It is week 6, and our work to review and advance information about oil and gas water monitoring is well under way. Here are a few projects that are currently in the works:

• Public Lab at "Reptiles at the Bayou": Rollin and I were at a family-friendly event in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans this Saturday, playing around with some of our water testing tools. We met some new folks and introduced them to the Public Lab, some of whom were in education in New Orleans. We talked about ways to motivate kids and citizens to take initiative to interact with and consider their environment, even in a more urban location like New Orleans.
• Healthy Gulf hosted a mapping event last night, in which we learned how to research permit requests from oil and gas companies in order to determine their environmental impact and construction decisions. I'll post a research note later today on this process and the advocacy side of monitoring water for oil and gas impacts -- regulation and advocacy processes inform what information we might want to collect about water quality impacts from the oil and gas industry.
• I am continuing to build connections for interviews about this work, including with folks in Environment America and Environment Pennsylvania, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Fractracker, Healthy Gulf, Nunez CC Coastal Studies Department, and a couple of Waterkeepers. More to come, and always open to connecting with more people in the field.
• Greg emailed with a question about fracked water. Posted here, more research to come.
• We are moving forward with plans to test out and document a couple of our monitoring methods in the field. We have a Hanby kit to put to use, and we also have the equipment to build and try out some of Will's sensors. I'll spend some time this week trying to follow some of his plans. Working on finalizing the best test location for these methods.
• OpenHour: November's OpenHour, on Tuesday, Nov 12 at 8pm EST, will focus on our research area. More info and a meeting link will be available soon.