West Virginia is currently experiencing, on a wide scale, what people near hydraulic fracking sites have had to put up with for years. As the State and Federal government scramble to provide minimal clean water to hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps it's time to rethink our love affair with carbon based fuels before it is too late for the water, land, flora, fauna and humans over even larger areas than are already impacted.
Just in the last year, Arkansas had a bitumen (liquid asphalt) pipeline break in a subdivision. Do you think the people that bought homes there knew about the pipeline? If you said yes, you'd be wrong. The first they knew was when sludge started oozing from the ground.
Oklahoma city is currently experiencing silica sand pollution in its' city water supply. Where did the sand come from? It's used in the fracking process and seems to have leaked from the concrete drilling sleeves, which have a 50% failure rate on first use, around the many fracking wells that have popped up in and around the city. Would you trust your water supply to something that fails half the time the first time its' used?
And we can also add in the earthquake swarms in the area which could get very interesting when the New Madrid fault line wakes up.
Illinois lawmakers went against science and public opinion and passed the "first, well regulated hydraulic fracturing law". But not really. The law was written with the "help" of the industry and its' suppliers and is so full of holes that the "energy companies" will be able to drive their semis right through it. This bodes ill for the southern half of the state which has suffered through many years of drought and has no water to spare for drilling these time bombs.
Pavillion, WY water supply is now under testing by the severely underfunded EPA. Why? It's frack central up there.
Go straight south and you find over 20 fracking wells have blown out in the Barnett Shale formation in TX. Along with an explosion that seriously burned two workers and resulted in the partial evacuation of a town near Dallas/Ft. Worth.
Head west and find that California is about to allow fracking fluids to flow directly into the Pacific Ocean! We don't know what's in the fluids as the chemical brew is labeled "proprietary". Kind of hard to regulate or clean up something when you don't even know what it is.
The list, unfortunately, goes on and on and probably will go on and on until there is no more clean water. Believe this, once water is contaminated by these chemical stews, it can't EVER be used by living beings again. To see where you and yours fit into this mess, click on this link: http://earthjustice.org/... and for more information: http://www.npr.org/....