. Our water, our health, earthquakes, and finally, our climate. Let's start with a detailed look at how fracking actually works.

Our frackers, Seneca's Rob Bullware and Doug Kepler, offered to give us an up-close look at one of their fracking sites in northwestern Pennsylvania. The fracking site itself is actually inside a national forest, which means that as you drive in, you see tons of trees and beaver dams, and even Pennsylvania's state bird, the ruffled grouse. Oh, look, Doug.

You see it, Doug? It's a grouse, right back here. See? Oh, I see him on the edge of the right there. But as you approach the frack, things look a little different. We see a couple of huge cranes connected to a bundle of narrow pipes.

And it's right here that water gets pushed under the surface at intense pressures, which is what cracks the rock to release the natural gas. We're actually fracking right now underground. So there's, is a 5-inch diameter pipe that that water is being pumped through.

We're pumping about 4,000 gallons per minute of water through that pipe. So a tremendous amount of water in a very quick time. The pressure from that is what breaks the rock. Gimlet producer, Caitlin Kenny, is here with me. You're right under our feet right now. Big, old rocks are breaking. Yes. I can you...

I can't feel anything. But it's not just water going down that pipe. There's also sand and chemicals. There's a conveyor belt that takes all the sand to the blender where the water in those tanks is blended along with the chemicals and then they're pumped down hole. The sand is used to keep the cracks in the rocks open so that the gas can flow out,

while the chemicals, they do a couple of things. A bactericide is added to prevent bacteria growing down the hole, and to get the fracking fluid moving very quickly through a very narrow pipe, they add friction reduces. And this brings us to the first fear that people have about fracking. Can these chemicals get to? into our drinking water. When rocks are being cracked more than a mile underground, which is below drinking water supplies,

studies have shown that there is a very low risk of the fracking chemicals seeping up through the rocks up into your drinking water. It could happen, but one study estimated that it would take several thousand or even millions of years. And the thing is, one report estimated that 95% of fracking wells in America are about being fracked this far below the surface. In Australia though, where fracking is happening higher up, it is riskier. So that's cracks in rocks. But there is also the potential of chemicals leaking into our water through cracks in pipes. But how often does that happen? Well, a study found that

in Pennsylvania, 6% of pipes had some kind of problem. So it's not widespread, but it is happening. So that's what's happening below ground. But the biggest risk of contamination, it seems, is happening above ground on the surface. Doug from Seneca explains that once you've cracked the rocks open to release the natural gas, the gas comes up and the pressure from the gas carries the fracking water back up with it. So you had shoved the water down there?

We pump it down under pressure to fracture the rock and then the pressure of the gas carries the water back up out of the ground with the gas, and then we separate the gas from the water. And this water, which has the fracking chemicals in it, plus salts and heavy metals from underground, is now known as wastewater. Anyway, you've got all this wastewater that's up at the surface, and it gets trucked or piped away from the fracking site,

and then Seneca has to figure out what to do with it. Right now, they're storing some of it, and they showed us the storage site. It looked like three giant water coolers. So this is how many gallons? Each one of those three tanks holds two million gallons of water. That is a, that is a, that is a, that is a lot of water. It is a lot of water.

When you look at the entire fracking industry, it's billions of gallons of wastewater per year. And while the shiny tanks that we saw looked watertight, not all fracking sites are storing their wastewater this way. Sometimes fracking companies use pits, large holes that they've dug in the ground, and then lined with a plastic. Now, this plastic is thick, but still, it can rip, allowing wastewater to leak. Also, when you're schlepping vats of wastewater

plus vats of fracking chemicals around, there's just lots of chances for spills. But here's the question, and it's a really important question. Yes, there's lots of chances for leaks and spills. But how often do they actually happen? It's time to talk to our expert. The bullfrog. This is Robert Jackson, a professor at Stanford,

and he's one of the top experts on fracking in America. He also does some very impressive frog poetry. This is the green tree frog. Oinky, boink. So remember when I said at the beginning of the show that both sides of this debate weren't being straight with the fracts. Well, that can make it hard to know who to trust on this fracking debate.

But Robert Jackson, he's my guy. I do trust what he says. And it's not because of the frog poetry. Well, it's partly because of the frog poetry. But it's also because of this. Honestly, I get beat up from everybody, depending on what a particular study says. When we publish a study that says

we find no evidence of contamination of drinking water in a place like the Fayetteville field, I get calls and emails from people saying, You know, how can you say that? And, you know, you only looked at 100 or 150 houses and this and this and that. And I promise you, every time I say that we find water contamination or publish a map of 6,000 leaks in Washington, D.C., I get beat up from people in industry who say you're fearmongering,

you're promoting the decline of our industry and all that. I get it from all sides. So, leading researcher in the field pisses off both sides of this debate. What does he say about how often fracking contaminates water? It does contaminate drinking water. It has contaminated drinking water. But most of the time, it doesn't. So it can happen. It doesn't happen very often. But when it happens to you or your neighborhood or you think it could happen to you,

it's something to be afraid of. I think that's what people latch on to. So most of the time, it's completely safe. Once in a while, it isn't. It's really hard for scientists to put a figure on what that once in a while is. A report made public by the Environmental Protection Agency last year put the number at between 100 to 3,700 spills from fracking each year in the United States. Let's think about that for a second.

The EPA doesn't know if there are 100 or 3,700 spills. We're going to put a sound effect on that, right? Cool, from fracking each year. Why so much uncertainty? Well, there's a few reasons. But one of them is that if scientists go to a town and test the water and find out that it's dodgy, if no one tested that water before the frackers came to town, then the scientists can't say for sure what made it dodgy.

Some things are just naturally in the water. They come from the rocks and the geology nearby. And currently, we don't have a lot of this interesting. independently gathered baseline data. Add to this, it's notoriously difficult to get fracking companies to acknowledge spills and to explain what happened. Seneca does this too. Take, for example, when we asked Doug from Seneca about whether fracking chemicals had ever contaminated water.

He and Rob denied it. That hasn't, I don't think, I don't think we could find a documented case of that. But we could. We used the internet. and found that there were 270 instances where an oil and gas company had affected someone's water supply in Pennsylvania. In each of those cases, the Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, sent a letter confirming the contamination to the company that was responsible,

and Seneca was called out in a handful of those letters. When we talked to Seneca about this, they kept denying that their chemicals were responsible for contaminating people's water. and that's when we finally took out the letters. Okay, so like this. Have you guys seen these letters? I'm the Department of Environmental Protection in Pennsylvania. This is to Seneca.

Now, for a visual on what you're about to hear, this was happening in Rob's car right outside the fracking side. The conversation went on for a while, and by the time I took the letters out of my backpack, it was actually so tense that the windows had steamed up, Titanic style. So just the fact that you have one of these letters doesn't mean we actually polluted something. It means that they were responding to a complaint that was made. I think this says it actually did determine that there was a pollution, a contamination caused.

Let me see what's this one. This is, again, Warsaw Township, Jefferson County, 2009. Increased levels of sodium chlorides and total dissolved solids. This looks like there was some type of impact at that time because the sodium would have come from the drilling itself. But I don't remember what it was, but it appears. there was a temporary impact on this one. But again, I wasn't looking at the types of things we're doing now and what you're talking about.

But that is included. When you read the EPA report on hydraulic fracturing and the effects of it, we are talking about from the surface bills, we're talking about exactly like where something might go wrong. And you even mentioned, like... I stand firm on what we've done as Seneca that we have not had those issues.

And you read the letter in it? No, because this is not fracking. That's what I was saying. And it didn't have the process of fracking within it. as well as well. But this was not anything that had to do with fracking. It looks to me as with that, it would have probably been some type of surface

spill next to a, was it a spring again on it? Yeah, it was a spring on that. And why would there spills into people's water supply? Why did it happen? And they were related to surface spills. Yeah, it was a very careless act by a contractor on the location. It spilled that one that temporarily impacted

that spring. So, yes, it did happen. I'm not making light of it. It wasn't willful. It was an accident. But this was one incident that happened that year out of 300 and some wells that were drilled. And it didn't happen every year. But I would say we probably averaged maybe one or so, some years, maybe two, some years maybe now, but maybe one a year or something like is what happened with a 300 well program when the regulations were very lax compared to what they are now. So that's what it takes to get these guys to agree to publicly confirmed facts that you can find on the internet.

Now, about those regulations Doug mentioned at the end, we're not going to go into the details of how regulations on fracking have changed in different parts of America or the world. But regulations on fracking continue to get tighter. And looking around us today at Seneca's storage site and the fracking site, you can see the effects of them. Here at the site, there was lining under everything. Those water coolers that were filled with waste,

They were sitting on what looked like a giant kid's swimming pool made out of metal, and then under that was another layer of protection. You have to have containment in case a tank would have some type of failure. And all of this was designed to stop a leak if, say, something busted out of one of those water containers. Conclusion. Chemicals used in fracking can contaminate drinking water. They leak through damaged pipes or spills up on the surface. But from what we know, these instances are.

are rare. Okay, so the scary stuff used in fracking doesn't get into drinking water very often. But when it does, will it make you sick? After the break, I drink some fracking chemicals and we find out. No, I'm definitely not going to do that, but we will talk to scientists about the potential health risks. That was the first half of the Science versus Fracking episode. For more, go check out Science versus wherever you download podcasts. Reply all is hosted by PJ Vote and Needs. Alex Goldman. The show's produced by Shruthy Pinnaminani, Fia Benin, Chloe Prasinos, and Damiano Marquetti. Our executive producer's Tim Howard. Our editor is Peter Clowny. Production assistance by Tom Cody. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Matt Lieber is tubing down a lazy river, towing a six-pack.

Our theme song is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Build Buildings. You can listen to the show on iTunes or on any other podcast app. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.