Hydrofracking: Unacceptable Risk: Google Maps? Google Earth?

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Google Maps? Google Earth?

Here is an interesting bit of information:

When I search on Google Maps and close in for details about where I drove, I find that just to the west of Dimock Township the satellite detail is obscured for miles north, south and west by a screen, and the color is removed.

These maps are provided to Google by the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources

As I retreat, real patches of puffy white clouds appear. What is going on up closer is not clouds.

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Why a blog dedicated to the love of pure water v. the risks of hydraulic fracturing?

My first thought is that the place is occupied. It feels like it has been invaded.

During my recent trip to Dimock and Springville in far northeastern PA, I intend to witness the development of the means to extract natural gas from shale that is several thousand feet below ground level. I know that hydraulic fracturing is already underway here.

Still, expecting mostly a pleasant drive in rolling rural Pennsylvania, the drive becomes a nightmare of roads pounded apart; countless enormous dump trucks, too wide and going too fast; jake brakes; new hardened roads across farm fields, and huge flat white pads the size of city blocks, made of crusher rock that leaves white dust on everything; a men's world of pickups, yellow and orange vests, blue reflective sunglasses; PENNDOT trucks; electric company trucks; no resident on the rural streets or in yards; abandoned homes and farms, fallow fields; no American flags nor protest yard signs nor cows anywhere in sight.

Another thought: is this a National Sacrifice Area?

The dust gives a ghostly pallor to everything it touches.

I am a Central New Yorker. I live at the northern edge of Marcellus shale.

Hydraulic fracturing is headed this way, and fast.

Marcellus shale rises up out of the ground close to here in Marcellus NY, and runs underground all the way to West Virginia.

There is no way that the introduction of hydrofracking into a region, a town or village, or into farmland, is not going to be a disaster. It has turned this area of northeastern PA into a monoculture of giant hungry industry that is eating economic stability, jobs, rural lands, the natural world, mental and physical health, and any sense of place or community.

Mistakes have already started to pile up: the spills, the infiltration of poisons into the water table, the huge payouts to the people to give up every land right to industry and get out of town, the slow inexorable death of a way of life.