Part I – An Abrupt Awakening
This past February of 2014, 50 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the rural area of Dunkard Township, people were shocked by the dramatic explosion of the Marcellus shale natural gas fracking well, which led to a huge fireball that raged and continued to burn for five days. The fire crackled and hissed loudly as neighbors described it as sounding as if a jet engine was continually running just outside your window. The heat was so tremendous that it was impossible to remove equipment and propane tanks near the site that exploded. One worker was hospitalized, but another was declared missing, and they could only find a few fragments of charred skeletal remains on the third day after the fire finally burned itself out. Chevron, the owner of the well, sent out a special team from Houston called the Wild Well Control Team, and apparently, the only emergency plan to control such a fire was to let it burn itself out. The service technician, Ian McKee, who died in the blast, was only 27 years old. Ian’s fiancée is pregnant and expecting in July. They were hoping to make enough money to get married soon and buy a home. The press kept her name secret at her request, but we know that she was hoping that he was only injured. That hoped was tragically dashed.
Chevron, realizing the public relations disaster it had on its hand, sent out hundreds of letters to the community stating:
“Chevron recognizes the effect this had on the community. We value being a responsible member of this community and will continue to strive to achieve incident-free operations. We are committed to taking action to safeguard our neighbors, our employees, our contractors and the environment.”
Along with the letter was a gift certificate for pizza with a soft drink of your choice. The gift certificates expired this past May 1. For some reason, the people of Dunkard Township did not appreciate Chevron’s communal offering.
The opinion of the public is very mixed on hydraulic fracturing, which is also called fracking. The news media has for the most part been positive to some extent, especially pointing out the explosive economic growth in sleepy North Dakota which is now a major oil producing state. Then there is a mix of negative stories, which picked up momentum when the movie Gasland came out in 2010 and introduced images of people setting their kitchen sink tap water on fire because it was leaking methane gas. The conservative media was quick to demonize filmmaker Josh Fox as one of those bad liberal filmmakers trying to make money off by picking on a successful industry. The news media for the most part has failed the public on educating people on the nature of fracking. This is understandable, as the real customers of broadcast media are corporations looking to advertise to a more affluent audience, and oil and gas companies are among that customer base.
If you look at public opinion polls, a year ago, 48% of the U.S. population was positive on the development of fracking, and a slightly higher 49% was very much against it. In the most recent survey, the percentage of people positive toward fracking started to dip to 44%. Even without the proper information, stories are spreading and people are getting a sense of something going wrong.
Unfortunately, the industry promotes fracking as a technology that has been used for the past 60 years. This is actually quite false. Some variant of fracking has been tried in vertical wells over the years, but pressuring oil and natural gas out of shale rock formations using horizontal drilling has only started within the past 7 years or so. Literature about the environmental implications in peer reviewed academic and scientific journals only began appearing in late 2011. In other words, its questionable if the industry even knows what its doing.
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