Fracking is Destructive but Defenders Continue the Hype

One study can’t absolve fracking

Letter to Editor, Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV

Hoppy Kercheval’s May 16 opinion piece, “Evidence against fracking lacking,” is remarkable for several reasons.

First, he writes about a subject, hydraulic fracturing, citing a single piece of research, coming to the conclusion it “demonstrates that the hysteria over fracking is unwarranted.”

Not so fast Mr. Kercheval! There is now a literature of more than 600 articles published in scientific journals. Such peer-reviewed research is difficult, expensive, and time consuming to complete.

Six years ago, before the body of literature developed, a single article with such conclusions might have been acceptable as a first try, but that is hardly the case now.

The articles now published are divided, by my estimation 80 percent saying investigators found harms or substances that could cause harm as a result of fracking. That doesn’t provide a tight cinch, but it certainly doesn’t justify Mr. Kercheval’s facile conclusion.

Second, referring to the concerns of rural people who have observed adverse effect in their children, their seniors and themselves as “hysteria” is roundly and soundly depreciating. It is much like racism or depreciation of foreign people or minority religion.

The countryside is not inhabited by mindless souls who function with the sensibilities of ghouls. These are real people who take their children to physicians who treat various medical issues that may include respiratory problems, birth defects, blood disorders, cancer and nervous system impacts from questionable causes.

When the disease occurs concurrently with drilling and production and nothing else new has happened, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suspect fracking. Not much else does happen in the country side involving a thousand or more truckloads of chemicals and water per well, injected underground at as much as 15,000 pounds per square inch, along with surface disturbance of several acres for well sites, access roads and pipelines.

Fracking is really a big thing. It requires a huge amount of land. More than 15 million Americans now live within a mile of an oil or gas well, and many more wells are in prospect. These people, choosing to live in rural areas, experience many problems tolerated in only the worst urban areas such as excessive lighting, noise, odors, broken roads, property depreciation and institutional bullying.

In Wendell Berry’s terminology, rural America is considered a “resource colony.”

S. Thomas Bond, Jane Lew, W.Va.

Thomas Bond writes for Frackcheckwv.com.

Tagged as: air pollution, drilling, fracking, land disturbances, marcellus shale, natural gas, public opinion, water pollution