Fracking Hell: The Untold Story - YouTube
Fracking Hell: The Untold Story - YouTube
Watch more Earth Focus at http://www.linktv.org/earthfocus
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An
original investigative report by Earth Focus and UK's Ecologist Film
Unit looks at the risks of natural gas development in the Marcellus
Shale. From toxic chemicals in drinking water to unregulated interstate
dumping of potentially radioactive waste that experts fear can
contaminate water supplies in major population centers including New
York City, are the health consequences worth the economic gains?
Marcellus
Shale contains enough natural gas to supply all US gas needs for 14
years. But as gas drilling takes place, using a process called hydraulic
fracturing or "fracking," toxic chemicals and methane gas seep into
drinking water. Now experts fear that unacceptable levels of radioactive
Radium 226 in gas development waste.
Fracking chemicals are
linked to bone, liver and breast cancers, gastrointestinal, circulatory,
respiratory, developmental as well as brain and nervous system
disorders. Such chemicals are present in frack waste and may find their
way into drinking water and air.
Waste from Pennsylvania gas
wells -- waste that may also contain unacceptable levels of radium -- is
routinely dumped across state lines into landfills in New York, Ohio
and West Virginia. New York does not require testing waste for
radioactivity prior to dumping or treatment. So drill cuttings from
Pennsylvania have been dumped in New York's Chemung and other counties
and liquid waste is shipped to treatment plants in Auburn and Watertown
New York. How radioactive is this waste? Experts are calling are for
testing to find out.
New York State may have been the first state in
the nation to put a temporary hold on fracking pending a safety review,
but it allows other states to dump toxic frack waste within its
boundaries.
With a gas production boom underway in the Marcellus
Shale and plans for some 400,000 wells in the coming decades, the
cumulative impact of dumping potential lethal waste without adequate
oversight is a catastrophe waiting to happen. And now U.S. companies are
exporting fracking to Europe.
