DENVER – Fracking companies average more than 2½ violations a day, according to a study of just a small portion of the public record. The Natural Resources Defense Council studied online reports for Colorado, Pennsylvania and West Virginia covering five years.

Report author Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, says the firms racked up 4,600 citations; about 18 a week. She says some of the 68 drillers they looked at ran up hundreds of violations including waste-water spills, well leaks and pipeline ruptures.

“When companies are seriously violating the law on a regular basis, and they’re what we would call a repeat offender, they need to be shut down,” she says. “Or they need to be prohibited from getting new permits.”

Mall says they didn’t examine the records from the 33 states that don’t post citations online, and she says they didn’t include all the companies doing hydraulic fracturing, which suggests the violations they found are a fraction of the total.

Mall says the fact that most of the public record is inaccessible means it’s out of reach for most people, and she says this covers a variety of violations, some of which are of immediate public interest.

“It could be contamination of a drinking-water source,” says Mall. “It could be a pit that overflowed. It could be not having the right paperwork on site. It really varies quite widely.”

The gas and oil industry has objected to the study, saying it includes a lot of paperwork violations – what they call clerical issues. Mall says some of those can actually be important.

“If it was information on what chemicals might be used or whether a well passed a certain type of an integrity test, even a paper violation could be quite serious,” she said.

Between 2009 and 2013, more than 2,000 spills were recorded in Colorado, but despite Colorado law, the state’s oil and gas commission only issued 1,000 violation notices.