Friday, November 30, 2012
What you don't know could very well kill you.
Whether you get your water from a well or a municipal system, fracking could be poisoning you and you have no legal recourse to discover what is doing the harm. The well drillers can declare any of the ingredients injected into the gound a Trade Secret and keep its true nature from you regardless of the damage it may do.
A year-old Texas law that requires drillers to disclose chemicals they pump underground during hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” was powerless to compel transparency for EXP- F0173-11. The solvent and several other ingredients in the product are considered a trade secret by Superior Well Services, the Nabors subsidiary. That means they’re exempt from disclosure.And all those chemicals can and do migrate into aquifers or get dumped into sewer treatment plants that have no idea what they need to treat for, if it is even possible. And let us not forget what is quietly dumped into the nearest creek or pond, to eventually travel downstream. Science has found many lifeforms able to exist in extreme conditions that would kill humans. It has not found a way to adapt humans, we still need clean drinking water.
Drilling companies in Texas, the biggest oil-and-natural gas producing state, claimed similar exemptions about 19,000 times this year through August, according to their chemical- disclosure reports. Data from the documents were compiled by Pivot Upstream Group, a Houston-based firm that studies the energy industry, and analyzed by Bloomberg News. Nationwide, companies withheld one out of every five chemicals they used in fracking, a separate examination of a broader database shows.
Trade-secret exemptions block information on more than five ingredients for every well in Texas, undermining the statute’s purpose of informing people about chemicals that are hauled through their communities and injected thousands of feet beneath their homes and farms, said Lon Burnam, a Democratic state representative and a co-author of the law.
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