5 Shocking Places Where Fracking Is Taking Off

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/5-surprising-places-where-fracking-taking



1. California's Vital Farmlands. Kern County in California’s Central Valley is part of the heart of the state’s $43 billion a year agriculture industry and it has made headlines frequently as ground zero for California’s crippling drought. Dairy is big in Kern and farmers (mostly large agribusiness) also grow almonds, pistachios, grapes, cotton, carrots, onions, citrus and much more.

***SNIP

2. Pacific Coast Waters. A six-month investigation by Truthout revealed last July that hydraulic fracking had occurred off the coast of California in the Santa Barbara Channel and no special permits or environmental review were required. Mike Ludwig wrote:

Truthout reported that an oil company called Venoco had quietly used fracking technology to stimulate oil production in an old well off the coast of Santa Barbara in early 2010. A Freedom of Information Act request recently filed by Truthout has confirmed the Venoco operation and revealed that another firm had since received permission for fracking in the Santa Barbara channel, which is home to the Channel Islands marine reserve .

***SNIP

3. Florida's Tropics. Is fracking happening in the Everglades? That depends on who you ask. According to the Texas oil company Dan A. Hughes Co., the answer is no. But not everyone agrees with that. The Orlando Sentinel reported that the Texas company, “has been caught using fracking-like blasting methods to drill for oil near the Everglades, raising alarms from state officials and inflaming a long-simmering controversy over energy exploration in the midst of a cherished ecosystem.”

***SNIP


4. The Great Lakes. Fracking is already happening in Michigan and environmental groups are worried that it may expand and threaten their prized freshwater resources.

[rickyhall]

1. Fracking has got to stop, Mr. President

[cali]

2. the greatest immediate threat to our water and air bar none

[TransitJohn]

5. Factory farming is a worse threat to surface and ground water

by orders of magnitude.

[cali]

7. Evidence?

[TransitJohn]

10. Lol

Hundreds of millions of tons of non-point source effluent discharge into surface water annually?

[Enthusiast]

3. Kicked and recommended!

Beyond sad.

[watoos]

4. Good Luck stopping them

Our small town (1,200) and surrounding township (1,500) people in Pennsylvania fought fracking on our pristine watershed. Our Municipal Authority is screwed, we own the land but not the gas rights. Our watershed has 2 reservoirs, several artesian wells, and several pristine streams. Even cutting timber has disturbed our water by increasing the turbidity. They drilled one well bore and the water stopped flowing at one of our artesian wells, the water then showed up in their well bore, which means their hole intersects our well. After they encased the well bore our water returned to the artesian well. It's not comforting to know that a couple inches of concrete is all that stands between contaminating our artesian well.

OK, here's the kicker, the President of the Senate Pro Tem, Joe Scarnati is (was) a resident of our small town. Of course we talked to him and wrote letters to him, hired a lawyer, held hearings to stop fracking on our watershed to no avail.
As a side note we found out that Scarnati had gone to the Super Bowl, courtesy of the frackers. After he got caught he simply paid back the costs of the trip.

The frackers now want to put in another pad closer to one of our 2 reservoirs, glory be, Scarnati has written a letter to DEP recommending against it, we will see. If the frackers want to put in the 2nd well pad no one can stop them, Dick Cheney saw to that. The area for the 2nd well pad, finally, (the designation was held up) has been designated the highest, exceptional designation for a trout stream you can get. Get your city, town, municipality, to write up an ordinance banning the bastards, it may convince them not to fight city hall, but if they want to frack good luck trying to stop them.

[Pakid]

8. I see you are from my part of the state

What has been going on here is not good. How to stop it is a question that is in need of an answer. Locally where I live the less than intelligent local politicians are doing every thing in there power to sell off the water company that is own by the people to corporate America. They seized it from the board that has run it for years help themselves to it money and then claimed it was broke and has to be sold. Water our most valuable resource and these people want to sell it off. Meanwhile most of our state elected officials are more than happy to look the other way while the greed of big gas and oil lay waste to the rest of our water supply. When does it end before it to late and we have no water or do they leave us just enough water so that they can claim it's in short supply and then charge us far more than we can afford. That may very well be the real plan or just a side benefit.

[mia]

6. They drill first, pay the fines, and keep on drilling. There aren't enough regulations to stop them.

http://www.npr.org/2014/07/02/327373952/florida-county-goes-to-court-over-acid-fracking-near-everglades

...Acid has long been used in oil drilling operations in Florida to dissolve and loosen the limestone bedrock. But a drilling operation near Naples, on the western edge of the Everglades, was something new. In December, Texas-based Dan A. Hughes Co. injected acid under pressure there — a process not used before in Florida.

Florida regulators asked the drilling company to suspend the operation while the state studied the process. The company refused.

"Within a matter of hours after we realized that the process was going forward, I issued a cease and desist order," says Herschel Vinyard, secretary of Florida's Department of Environmental Protection.

Despite the cease and desist order, Vinyard says, the company continued the work anyway and completed its operation. Eventually, Florida and the driller signed a consent agreement, and the company agreed to pay a $25,000 fine and install groundwater monitors....

[Divernan]

9. W/So. Fla.'s limestone base? TOTAL INSANITY !

Where fracking has caused earthquakes in other parts of the US and the world, in Florida just add interlocking underground rivers, springs & sinkholes to the picture. And a spill/overflow of fracking fluids or fracking wastewater would be limited not to just a single river or stream, but spread throughout the everglades. Then add in the possibility of direct hits by hurricanes or storm surges to fracking collecting stations? If ever a governor or state supreme court needed to take emergency action, it is in Florida to shut down all fracking operations immediately.

The Florida peninsula is the emergent portion of the Florida Platform. This is a wide, relatively flat land formation. The Florida Platform lies between the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Florida's landscape varies widely. Many of Florida�s prominent features have resulted from karst, a landscape with a base layer of limestone. Because limestone is porous, freshwater gradually dissolves the rock and forms cracks and passages.

The limestone layer of the state is honeycombed with underground rivers. Where the rivers break through to the surface, springs and sinkholes are found. Lakes and wetlands are abundant.

http://fcit.usf.edu/florida/lessons/land/land.htm