OK, there are so many things wrong with this story I don't even know where to begin.
Two children aged 7 and 10 have been banned from talking about fracking for the rest of their lives. It's part of a settlement received by their parents, who were awarded $750,000 from drilling company Range Resources to help them move from their fracking-polluted home in Washington County, PA.
It's common for adults in fracking settlements to be banned from ever talking about fracking, but including kids in the gag order is a novelty, and it sounds harder to enforce. During the settlement hearing the Hallowiches questioned what it would mean for their young children.
Before the settlement, the Hallowiches said that "air and water contaminants caused them to experience burning eyes, sore throats, headaches and earaches, and contaminated their water supply," according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Because of the gag order in their settlement, the Hallowiches won't be saying any more about that.
Settlements with gag orders mean that little is known about the effects of fracking on people who live nearby it, according to anti-fracking advocates.
Via the Guardian and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Aside from how repulsive it is that the practice of gas/oil companies demanding gag orders as part of settlements for completely fucking up entire communities' health and property is "common", the legal junkie in me has to ask how this would even be enforceable in the case of children??
The kids didn't sign anything, and even if they had done so, their signatures aren't legally binding until they turn 18 anyway.
Could some legal minds here clue me in about this?
In any event, the whole "gag order" thing reminds me of a situation I ran into about 13 years ago. I was using a small, local web hosting company for my clients (and myself), which was bought out by a larger hosting firm. Unfortunately, neither company gave anyone any notice of the buyout before or during the transition--which they then proceeded to completely f*ck up, hosing about 20 of my clients' websites as well as my own.
Worse yet, it all happened on a weekend, and neither company had weekend support, so I and my clients were royally screwed for the whole weekend.
Needless to say, I was livid.
After much screaming and profanity on my part, I managed to get 19 out of 20 clients safely moved to an unrelated hosting service (amazingly, only one of them fired me), and the company that had bought out the smaller firm--and had f*cked up the server transfers royally--agreed, grudgingly, to pay me a small (but large, for me) settlement for my trouble, lost business and so forth.
The only legal stipulation was that I was not allowed to ever tell anyone the name of the hosting firm.
I had no problem agreeing to this, of course, because I had ALREADY cursed their name, loudly and repeatedly, to every one of my clients, family, friends, colleagues and anyone else who would listen.
So, I agreed to never mention their name AGAIN, anyway.
Of course, a few years later, they were themselves swallowed up by some larger firm, so it's pretty much moot at this point.