‘Caller states that he can ignite his drinking water’
There’s an incredible video posted at the website of Toxic Targeting, an environmental watchdog group that maps toxic sites on a lot-by-lot basis. The video shows a man lighting his tap water on fire. The water, and the tap, belong to a disabled Vietnam veteran who has lived in his Candor, New York home since 1962.
Naturally, he called in a complaint to the Department of Environmental Conservation. Unfortunately, the DEC did nothing. They didn’t send anyone out to investigate the problem. All they told the veteran was, “don’t drink the water.” Yeah, thanks. Not an issue.
The Marcellus Shale (Image from New York Times)
The veteran lives above something called the Marcellus Shale, a formation few people know about, but which has a huge impact on their water and gas supplies. It’s basically a giant rock formation that extends from New York all the way down to Tennessee. Industry first became interested in the Marcellus Shale when scientists realized there was gas inside the pores of the rock.
Walter Hang, President of Toxic Targeting, explains in an interview today with Democracy Now, that a new process called “slick water hydrofracking” was developed to extract the gas. However, the extraction involves tremendous amounts of water, and it’s incredibly polluting. The water that comes out of the ground has toxic chemicals, petroleum compounds, and it’s actually radioactive.
Huge corporations like Chesapeake, Fortuna, Talisman, and Hess benefit from slick water hydrofracking, but the process is potentially polluting the drinking water of 15 million people, including 9 million New Yorkers.
With further Marcellus drilling planned, the full range of environmental consequences from this breed of drilling has yet to be seen.
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Jesus Mary and Joseph… that’s straight-up ridiculous. Gotta love fossil fuels…
F’n great find Allison.
Hydro-fracking is a dangerous mining procedure that extracts natural gas from up to 9000 feet below the surface of the ground by using a toxic proprietary brew of chemicals to explode shale beds (horizontal drilling) and release the gas below. The remaining chemical slurry then leeches into ground water that provides drinking water for mostly rural communities. The proprietary toxic brew’s secret formula is understandably guarded by mining companies because if people knew the sludge being surreptitiously introduced into their bodies via their sinks they would justifiably storm their castles. Coke a Cola also has a proprietary formula, but that company doesn’t foix gras into the general population, or do they?
“Natural Gas” is composed largely of the toxic greehouse gas, methane, but referring to it as “natural” is a friendly misnomer that makes it sound all lovey dovey, like honeyed granola. Methane is not a solution to our increasingly manic fossil fuel energy jones, it’s the usual corporate boondoggle geared toward short term profits producing long term environmental destruction. Hydro-fracking must be banned. The process is dirty, requires hundreds of trucks for shipping gas and dumping of tainted water, destroys the night sky, adds sound pollution, unduly stresses underfunded local infrastructures and will not alleviate our dependence on foreign bought fuel one iota. Sadly New York State has such a depressed financial situation that our state senate and governor may take the short term cash infusion, likely bury their heads in the sand (sand being a synonym for up their behinds) and discover a more immediate domestic stockpile of personal methane.