Fracking? One Man’s Mystery Leads to a Backlash Against Natural Gas Drilling

Well worth the time!



Hydrofracked? One Man’s Mystery Leads to a Backlash Against Natural Gas Drilling
by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, Feb. 25, 2011, 7 a.m.


This story was published as part of Amazon's Kindle Singles program, and is available for reading on that device. ProPublica's first Kindle Single,"Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks: The Untold Story," is also available.



There are few things a family needs to survive more than fresh drinking water. And Louis Meeks, a burly, jowled Vietnam War hero who had long ago planted his roots on these sparse eastern Wyoming grasslands, was drilling a new well in search of it.

The drill bit spun, whining against the alluvial mud and rock that folds beneath the Wind River Range foothills. It ploughed to 160 feet, but the water that spurted to the surface smelled foul, like a parking lot puddle drenched in motor oil. It was no better — yet — than the water Meeks needed to replace.

Meeks used to have abundant water on his small alfalfa ranch, a 40-acre plot speckled with apple and plum trees northeast of the Wind River Mountains and about five miles outside the town of Pavillion. For 35 years he drew it clear and sweet from a well just steps from the front door of the plain, eight-room ranch house that he owns with his wife, Donna. Neighbors would stop off the rural dirt road on their way to or from work in the gas fields to fill plastic jugs; the water was better than at their own homes.

But in the spring of 2005, Meeks’ water had turned fetid. His tap ran cloudy, and the water shimmered with rainbow swirls across a filmy top. The scent was sharp, like gasoline. And after 20 minutes — scarcely longer than you’d need to fill a bathtub — the pipes shuttered and popped and ran dry.

Meeks suspected that environmental factors were to blame. He focused on the fact that Pavillion, home of a single four-way stop sign and 174 people, lies smack in the middle of Wyoming’s gas patch. Since the mid 1990’s, more than 1,000 gas wells had been drilled in the region — some 200 of them right around Pavillion — thousands of feet through layers of drinking water and into rock that yields tiny rivulets of trapped gas. The drilling has left abandoned toxic waste pits scattered across the landscape.It has also disturbed the earth itself. One step in the drilling cracks and explodes the earth in a physical assault that breaks up the crust and shakes the gas loose. In that process, called hydraulic fracturing, a brew of chemicals is injected deep into the earth to lubricate the fracturing and work its way into the rock. How far it goes and where it ends up, no one really knows. Meeks wondered if that wasn’t what ruined his well.

more, lots more...

http://www.propublica.org/article/hydrofracked-one-mans-mystery-leads-to-a-backlash-against-natural-gas-drill/single

and his secret energy meetings.

how much damage has been and continues to be done thanks to that "policy" they created.

I was going to ask what sex had to do with getting natural gas out of the ground.

just watched "gasland" last night. i recommend it to anyone and everyone.
greed will destroy our human race.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1558250/

... and I agree completely. There's an article in LBN today about yet another angle: the damage being done to archeological sites by fracking wells indiscriminately drilling every hundred yards or so throughout so much of the country. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4843678

continue to work to cover this up... And quite frankly, I think most knew from the beginning this could be the result. Cheney, your hell awaits. :mad:

So the mere possibility of eternal damnation isn't enough for me - I want to see these guys frying in hell while they're still alive. Happily, they're busily creating hell right here on earth, so all that is required for justice to be served is for them to have to live in and drink the poisonous waters of the toxic cesspools they're making of everyone else's homes.

and surely no symbolic "hell" can be worst that that created in ones own mind.

For instance, half of Ector County had their water turned to salt in the late 70s by a method called salt water injection. There were casing breaks downhole (can't be, said the Railroad Commission, the agency that "regulates" oil and gas in Texas, the producer tells us it's all okay.)

The whole area had to form a water district and buy water from Odessa, the nearest town, for 150% the going rate.

There is no such thing as environmentally neutral hydrocarbon production.

I can't wait for it to be gone...