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.
