Keep Tap Water Safe

To Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC TV:

Dear Rachel:

The waste water produced by hydraulic fracturing, which many on the MSNBC network now refer to with the innocuous industry term “flowback,” is not merely toxic, it’s radioactive. Disposing of the massive volumes of this carcinogenic, endocrine-disrupting “flowback” has become a major industrial dilemma.

In Southeastern Pennsylvania, gas companies have been illegally dumping frack waste water in our rivers and streams.

With 2,755 frack wells in Pennsylvania in 2010, there were 2,486 documented violations including illegal discharges into streams and tributaries, explosions, frack water spills and toxic air pollution. The source of the drinking water for the 15.6 million people living in Philadelphia and the Lower Delaware Region is at serious risk. I’m a resident, a parent and an environmental blogger, and I don’t want to raise my children in a Disease Cluster.

We need viable solutions, and we need them now!

Of course, this issue is not limited to pollution. The average single frack well pulls nearly 4.5 million gallons of water from an aquifer. We might have hundreds of years’ worth of gas trapped in the Marcellus Shale but we’ll run out of fresh water long before we burn through it all. Also, we’re not seeing the landscape merely “change,” we’re seeing it destroyed.

Sincerely,
Liz R.
KeepTapWaterSafe.org
Don’t Frack With The Delaware River Watershed!

This entry was posted on April 4, 2011 at 11:11 am and is filed under fresh water pollution, Pennsylvania Watersheds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.