Tuesday, November 16, 2010

What the Frack?





To be honest, I had never heard of fracking, before I stumbled on it in the 60 minutes story. 
Fracking is a process of getting at Natural gas reserves deep underground:


Of course Dick Cheney, ex Halliburton honcho, when VP under Bush jr, created a genre of drilling that would be totally exempt from all environmental protections. 

Fracking requires huge amounts of water, and the process just happens for foul the waters when leaks occur & the fractured zones happen to leak into drinking water aquifers, ponds, lakes & waterways. 
Toxic Chemicals contaminate drinking water, making it unsafe. This toxic water can actually ignite, has killed massive farm animals & resulted in massive fish kills. 



Leave it to Dick Cheney to come up with one of the most vile, life-blood-sucking, environmentally horrific loopholes to foul up the nation's drinking water. There has to be a special place in hell for Cheney. 




4 comments:

nonnie9999 said...

frakking was covered in the movie, gasland. scary as hell!

Fran said...

Holy crap Nonnie~ It is hard to believe Cheney & the lockstep GOP actually passed gas.... legislation exempting an entire industry of environmental laws.
Any time I hear the government pitching something as "safe" it is going to raise my hackles as a real red alert.
Safe & clean coal, offshore drilling & natural gas.
Oh yea... Nukes too.
Runs out of room screaming!!!

D.K. Raed said...

A few months ago I watched "Gasland" on HBO, completely stupified as to how this could happen. The documentary was put together by Josh Fox after he found out his property in PA was scheduled to be fracked. Traveling across the country, he witnessed the damage to date (destroyed ecology & homes, polluted water supplies, sick people, sick animals, etc) -- it was a nightmare to watch!

From the HBO site: In 2005 Congress passed the Energy Policy Act championed by Cheney exempting fracking from long-held environmental reg's like the Safe Drinkng Water Act (yeh, who needs safe drinking water?). Hundreds of thousand of rigs in 34 states were then allowed to drill into huge shale fields, right sand or coal bed seams containing gas deposits trapped in rock. Each well requires fracking fluid -- a chemical cocktail of 596 chemicals including carcinogens and neurotoxins, plus 1-7 millions gallons of water (per well). 450K wells in the US so far (thanks, Dick), est 40 trillion gallons of chemically infused water from fracking, much of it left seeping or injected into the ground.

Holy Hell.

I swear, the pollution from this deal alone is enough to ensure only robots will survive longterm.

Life As I Know It Now said...

The corrupt bastards need to be forced to drink this water themselves, instead of living in their gated communities far away from the common people, and then we can see how "Safe" this is.