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Award of Excellence POY/VodouI realize I haven't posted here in my own blog in close to a year. Very bad. Well here is my post, POY Award of excellence. Haiti/Vodou...long live.

A trip to Mordor PA, Hydrofracking Hell

Just spent another week cruising around the surrealistic, beautiful countryside of North Central, and Southwest Pennsylvania. For anyone unfamiliar with fracking, Rural PA is being slowly converted into part industrial zone, part Blade Runner landscape. Gas flares, drilling rigs, tens of thousands of trucks carrying chemicals,

miles of pipeline, looking from the air like thousands of tunneling moles, cutting across forests and farms. Dead animals, sick people, bad water, bad air, lawsuits, anger and exasperation are only the beginning. Pennsylvania is so beautiful, sometimes it defies explanation. What a tragic loss. Coming soon to New York?.....TBA I won't try and be more pedantic here. Please just take a look at the photographs, judge for yourself.

***Sorry, I thought the pictures had captions, but not to be. So I will give some important ones: *Like, Terry Greenwood from Washington County, with his dead calf, he lost 10 stillborn calves in a row because his cows had been drinking from his pond that the gas company was dumping waste into. He kept one of them frozen in his freezer as proof. *The Horn Family, second to last, living in the carter trailer on Carter rd in Dimock, the are suing Cabot for poisoning the water, the younger boy breaks out in rashes if he comes in contact with the water. They live on bottled water. *Maryellen McConnell lives with a gas mask in her house in Bedford County PA. Her farm is in an area where they are pumping and storing waste underground. Several times a week gas invades her house, she has passed out and gone to the hospital several times. *Sharon Vargson in Bradford County can light her kitchen sink on fire, the gas company well is 50 feet behind her house, the water is filled with methane gas. *Craig Sautner in Dimock (the blue flame) fills an empty gallon jug from his well with only methane gas and can light it on fire. *Ray Kemble in Dimock holds a jug of brown water from his well in his front yard, he is involved in delivering water to his neighbors that can't drink or wash in their water. *And last picture, Scott Ely and his children in Dimock who had recently built his dream house when the water went bad.

Freaking Fracking

For those of you who are not up to speed on Fracking in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and the impending and threatening start of Fracking in NY. Here are a few choice quotes from the internet and a few pictures from a trip to PA last week. A truly frightening mess that New Yorkers wherever you live, upstate or downstate better prepare yourself for, poisoned water, air pollution, horrible traffic, lies and deceit. The entire watershed for over 15 million people from Philadelphia to New York will be affected. The environment of Upstate NY will be destroyed. I'm not being a Casandra here, go to Dimock or Bradford County PA, take a look for yourself. And this is only the beginning, in short order poison wells and cancer will be the norm. Talk to Julie and Craig Sautner for example and many others, their water is poisoned and their way of life ruined, a small microcosm of what is and will be happening on a huge scale.

The rapid expansion of this new form of fracking has brought rampant environmental and economic problems to rural communities. Accidents and leaks have polluted rivers, streams and drinking water supplies. Regions peppered with drilling rigs have high levels of smog as well as other airborne pollutants, including potential carcinogens. Rural communities face an onslaught of heavy truck traffic — often laden with dangerous chemicals used in drilling and declining property values. Over the past 18 months, at least 10 studies by scientists, Congress, investigative journalists and public interest groups have documented environmental problems with fracking. Findings include: Toxic chemicals present in fracking fluid could cause cancer and other health problems Fracking wastewater contains high levels of radioactivity and other contaminants that wastewater treatment plants have had difficulty removing; this potentially contaminated wastewater can then be discharged into local rivers. Fracking is exempt from key federal water protections, and federal and state regulators have allowed unchecked expansion of fracking, creating widespread environmental degradation. Overwhelmed state regulators largely oversee the practice. Even if the laws on the books were strengthened, fracking poses too severe a risk to public health and the environment to entrust effective and rigorous regulatory oversight to these officials. Both state and federal regulators have a poor track record of protecting the public from the impacts of fracking. Congress, state legislators and local governmental bodies need to ban shale gas fracking.

And this is just a tiny amount of information available on the internet. The time is now to educate and understand what is happening and totally Ban Fracking in NY before it's too late.