NYT: "The Fracturing of Pennsylvania"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/magazine/fracking-amwell-township.html?pagewanted=all
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/11/18/magazine/100000001177838/fracking-in-one-town.html

"Five years ago, no one in Amwell Township knew anything about fracking."

Correlation isn't causation. Yet it suggests something. When a plague of illness, gagging smells and death shows up at your doorstep only after fracking moved in, maybe, just maybe, there's a link that deserves to be investigated. In the words of Randall Munroe, it waggles its eyebrows suggestively and mouths, "look over there".



The unwillingness of Pennsylvania's DEP do its job, dismissing the flood of complaints with such responses as "[there was] a 'strong odor' at the impoundment but not [directly] on her property, or deal with Range Resources' amnesia with recording complaints, makes one suspect the cause. Frequently, blind eyes at agencies are correlated with corruption. But that's correlation. Perhaps as the lawsuit against the DEP progresses one might ascertain a cause.

I never thought I'd start a "watch" site

I mean, I didn't think I was one of those folk. Tin-foil hats never really made for good fashion, but here I am.

I am a fourth year at the University of Virginia studying biochemistry, biology and physics. I work in a fruit fly laboratory where we dissect their brains and put them through all sorts of contraptions, including them inoculating them with cocaine to research circadian rhythms. I don't really have a direct stake in fracking; I'm not a leaseholder, and fracking hasn't come to me, yet.

My stance is mixed. I mean I love the idea of abundant cleanly-burning natural gas (its main emission is CO2), and I'm less alarmed about the CO2 emissions than I am about animals dying and poisoned groundwater. Maybe contamination might be due to occasional accidents that aren't the norm. Maybe some contamination is the norm, but contamination that can be contained. I would be sad if it's not environmentally sustainable. I'm all for finding out. Certainly communities shouldn't be paying a public price for the private profits of private drilling.

Idealism is today, apathy is forever.