To: The United States House of Representatives and The United States Senate
Frack View! AKA ~Flaming Drinking water IS NOT SAFE!
Whereas:
1. With a failure rate of between 2 to 8 percent, horizontal drilling and hydrofracking pose an unacceptable risk to our drinking water and the quality of groundwater, aquifers, lakes and streams
2. Drilling will introduce over 250 chemicals into our air and water, placing local residents, wildlife, and critical agriculture and watershed areas at risk
3. Communities where hydrofracking has occurred have experienced explosions, fires, spills, stream contamination, and well pollution as well as degradation of aquifers and other water supplies
4. Local emergency services, including volunteer fire departments, EMS units, and healthcare providers, will be severely stressed and placed at considerable risk from accidents
5. Gas drilling will involve construction of a massive infrastructure of wellheads, pipelines, compressing stations, and processing centers.
6. Infrastructure development will involve extensive clearcutting, 24-hour noise and light pollution, huge increases of truck traffic, and the permanent altering of existing landscapes
7. Industrialization is incompatible with agriculture, tourism, recreation; drilling and related development will significantly alter existing use patterns of rural areas
8. Compulsory integration of neighboring landowners to allow gas extraction against their wishes is an unlawful seizure of land and an unconstitutional abuse of power
9. Extensive drilling will undermine property values and increase tax burdens on local citizens, creating boom and bust economic cycles in local communities
10. Recent preliminary assessments reveal that “natural” gas is not “clean energy” but rather just another polluting, non-renewable fossil fuel contributing to global warming
We call on you, and your staff, to put the people first and protect our health, environment, communities, and future by banning horizontal drilling and hydrofracking to release gas from low-permeable stone formations in our states and country.
Why is this important?
People are encountering unsafe drinking water as a result of the practice of fossil fuel extraction called "Hydrofracking".
"Hydrofracking" is when a person pumps 250 chemicals into the ground water and then blows up the rock layers underground to get the gas. This releases natural gasses into the water which makes Toxic (unsafe) and Flaming (also unsafe) drinking water.
We know this is not safe for the residents of any community. The Clean drinking water act is in place to protect us from exactly this kind of abuse and exploitation. Somehow gas and oil companies have bought themselves an exemption from this protection of all of our shared water , even with the evidence and the knowledge that they are corrupting our drinking water. See gasland the movie for more first hand eyewitness accounts Here is a link to questions and answers about fracking and hydrofracking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agEYLbUQAeI
The exemption must be repealed. Our representatives must represent our interests and come together to protect Americans from this invasion by foreign or domestic resource exploitation or be replaced as incompetent or unable to represent our interests when faced with the fossil fuels industry and its coercive power.