Category Archives: Fracking
Mystery Illness and Mystery Smells: The Neighbors of America’s Fracking Boom Need Answers
Kay Allen is a nurse who deserves some answers. She works at a health clinic in Burgettstown, Pa. — in the southwestern corner of the Keystone State where the rolling hills are now pockmarked with fracking wells in a natural-gas gold rush. In one sense, Allen and her co-workers at the Cornerstone Care community clinic are like a lot of health care professionals across the suddenly overwhelmed Marcellus Shale region of Appalachia: [...]
Read More »If there’s anything we’ve learned in the last couple of years since the word “fracking” entered our lexicon, it’s this: Natural gas drillers don’t want you to know what they’re up to. From the Oklahoma prairie to the forests of Pennsylvania, from the moment they get your name on a lease until the last tank of wastewater is dumped, these energy giants go to remarkable lengths to keep the public [...]
Read More »More upside down priorities from the western fracking front. In drought-struck Colorado, oil and gas companies will have plenty of water for their fracking operations this summer, but farmers may not have enough to irrigate their crops. It seems our insatiable thirst for fossil fuel is now even trumping our most basic need for food. Can you eat natural gas? Consider this from an April 2 Denver Post report by [...]
Read More »Why would House Republicans bar an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker from last week’s public hearing on hydraulic fracturing? Hmmmmmm. Could it be that they’re hiding something? Nah, couldn’t be – particularly in light of the fact that the filmmaker happened to be environmental crusader Josh Fox, whose film “Gasland” awoke America to the grave environmental and public health risks tied to fracking. It was an unfortunate episode nonetheless, adding yet another [...]
Read More »Officials from Central New York Oil & Gas recently informed landowner Bob Swartz that the company plans to cut “a 50-foot-wide, 400-foot-long gash through an ancient stand of trees” in his front yard to clear the way for a $250 million, 39-mile natural gas pipeline in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. Not surprisingly, Mr. Swartz balked at the company’s heavy-handed plan, recommending an alternate route for the pipeline out across [...]
Read More »Few people know fracking better than Paul Hetzler. He’s an environmental engineering technician who for years worked for New York’s Department for Environmental Conservation (DEC). Mr. Hetzler managed dozens of groundwater remediation projects in the 1990s. He’s pored over “thousands of lab results from contaminated wells,” and he’s intimately familiar with the movement of contaminants through fractured rock formations. In an intensifying national debate brimming with so-called experts, by all [...]
Read More »Time Magazine got it right when it outed hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as the biggest environmental concern our nation is facing as we head into the new year. Why fracking? The world’s largest weekly news magazine, boasting a global circulation of 25 million, points to “the threats that shale gas drilling could pose to water supplies” and the fact that “natural gas produced by fracking may actually have a bigger [...]
Read More »More evidence rumbled in over the holiday weekend tying fracking operations to earthquakes. The most recent and largest tremor – in a “suspicious” string of 11 – to hit the Youngstown area since last March measured 4.0 on the Richter scale. The epicenter, according to a Jan. 1 New York Times report, is “a well that has been used for the disposal of millions of gallons of brine and other [...]
Read More »Thanks to courageous regulators in Colorado, the American public will get its first real look behind the curtain at the closely held “chemical recipe” used by natural gas drillers in the highly controversial extraction process known as fracking. The increasingly widespread practice – involving the high-pressure injection of water, sand and a secret mix of toxic chemicals deep into the ground to release natural gas – has been tied to [...]
Read More »There’s something very wrong with the water in Pavillion, Wyoming. It reeks of chemicals. Local health officials warned residents not to drink it after the EPA found pollution in their wells. Some residents have reported health problems – shortness of breath, nausea, itchy skin and rashes, headaches and dizziness – consistent with chemical poisoning. So what’s causing all the trouble in this tiny ranching town? According to a bombshell EPA [...]
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