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LETTER: Fracking too risky

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Staff

As a concerned citizen of Chapel Hill, I am completely against fracking. The practice of hydraulic fracturing is incredibly dangerous. Even fracking in rural areas is dangerous.
When fracking is done, harmful methane gas is released and can ruin the local water supply. This affects not only the people who live nearby but the animals, too.
Water with methane gas is hazardous to drink. Methane-infested water can ignite, meaning that if someone left a lit cigarette or candle near a glass of water, it could all catch fire. Who would want to take these risks?
If a large number of animals drank this toxic water, they would most likely die. If a lot of animals died, it could very likely damage that particular ecosystem. And if one small ecosystem was ruined, it could dramatically change the whole area.
In the play An Enemy of the People, by Henrik Ibsen (adapted and translated by Arthur Miller), the topic of fracking is discussed.
An Enemy of the People is about a doctor who tests the town’s water supply and finds it is poisonous. The doctor then tells the citizens of the town and they don’t believe him. He is then thought of as an enemy of the people (hence the title).
It is very likely that the water supply was poisoned by fracking. Many of the townspeople and people who visited the town got sick, but no one knew why. This is legitimate evidence that they could have been poisoned by methane-infested water, the result of hydraulic fracturing.
The importance of this play is the realization that this could happen to us. If we decide to frack here, in North Carolina, our water supply might become poisoned.
Is that what we want? To drink poisoned water? To make ourselves sick? To have that risk of being hurt?
Why be haunted by that risk when we, as the people of this community, can decide against it? Fracking is our decision; why choose to frack when the cons heavily outweigh the pros?
I, as a member of our community, am against fracking. Why take the risks when not much good can come of it?
Would you want to take the risks?

Alexandra Glasser
Chapel Hill

4 thoughts on “LETTER: Fracking too risky”

  1. Joel Anderson says:
    December 28, 2011 at 6:02 pm

    “If ” is sometimes the biggest word in the English language. Considering how often it is used maybe the author should check their facts if there were any.

    The cited play is a fictional story written in 1882. How the connection to fracking is made is beyond any sort of reasoned thought process. The only intention of this letter is to scare people and create a hysteria over a process that has been used safely for decades.

    If you want energy, you have to do something to get it out of the ground. Fracking has opened up new supplies of energy for the United States for the next several hundred years and should be used wherever possible.

  2. Maria Payan says:
    December 29, 2011 at 9:47 am

    Joel,

    Hydraulic fracturing …horizontal, that is, is an unconventional form of extracting natural gas. It has not been done for decades. Firstly the estimates over how much is there varies greatly from research. I can tell you that more research needs to be done. EPA is in the process of this. The wise thing to do is wait until the science is done. As Dr, Ingraffea has stated…so far , the extraction has been basically an experiment in communities. They are trying ” to get it right”. Many are sick in PA and many have had their wells contaminated. There are many foreign interests involved…and this gas will be exported. We are sacrificing sustainable jobs, such as tourism and agriculture, for jobs that will disappear when the gas is gone.

  3. Kirk LeDoux says:
    December 29, 2011 at 5:22 pm

    Hydraulic fracturing has been used safely over one million times since the 1940’s according to the American Petroleum Institute.
    Unconventional, in this case, is a good thing. It means advances in technology have allowed us access to huge amounts of low cost, clean burning natural gas while providing hundreds of thousands of jobs and pumping hope and millions of dollars into areas of the country that had been suffering economically for decades.
    The blessing of horizontal drilling allows one gas well pad to be placed every 640 acres instead of the typical “conventional” gas well pad spacing of one every 40 acres, drastically reducing surface disturbance.
    Natural gas royalties are allowing many farmers to hold on to their family farms and preserve the rural character of these areas of the country, while also bringing millions of tax dollars into state and local governments previously suffering from shrinking revenues.
    The people of North Carolina deserve the facts about natural gas exploration, not fear mongering from individuals and groups making unsubstantiated claims and wild accusations.

  4. Joshua Harwood says:
    January 15, 2012 at 2:42 am

    I have been feeling tremors in my Apt. recently, in Chapel Hill–I wondered if fracking could be involved or if something else was causing them.

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