Pennsylvania lifts fracking ban in polluted town of Dimock
Environmental justice advocates cried foul Tuesday after reports that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is allowing a fracking giant to resume drilling operations in Dimock just two weeks after it accepted responsibility for poisoning the small rural town’s drinking water.
Roughly 14 years after a well explosion on New Year’s Day 2009 revealed to Dimock residents that methane had seeped into their groundwater, Cabot Oil & Gas pleaded no contest to 15 criminal charges, including nine felonies, on November 29. The notorious driller, now owned by Coterra Energy, was featured in the 2010 HBO documentary Gasland.
On the same day the Houston-based company took responsibility for destroying the town’s drinking water and agreed to pay $16.3 million to build new public water infrastructure and to cover the costs of delivering clean water to those who have been harmed for the next 75 years, it received a green light to extract more of the same polluting fossil fuels when state regulators quietly lifted a moratorium on gas production in Dimock that had been in place since 2010.
As The Associated Press reported Monday, “State officials denied that Coterra was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor charge in exchange for being allowed to drill for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gas.”
“Some of the residents, who have long accused the Department of Environmental Protection of negligence in its handling of the water pollution in Dimock, said they felt betrayed,” the news outlet noted.
A huge body of research has documented the deadly consequences of fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction, including planet-heating and illness-causing air pollution as well as drinking water contamination, which creates another pathway of exposure to cancer-linked chemicals.
Peer-reviewed studies published earlier this year found that newborns who live in close proximity to fracking and other so-called “unconventional” drilling operations are two to three times more likely to develop childhood leukemia and that elderly individuals who live near or downwind of fracking sites are at higher risk of early death.
Originally published at Commondreams.org.
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