Hydrofracking – Starting to Peel the Onion

Drilling for methane gas in the Marcellus Shale deposits – hydrofracking – is probably the most visible issue in Otsego County at this moment. There are yard signs all over – running about five to one against, by my unscientific count. There's a lot to think about here.

The more you peel back this onion, the more layers you find. Certainly, there are grave risks – to our water, first and foremost, and also to our roads, from the greatly increased truck traffic required to support the drilling operation. These are potential problems that you can measure and monitor, and the available evidence from current drilling locations suggests that the measurements add up to grave risk.

The damage to our way of life is less measurable but, in the long term, it could be as devastating as any other issue. It's been said before, but it's important: we are a rural community, and economically at least, we're dependent on many kinds of tourism for our livelihood. My wife and I have traveled through all the states and all but one of the Canadian provinces, and as grand and breathtaking this continent is, we've always been glad that home is in Otsego County. It's a beautiful landscape, and there are lots of ways to enjoy it. It's a priceless resource. Adding wells, trucks, buffalo tanks, and small armies of drilling company workers can only degrade what we have.

This article in the NY Times added another layer to the onion. As we are learning, hydrofracking uses water (the 'hydro' part) to break up rock; the water is recovered, and although some of it is re-used, eventually it trucked away and disposed of. According to the Times article,

...wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.

The whole article is worth a read.  Apparently, we could be poisoning someone else's water as well as our own.

And there are more layers still. In the interest of keeping these posts relatively brief, we can look further into this issue in a future post.