In this scene a farmer being held at an officer's gunpoint, throws a cigarette but into his water well, which has been contaminated with natural gas and toxic chemicals.
I am excited about the various ways that knowledge of the dangers of water contamination from hydrofracking for natural gas is finally seeping into the mainstream. The most recent epidsode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is a two part mystery in which detectives discover that two anti-fracking activists (from a town where everyone is dying of cancer next to drilling sites) have been murdered, they suspect, by someone from one of the natural gas companies.
You can watch the first episode on line by clicking the link above, and Part II will be shown this Thursday at 9pm!
Hopefully this will inspire a few more readers to write an email to our representatives, senators and the editors of local papers. How do you like that free, clean tap water you've been drinking all these years? Don't get used to it, unless you're willing to do something to protect it. These gas companies do not care about you. They are willing to ruin your water forever and destroy your property values with it, while you and your loved ones die of cancer. That is the cold hard reality of it all. That is what is happening all over the country, and that is what is happening in Dimock, just two hours north of Easton. 50,000 well pads along the Delaware River are waiting for the green light to start drilling. The only thing that will stop them is YOU. If there ever was a cause for the slogan "Fight or Die"--this is it.
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4 comments:
60 minutes on this subject was good on Sunday
i was glad to see the issue get the mainstream attention on 60 minutes, but one thing disturbed me, and that is that the gas industry has managed to couch this debate as energy independence vs. health risks, which is not the case. 52% of natural gas goes to plastic production.
also, the way the CEO of Chesapeake referred to the Marcellus Shale as being "two Saudi Arabias" makes it seem to the lay person that cars can run on natural gas, when they can't. natural gas is not the same as gasoline.
but in general, i'm just so glad to see the health risks getting national mainstream play at all--awareness is spreading...
On the usage percentage of Nat gas...I think about 43% of overall production goes to industrial uses, which would include plastic manufacturing. But I'm not an expert on that...it's still a lot of gas.
Interestingly last week, I saw an article about the RACP funding in PA going to gas drillers. If I remember, roughly $80 million of discretionary tax money from the Governor's development slush fund (money also given for such local projects as Easton's failed Pomeroy's rehab while under the control of Ashley Development) was granted to drillers to set up shop in Pa.
It's one thing to help cash-strapped developers in smaller Pa cities get a foothold on redeveloping local economies with state tax money, not that even that type of use couldn't be argued as unnecessary, but dumping wheelbarrows of cash at the feet of rich, multi-national gas corporations? Do they really need our tax-backed support to extract our own resources and potentially poison our water supply?
This makes the issue of a severance tax even more critical. If they are allowed to drill (and I say they shouldn't be) any deferment of full tax rates until later in the drilling cycle will harm us all.
Gas wells deplete very quickly. Usually within a year and they tend to stop all at once, unlike oil which usually slows to a trickle first. All the new technology doesn't create more gas; it just gets whats down there out faster in a very chaotic geological process.
So the questions become; how quickly will they deplete, how much will the severance tax be deferred until later drilling activity (costing us millions as wells run dry) and if the money isn't there, what happens when front companies for the mutli-nationals start pulling out of dry wells, declaring bankruptcy and leaving ecological damage behind for us to pay for?
Seems we are getting screwed at both ends...we paid to get them up and running and the state will allow them exit strategies to abandon us without the financial means to fix the mess they leave behind.
James Howard Kunstler's blog has a great rant on the 60 Minutes program and fracking in general. He supplies lots of facts left out of the CBS story.
Check it out here:
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/11/sixty-lame-minutes.html
DRL
While I was initially impressed on how the series depict the jobs of investigators and forensic engineers, there are times when they tend to glamorize the entire episode too much.
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