Environmental groups have threatened to sue the Obama administration for failing to prevent swarms of earthquakes that came in the wake of America’s fracking boom.



In a first step to a lawsuit, the groups on Wednesday challenged the Environmental Protection Agency to improve what they said were weak laws governing the disposal of fracking waste – or go to court.



The groups, led by the Environmental Integrity Project, said the EPA had stalled for years in regulating waste from the oil and gas industry.

Scientists have connected a spike in earthquakes in Ohio and Oklahoma to disposal of that waste in underground injection wells.



The groups said the EPA also needed tougher rules to stop disposal of fracking waste in open-air pits, which can leak toxic chemicals, or ordinary municipal landfills, which are not equipped to deal with radioactive elements in the materials.



Fracking generates a tremendous amount of waste – 280bn US gallons in 2012, or enough to sink all of Washington DC beneath a 22ft-deep toxic lagoon, according to a 2013 report from Environment America, which did not join the suit.

One of the main risks of that toxic mix of water, sand and chemicals is earthquakes. Oklahoma, which had never previously experienced seismic activity, now has almost daily tremors – which scientists last year linked to the use of high-volume wastewater disposal wells to store wastewater.

It can take up to 9m gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals to frack a single well, and much of that returns to the surface along with naturally occurring radium and bromides, which are also a growing source of concern for public health.

“When you are dealing with millions of pounds, millions of gallons of waste, it needs to be handled in a very safe way,” Adam Kron, a lawyer at the Environmental Integrity Project, said.



He said the groups also hoped to push the EPA to adopt stronger rules for other disposal methods. At the height of the fracking boom, oil and gas companies sprayed fracking waste on winter roads as a de-icer, or on ordinary municipal landfills, open pits and ponds, which often leak or evaporate chemicals into the air.



The EPA had no immediate comment on the environmental groups’ claims. But Laura Allen, an EPA spokeswoman said in an email that the agency’s technical experts were looking into the earthquake risk – and that the existing rules already gave states the authority they needed to shut down those wells that could potentially trigger earthquakes. “Existing regulations provide state and federal permit writers with broad discretionary authority to include conditions and requirements in permits to address induced seismicity,” she wrote. The spokeswoman added that other states such as Oklahoma and Kansas had shut down wells linked to earthquakes.

The agency proposed last month to ban municipal water treatment plants from taking fracking waste – a move opposed by industry.

The environmental groups said the EPA had first acknowledged the need for tighter regulation of oil and gas waste in 1988 – well before the fracking boom.



But the agency had largely left it up to the states to oversee disposal of oil and gas waste, allowing industry to exploit a weak patchwork of regulations.



Other groups involved in the lawsuit include the Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthworks, Responsible Drilling Alliance, San Juan Citizens Alliance, West Virginia Surface Owners Rights Organization, and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice.

