For the story so far, click here

“They create a mixture of mostly fresh water with sand and nasty chemicals added.  Then they inject this fluid at very high pressure, into a gas well, thousands of feet deep into the ground.  Now forget the chemicals for a minute and just picture the fact that they use about 40,000 gallons of water every time they do this!  And each well can be fracked 18 times.  What a criminal waste of water!  Anyway, the fluid is going down the pipe at such pressure that when it reaches the end of the well and hits the shale rock down there, it fractures it, making lots of tiny cracks, kept open with the grains of sand in the fluid, and the natural gas – that is methane – leaks out of these cracks into the well.  So that’s how they get the gas.”

“What makes this business really horrifying is that during the process some of the toxic chemicals – and they use hundreds of different nasties in there, like lead, uranium, radium, mercury, hydrochloric acid, the list goes on and on – and the methane gas leach out from the system and contaminate the ground water.  And the ground water is where our drinking water comes from.  They are threatening the health and survival of everyone!  In America they have found that drinking water wells near fracturing sites have 17 times higher concentration of methane in them than normal and some people have even been able to light their taps on fire because of the high level of gas in their water.  Many others have become seriously ill from drinking it.”

To be continued …

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Information from Dangers of Fracking and Food and Water Watch

Fracking infographic adapted from one found at levellers.org