“Twenty years after the first gas well was fracked on the Renz farm in Mount Pleasant Township, Washington County, a body of evidence points to the possible correlation between the drilling technique and health harms, ranging from cancers, respiratory ailments, lower birth weights, and cardiovascular disease.”
20 years on, fracking’s potential health impacts eyed
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of stories reflecting on 20 years of gas drilling in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Twenty years after the first gas well was fracked on the Renz farm in Mount Pleasant Township, Washington County, a body of evidence points to the possible correlation between the drilling technique and health […]
Our politicians evade the issue because there is a lot of money in play. They don’t want to draw fire from special interests when elections are close. We ignore the fracking danger at our own peril.
Fracking as portrayed in movie Gas Land I and Gasland II is too dangerous, too expensive and totally unnecessary for our energy needs. The water used to frack the gas and oil can never be reclaimed, made clean or made safe. It is permanently destroyed. The chemicals used are toxic, carcinogenic, and mutagenic. The companies making these chemicals won’t allow the formula or names of these chemicals to be released to the public or to the healthcare professionals to help them treat victims of people living in these communities or who are accidently working with these chemicals, saying they are “proprietary,” which means they are top secret, to be keep from their competitors, but really from the public, because they are deadly, dangerous and harmful to the environment. These companies that use these chemicals just dump them anywhere they can. They dump it in landfills, sewers or obtain “beneficial use forms,” give it or sell it to local governments to use for “dust control,” or for winter de-icing of roads. This fracked well “flowback” or “spent fracking fluids,” is toxic and radioactive as are the filters used to try to clean of the solids in the flow back. The natural gas contains radioactive radon, then when breathed in can cause cancer, leukemia, bone cancer and other cancers. We don’t need this gas as a “transition fuel,” until renewable energy is ready. If the profit addicted, fossil fuel and for profit, investor owned electric utilities got out the way and stopped buying the votes of the elected leaders from both parties in the Federal and State Government. Go to https://thesolutionsproject.org/ They have plans for all 50 of the United States and 146 countries to transition to renewable energy with just solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal energy. We will not “starve and freeze in the dark,”nor wreck our economy in the process.” All we lack is the political will to do so.