Fracking Booms Near Schools With Minority Students

[RiverLover]

Fracking Booms Near Schools With Minority Students
11/18/14



...Aside from Red Hawk, there are many other grade schools across the country with fracking operations nearby. In Colorado, for example, there are nearly 200 active and proposed gas wells within 2,000 feet of a public school, 931 oil and gas wells within one mile of a school, and 26 wells within 1,000 feet of a school. These wells can be any type of oil or gas drilling, but it’s likely that they’re mostly fracked, as 95 percent of new oil and gas wells in Colorado use the process, the Bureau of Land Management notes.

Colorado has a limit on how close a well pad can be to a school — 350 feet in urban areas, and 150 feet in rural areas. But in other states where fracking is rampant, there are no setback limits. One of those states is California, where 352,724 students attend school within one mile of oil and gas well, according to data compiled by Kyle Ferrar at FracTracker.org and released Tuesday.

Setback limits are different in every state, and little is known about how states decide what distance is safe. What is known is that the differing limits give American children unequal protection from the potentially detrimental effects of fracking near their classrooms and playgrounds. In Pennsylvania, children have the protection of at least 500 feet. In Texas, they only have 200.

It’s not just the difference in setback limits that make children unequal in how well they’re protected from the potential risks associated with fracking. A community’s income level, social vulnerability, and race affect the ability of concerned parents to put enough pressure on companies to make sure they’re operating responsibly, or whether they’re operating at all....

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/18/3475882/fracking-near-schools/

Also see Fracking The Poor
http://inthesetimes.com/article/17355/fracking_the_poor

Worrying about school lunches seems pointless when we're giving kids, & poor kids in higher numbers, cancerous air to breathe, imo.

[maced666]

1. So proof gas companies are racists too.

Yea, I am so shocked- NOT.

[RiverLover]

2. I think its more that less affuential areas don't fight them like the Erie PA school did.

“We put so much pressure on Encana, the wells that they wound up putting by the schools were like, the cleanest operation you can do,” said April Beach, an Erie mother of three who co-founded Erie Rising and led the charge against the project. “They did everything we asked except for not drilling those wells.”
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To appease its opponents, Encana agreed to use what’s widely considered the most expensive, but safest way to frack — a process known a “closed-loop” system. During fracking, companies blast high-pressure fracking fluid down a drilled well to crack underground shale rock formations to make oil and gas easier to extract. In a closed-loop system, the fluid never touches the ground, fumes are contained in steel tanks, and use of fresh water is significantly reduced. Encana also agreed to drill only during summer vacation, and diverted truck traffic to drive around school property instead of in front of it.

Red Hawk’s happy ending is just one story of oil and gas extraction near schools across the country. But what happened there doesn’t happen everywhere. In many communities where fracking operations are proposed near schools, parents aren’t given the opportunity to protest; they often don’t have the time, they don’t have the money, and they don’t know whom to call. Regulations on how far away drilling must take place from schools differ in every state. Race, income, and social vulnerability all play pivotal roles.