Marcellus Shale gas drilling divides communities

[RamboLiberal]

Ron Hilliard came back from church one Sunday to find hundreds of plastic $5, $10, $20 and $100 bills hanging on his fence in Flower Mound, Texas, another message from townsfolk angry at him for signing a lucrative natural gas drilling lease for his suburban Dallas property.

In Damascus, Pa., about 1,500 miles away, drilling advocate Marian Schweighofer awoke one morning to the word "LORAX" — from the Dr. Seuss book about environmental destruction — spray-painted on the road near her family's 712-acre farm.

Hilliard and Schweighofer have never met, yet both are living with the nastiness and rancor erupting in communities nationwide over the volatile issue of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

This technique — used with horizontal drilling — allows rich stores of gas to be extracted from once out-of-reach, dense shale formations more than a mile underground. Intense drilling activity is under way in the Barnett Shale of Texas, the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania, and other producing shale regions around the country. As tens of thousands of Americans become energy magnates in their own backyards, tens of thousands more worry about environmental dangers. The industry insists the process is safe, for people and the environment.

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/04/marcellus_shale_gas_drilling_d.html

[KamaAina]

1. Looks like more than the shale is getting fractured

sighhh... I'll bet there are safer ways to extract the gas, but fracking is cheaper, so to hell with the rubes' drinking water. :sarcasm:

[Altoid_Cyclist]

2. This is a link from Damascus,

http://www.damascuscitizens.org/

Our local Water Authority (Altoona) just gave approval to another company to take up to 250,000 gallons of water a day to drill more wells in the Blue Knob area. This is so fracking stupid!! This area was finally seeing improvement in the waterways after years of remediation efforts to clean up the acid mine drainage from the king coal days. Now our local water authority decides to allow the Marcellus Destroyers to come in and cause more damage. Blue Knob is the second highest point in PA, so what is going to happen when the accidents and spills happen? There is even a spring part way down the mountain which a lot of the locals use for drinking water. Every fracking zone is a disaster waiting to happen.

Read more of the sordid details here:

http://www.altoonamirror.com/page/content.detail/id/549004.html

[AdHocSolver]

3. Fracking is perfectly safe just like nuclear reactors are perfectly safe. k&R. nt

[Nihil]

4. Good.

Glad to see it is staying non-violent (so far) but at least people
are acting against the "Fuck you, I want my $$$$$$s" attitude of
the pro-fracking lobby.

:thumbsup:

[Petrushka]

5. K & R + another link . . . or 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOIxesWknk0

Edited to add: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=287622&mesg_id=287752

[Petrushka]

6. Radioactive fracking water

http://www.donnan.com/fracking-water-3.htm