From Pine View Farm

Everybody Must Get Fracked 2

The Baltimore Sun takes a long and relatively balanced look at fracking’s effects on the fracked.

A nugget:

In neighboring Bradford County, scene of the most intense drilling in the state, Sherry Vargson said she’s been waiting more than two years for the state to tell her how her water became contaminated. She calls her decision in 2006 to allow drilling by another Oklahoma-based company, Chesapeake Energy Corp., “the biggest mistake of my life.” Though the one-time lease payment of $19,000 helped pay off her son’s college loan, she said she and her husband had to sell their dairy herd on their 197-acre farm to make way for a well and pipeline that has yielded only about a $1,000 a year in royalty checks, she said.

Water from their kitchen tap fizzes like seltzer water, and she can ignite a foot-long flame by holding a match to the faucet when it’s on. The state says her water is safe to drink despite the methane, Vargson said, but she’s not reassured. Her dog and cat steer clear of it.

It’s pumping construction and other money into local economies–for now–and pollution into daily life.

Short-term boom, long-term poison.

Related:

Read about life on a fracking site.

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2 comments

  1. George Smith

    March 10, 2013 at 3:09 pm

    The paradox is there’s a simple way to blow the gas companies to hell. Insist they put a chemical marker in their fracking fluid, or, uncover the blanket legislation that allowed them to make secret the ingredients. With the latter they can argue proprietary concerns but with the former, they would not be able to. A President could call on an American scientific group, independent of the energy industry, to name a chemical marker and then institute an environmental regulation to implement it. Of course the Republican Party would fight it but you’re the good side to argue when you’re talking about clean water.

     
  2. Frank

    March 10, 2013 at 3:18 pm