Texas not protecting residents from gas drilling dangers

I wish people would stop saying sand.

It’s silica.

There’s a huge difference:

You don’t get silicosis playing on the playground!

Or at the beach!

It is ignorant to talk about percentages when it comes to determining a dosage of toxic compounds. No one cares that a solution was 99 percent saline if you administered the wrong dose.

Of course, Kelly nailed it. You can’t have a meaningful conversation at all when you can’t even name the compound.

At some point, this kind of “public policy” isn’t even willful ignorance, it’s criminal negligence.

First, silica IS a type of sand, and sometimes we play in it on beaches incuding those called sand traps on better golf courses, so let’s be clear about that fact. Silica is merely a type of fine, white sand as opposed to types of brown, course sand.

Everything Ed Ireland says is a pack of lies because he has no integrity or shame. I challenge Ed Ireland, and everybody else who defends the gas drilling industry, to move their kids to a location immediately adjacent to those wells, and then stay there for a period of one year. In fact, it ought to be a law that drillers are required to live, with their families, within 300 feet of the gas wells they drill. If that were the law, then there would be no drilling because they DO know the hazards they create, and to which they expose those who already live near where they go to drill.

What is really bad is how miserably uninformed news media people are about this process, and most of them make no real attempt to learn the facts. That would require a little effort and comprehension on their parts.

Hydraulic fracturing uses over 900 different chemicals, though not all are used on any one well site. The compounds are formulated based upon the type and nature of the shale formation to be fractured. Some of the chemicals used include benzene, xylene, ethylbenzene, toluene, selenium, boron, barium, chromium, cadmium, aluminum, mercury, lead, napthalene, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, hydrosulphuric acid, citric acid, arsenic, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, methanol, ethylene glycol, glycol ethers and many other toxic, carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals that cause birth defects, early infant death, memory problems, respiratory ailments, severe skin and eye irritation, severe headaches, nausea, severe coughing, and numerous other human and animal health problems.

Frac’ing has been substantially proven to contaminate ground water and surface water, air and soil. Every frac job requires 1.5 to 9 million gallons of fresh water, and renders that water permanently unusable by humans, animals or plants. Wells may need to be re-frac’ed as many as 18-20 times over their production lifesysle. There can be as many as 24-36 wells on a single padsite. A single padsite can, over the life of all its wells, consume 500-600 BILLION gallons of water that is forever removed from our water tables, and that does not even include aquifers, rivers, lakes or other bodies of water than becomke contaminated by migration of injected toxins, carcinogens and neurotoxins that are either left in the ground after frac’ing or else removed and pumped under enormous pressure into injection wells in the Ellenberger formation.

To put the water use in perspective, the earth is 70% water. Of that, only 3% is fresh water, and less than 0.03% is surface fresh water. The City of Dallas gets 89% of its water from surface sources, the Trinity River being the primary source. The Trinity River is the primary drinking water source for over 50% of ALL Texas residents and tens of thousands of businesses and industries including farming and ranching.

We are constantly facing severe and critical water shortages that mandate restrictions on water use, and municipalities routinely ban watering lawns and washing cars in summer months due to a lack of available water for drinking, food preparation and personal hygiene.

One has to be either illiterate about this issue, or else just plain uncompassionate about the harm it causes to so many people to defend the process of hydraulic fracturing, especially in densely populated urban areas, but also in rural areas where a great many people live and where water tables are often located.

Man has lived on this rock for 200-400,000 years, and we never used oil or gas until 1860, but not one person, animal or plant can survive on this planet without an abundant supply of clean, fresh water, air and soil. When we destroy the environment, then we risk making ourselves as extinct as a species as the dinosaurs. We only have one environment, and when it is gone, then we are history.

To quote envirornmental writer Miccheal Furtman, “All the water that ever has been or ever will be is here now. It sits, it runs, it rises as mist. It evaporates and falls again as rain or snow. You cannot pollute a drop of water anywhere without eventually poisoning some distant place.”

Beach sand, it isn’t.

You can learn more about how inhaling particulate matter damages your lungs on the EPA website. http://www.epa.gov/pm/