Fracked

Today, the first day of green: eight fluffy white tails and a porcupine, waters sparkling on spring’s mossy tufts and a blue heron dipping its wings. But say goodbye to all this. We’re getting fracked.

Fractured. Broken to bits. As in “a nasty fracture.” As you might fracture a bone or your skull—except this is no accident. We are choosing to break the back and spine and shale of the land we love. We are choosing to foul our waters.

As of April 12, 781 property owners in Wayne County have signed leases with natural gas drillers, giving up their land to be broken into.

What is hydraulic fracturing? Extremely high-pressure injection of fluids and sands to fracture rock formations underground, breaking open new pathways so more oil or gas can flow to the surface.

The problem? Well, when you crush nature’s own plumbing and create new pathways, you don’t know what will flow through them, do you? Maybe natural gas, true, but also maybe methane or other poisonous gases... contaminants used in drilling... fresh water from our underground aquifers? The truth is, we don’t know.

Landowners in Wayne County have received assurances that “no diesel fuel, or derivative thereof” will be used in the fracturing solution—but none as to what will be used. Will there be hazardous chemicals such as biocides, acids, metals, ethylene glycol, or corrosion inhibitors? The drillers will try their best to get out as much of the drilling fluids as possible, but still, in the best-case scenario, 30 to 40 percent of the drilling fluids will remain stranded underground. So all the more reason to know exactly what’s in these fracturing fluids, right?

Ahh, but here we run into a problem. Exactly what’s in these fracturing fluids is the “proprietary information” of these drilling companies, so it cannot be revealed. State agencies do not require companies to report the volumes or names of chemicals being injected during hydraulic fracturing. So neither the public nor the government can properly judge the real risks involved in injecting these fluids underground.

So they’re fracturing our lands and pouring unknown fluids into it, 60 to 70 percent of which they’ll try to retrieve again—after it has blasted through rock formations and altered natural underground cisterns and caverns and waterways.

And the environmental attorney for the Northern Wayne Property Owners Association is concerned about spelling out what will happen on the surface of our lands? I think the surface is the least of our problems.

In 2005, the oil and gas industry was granted an exemption from the federal Safe Water Drinking Act, making oil and gas the only industries allowed to inject toxic fluids directly into our land and our groundwater without oversight by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

That’s only one small part of the massive de-regulation and crippling of protective agencies that has taken place under the current Bush administration. As a result of the weakened powers of our protective agencies, we’ve seen too many cases of contaminated food, lead-contaminated toys, and other things in the last few years. Do we really want to see our lands and waters contaminated, as well?

It’s not too late. Drilling has started in Susquehana County, but has not yet begun in Wayne County. In Damascus, could we keep them out by declaring our right to home rule?

These are the questions that deserve answers. Before we’re totally and completely fracked.

(Katherine Glasson Prati is a resident of Milanville, PA.)