OmNomination

Fracking industry has spent $726 million on lobbying since 2001

solitaryforager:

A natural gas drilling rush is on in rural North Dakota. And with it, residents are reporting growing numbers of respiratory ailments, skin lesions, blood oozing from eyes, and the deaths of livestock and pets.

Elsewhere, residents of Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wyoming and other states who thought they’d hit the lottery by signing natural gas drilling leases have watched their drinking water turn noxious: slick, brown, foamy, flammable.

In December, for the first time, federal regulators scientifically linked hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to the contamination of an aquifer, refuting repeated industry claims that the practice does not pollute drinking water.

It happened in the rural ranching community of Pavillion, Wyoming, an area riddled with 162 natural gas wells dug between 1990 and 2006. Despite a decade of complaints from residents that their reeking water was undrinkable – and that many suffered from nerve damage, asthma, heart trouble and other health problems – state officials did nothing.

Finally the EPA stepped in, launching a three-year study running from 2008 to 2011.

In its report, the EPA identified numerous fracking chemicals in Pavillion’s water. Cancer-causing benzene was found at 50 times safe levels, along with other hazardous chemicals, methane, diesel fuel, and toxic metals – in both groundwater and deep wells.

Now, across the country in Pennsylvania, the EPA is testing drinking water in 61 locations in Susquehanna County for possible fracking-related contamination.

Nationwide, residents living near fracked gas wells have filed over 1,000 complaints of tainted water, severe illnesses, livestock deaths, and fish kills. Complaints, sometimes involving hundreds of households, have risen in tandem with a veritable gold rush of new natural gas wells – now numbering about 493,000 across 31 states.

This month’s hearings on the EPA’s Pavillion report, led by the House subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, have been contentious, with pro-drilling politicians and industry representatives attacking its conclusions.

“The EPA is trying to go after fracking everywhere they can,” said subcommittee chairman Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican. “They’ve had absolutely no proof that fracking had polluted drinking water, that I know of.”

(Source: socialuprooting)