Every one of 91 private water wells and springs sampled across two southwestern Pennsylvania counties came back within the Environmental Protection Agency's legal limit for radium. That is the first thing residents in Washington and Greene counties should know about a new Penn State study.
The second is more complicated. Researchers found that six of the 91 samples could potentially be associated with fracking wastewater, and that samples taken within about two miles of unconventional oil and gas operations were more likely to show elevated radium, though not by a margin the team considered strong enough to call a broad correlation.
