To: The St. Tammany Parish Council
Make St. Tammany Parish a Frack-Free Zone
Petition to the St. Tammany Parish Council: Write and pass a zoning ordinance to dis-allow the process of hydraulic fracturing in St. Tammany Parish.
Why is this important?
Many people are appalled at the proliferation of hydraulic fracturing wells across the country. Although some people are not particularly concerned about what goes on in other localities, no people, including oil company executives, want fracking in their own neighborhood. Taking that fact of human nature into account and, as current Louisiana state law makes it a matter between the company seeking the rights to extraction and the property owner of the drill site, the best hope to stop the dangerous practice of hydraulic fracturing is on the parish level. People who would not even consider themselves "environmentalists" don't want their property values lowered and are offended by materials being extracted from underneath their property through wells drilled on neighboring properties. Meanwhile, serious environmental concerns over fracking are quite numerous.
A Duke University study found unacceptable levels of radio-activity in streams after fracking had occurred. http://www.businessinsider.com/fracking-leaving-radioactive-pollution-in-pa-2013-10
Another Duke University study published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found methane and other fracking materials in well water within a kilometer of frack drilling sites.
http://nicholas.duke.edu/cgc/pnas2011.pdf
At a recent meeting at the St. Tammany Community Center, when asked if he could guarantee that there would be no spillage of contaminants or environmental damage, a representative of the drilling company answered that, "There are no guarantees." That makes it official then that the proposed extraction process is an EXPERIMENT, an experiment on our lives, health, and water supply and on the lives health and water supply of future generations.
Another gentleman from the team of frackers who showed up to face hundreds of angry citizens from across the political spectrum tried to reassure the crowd that, where contamination occurs, it moves very slowly because it's the nature of ground water to move very slowly as opposed to surface water. The operative word in that statement is "move". If there are people living in St. Tammany Parish 500 years from now condemning our stupidity for ruining their aquifer, they are not going to be very much impressed with this notion that ground water contaminants move slowly.
61 townships in New York and the nation of France count themselves amongst the growing number of localities who have banned the dangerous practice of hydraulic fracturing. If the majority of citizens of St. Tammany Parish can't stop a few land owners and a powerful corporation from endangering one of the best aquifers in the country then our democracy is long gone.
A Duke University study found unacceptable levels of radio-activity in streams after fracking had occurred. http://www.businessinsider.com/fracking-leaving-radioactive-pollution-in-pa-2013-10
Another Duke University study published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found methane and other fracking materials in well water within a kilometer of frack drilling sites.
http://nicholas.duke.edu/cgc/pnas2011.pdf
At a recent meeting at the St. Tammany Community Center, when asked if he could guarantee that there would be no spillage of contaminants or environmental damage, a representative of the drilling company answered that, "There are no guarantees." That makes it official then that the proposed extraction process is an EXPERIMENT, an experiment on our lives, health, and water supply and on the lives health and water supply of future generations.
Another gentleman from the team of frackers who showed up to face hundreds of angry citizens from across the political spectrum tried to reassure the crowd that, where contamination occurs, it moves very slowly because it's the nature of ground water to move very slowly as opposed to surface water. The operative word in that statement is "move". If there are people living in St. Tammany Parish 500 years from now condemning our stupidity for ruining their aquifer, they are not going to be very much impressed with this notion that ground water contaminants move slowly.
61 townships in New York and the nation of France count themselves amongst the growing number of localities who have banned the dangerous practice of hydraulic fracturing. If the majority of citizens of St. Tammany Parish can't stop a few land owners and a powerful corporation from endangering one of the best aquifers in the country then our democracy is long gone.