Dear Editor,
According to the Ohio River Valley Institute, in the most heavily fracked county in West Virginia, the industry promise of jobs never materialized.
What did materialize, though, was a reduced population, dangerously polluted air and water and major damage to infrastructure. Also damaged was the clean, wild and wonderful West Virginia that supports tourism, recreation and farming. Yet even with the highest gas production in West Virginia, Wetzel County still suffers from double-digit unemployment.
A recent study conducted by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) states that just one fracked drilling site deploys harmful chemicals sufficient “to contaminate more than 100 billion gallons of drinking water to unsafe levels … more than 10 times as much water as the entire state of New York uses in a single day.” These chemicals are often so dangerous that frack-waste cleanup crews report sores covering legs and soles burnt off boots.
Wetzel County also had many frack vehicle accidents: dump trucks smashed through guardrails, semis straddling roads, cranes toppled into ravines and drill rigs fallen off semis on deeply rutted roads littered with industry equipment. Meanwhile, Marcellus gas is mainly exported to other countries, keeping U.S, natural gas prices high.
However, as a Bloomberg report put it, extraordinarily generous fossil-fuel subsidies hide the true cost of fracking, wherein the average well production declines by 60% in the first year. So, though needing more costly wells to maintain output, polluting and destructive drilling using taxpayer dollars continues.
Further, while fracking created startlingly few jobs in Appalachia, most of them no longer exist. Instead the money went to corporate profits and to out-of-state workers.
We now have been forewarned that an even nastier version of Sen. Manchin’s Energy Independence and Security Act is being reintroduced in the Senate as an amendment to the must-pass NDAA bill.
This amendment would undercut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act (CWA) and other social and environmental protections, radically increasing the toxicity and community wreckage fossil-fuel extraction creates. Please, contact your senators and Senate leader Chuck Schumer at 888-997-5380.
Sincerely,
Barbara Daniels
Craigsville
