By the start of 2013, the Pennsylvania fracking boom went bust, with production declining by more than half of the 2010 peak. Many parts of Pennsylvania that ramped up housing and community infrastructure to accommodate workers and businesses ancillary to the fracking industry suffered with the exodus of the drilling rigs, leaving an even deeper scar of joblessness and debt. Landowners with leases saw royalty checks dwindle to nothing and multiple energy companies “pulled up their stakes” to rededicate their efforts to oil production elsewhere. In the past two years, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s online database, more than 300,000 tons of potentially radioactive fracking waste has been dumped in New York landfills and on roadways from Pennsylvania drilling sites. Much of this waste should be considered hazardous because of its chemical and radiological profile, but due to federal and state preemptions and loopholes, facilities designed to take municipal garbage alone have no restrictions on taking this dangerous refuse. The resulting exposures to workers and host communities receiving waters of the processed leachate represent a potential public health crisis that will only be compounded by other emerging health issues associated with fracking. The Cuomo administration, in its public health analysis, has undoubtedly come across a multitude of new research linking the exposure pathways of fracking chemicals to low birth weight, chronic respiratory ailments, neuropathies and other serious medical conditions.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 23:34:24 +0000