Joel Freedman: Special interests are the only winners in hydrofracking
Joel Freedman
Because of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking for short, the tap water of Dimock, Pennsylvania, residents bursts into flames with the smallest sparks. They suffer from severe headaches, blackouts and asthma. Horses go blind. Cows drop dead.
Wastewater, produced by fracking and containing high levels of radioactivity that wastewater treatment plants aren’t equipped to remove, pollutes the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people in West Virginia and western Pennsylvania. The radioactivity in the Monongahela River also threatens wildlife.
A house in Bainbridge, Ohio, explodes and 19 other homes are evacuated due to fracking-related high methane gas levels. Groundwater on the Wind River Indian
Reservation in Pavillion, Wyoming, is contaminated by methane. Fracking is the cause.
At a hospital emergency room in Durango, Colorado, a healthcare worker treats a man exposed to a chemical spill during a fracking operation. As she helps wash the man, vapors waft from his clothes. A day later her skin turns yellow and within days she becomes critically ill. Luckily, she survives.
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