EPA to citizens: Frack you

[kurth]

EPA to citizens: Frack you
In the Rockies, a gas-extraction process called "fracking" may be releasing a carcinogenic stew of chemicals. Dozens of people say it has made them seriously ill, but the EPA refuses to investigate -- a failure one of its own engineers calls "irrational and corrupt."
By Rebecca Clarren

May. 05, 2006 | The 20 miles of interstate highway between rural Silt and Parachute, Colo., slice a crusty landscape where sagebrush clings to ochre mesas. Nearby, the snakelike silver Colorado River carves a valley floor where poplar trees, naked in the winter cold, cast spindly blue shadows across the snow. There are few exits through this section of Garfield County, where the local population of deer and elk rival the number of ranchers, retirees and others who live here.

Susan Haire, a former elementary teacher who ranches on a small scale, has lived atop one of the surrounding mesas for nearly a decade. But she says the landscape has been turned against her. When she drives down this stretch of highway, her nose bleeds, her eyes burn, and her head pounds. She's taken to wearing a respirator, even in the car.

"I feel like an alien, like I don't fit into my own environment. It's frightening," says Haire, 55, tears filling her pale slate eyes as she looks through her living room window out on her back fields. "It's horrifying what's happening here. The changes that have happened in the past 18 months are so dramatic. It's just a nightmare."

Haire's doctor blames her health problems on the scenery's relatively recent addition: 600 natural gas wells, drilled by oil companies over the past two years. Every few feet, 150-foot-tall drill rigs, graced with American flags, rise upward into the sky. Compressor stations, banks of rectangular huts with five-foot-diameter fans, sit back from the road and pump the gas into underground pipelines...

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/05/05/fracking/index.html

[Elwood P Dowd]

1. Kick

:kick:

Under this climate, staffers at the EPA report that they're unable to do their job of protecting human health and the environment. "People are being penalized just for asking questions," says an EPA staffer who spoke on a condition of anonymity. "I've heard a bunch of people say they're keeping their heads down and basically focusing on their kids or personal interests and trying to keep their jobs. There doesn't seem to be attention whatsoever to health and the environment. They're ignoring all of their own standards and regulations left and right. It's just about corporate power to get the gas out."

[Greyhound]

4. Sounds like one of those federal class-action suits warming up.

Wait until the Dems take back the legislature.

[montana500]

2. This is some sick crap.

No one should have to live like that.

[Greyhound]

3. K&R

:kick:

[TheMadMonk]

5. I know folk sholudn't have to, but...

Why can't they take samples (air, water, soil, dead critters, whatever) and have them independantly analysed. Dump the results on the desks of every newsie and pollie in the country. Make the situation utterly impossible for the EPA and their "owners" to ignore or bury.

Now organise and move on to the next site, repeat and hang the whole corrupt cabal out to drip dry. (No spin.)

The unfortunate fact is, that the usual channels essentially don't exist any more and if you want your country back you will have to fight for it in a way that can't be ignored, buried or bought off. And you will have to pay for it yourselves. When the government is the problem, appealing to the government for redress is as efective as punching fog.

Hell, turn fog to your advantage. Hire/buy lightshow lasers and write the results on the sulphur yellow underbelly of every cloud that passes overhead.