This July, an emergency room nurse named Cathy Behr wanted to tell Colorado's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission the story of how she nearly died after being exposed to a mystery chemical from a gas-patch accident.

Regulators said she wasn't scheduled to testify and they didn't want to hear it. But anyone concerned about natural gas development should listen.

Behr, who works in southern Colorado, at Durango's Mercy Regional Medical Center, fell ill last April after being exposed for 10 minutes to a gas-field worker who had come into the ER, his clothes damp and reeking. He'd come into contact with one of the "secret formulas" drillers use to hydraulically fracture oil- and gas-bearing formations.

Within minutes of inhaling the nauseating fumes coming off the worker, Behr lost her sense of smell. (She later told her story to the Durango Herald, a daily paper that has done excellent reporting on the incident: durangoherald.com.) The ER was locked down and the room ventilated by firefighters. But when Behr went home after her 12-hour shift, she still couldn't smell anything. Then the headache she'd developed got worse. A week later, her liver, heart and lungs began to shut down. She spent 30 hours in intensive care.

Although the company that makes the frac'ing fluid provided Behr's doctors with what it calls "'Material Data Safety Sheets"' at the time of the incident, it refused to provide more specific information to the hospital once she fell ill, according to the Herald. Her intensive-care doctor had to guess what to do as he tried to keep her alive.

Among a suite of long-overdue reforms, the state's oil and gas commission is now considering rules that would require the oil and gas industry to tell the public what's in the toxic brew it uses for so-called frac'ing operations. Compounds commonly injected into the ground include benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene and a fracing formula called hydrocarbon methanol phosphate ester, which Behr's doctor suspects is what poisoned her.

Full Story: http://www.hcn.org/wotr/gas-industry-secrets-and-a-nurses-story