Chemical Pits From Oil and Gas Drilling Pose Significant Health Threat
I recently received this comment from a Texas woman with first hand experience dealing with the pollution often left behind by oil and gas drilling...
I live in South Texas on a 38,000 acre ranch that ExxonMobil has leased since the 30's. A lot of kids around here have leukemia. I got the old soil conservation aerial photos and found out that ExxonMobil had huge pits where they burned sludge. I dug up a few pits and found that they are full of PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons). Those are linked benzene molecules and worse than regular benzene because they NEVER break down.
I made an album of the pits on our ranch. They are 100's of feet wide. You can view them on my picasa photo page. View the pits...
I really hope people will locate the pits near them and move. We are suing ExxonMobil but it is pretty hopeless because they have so much money for lawyers. It's best to just know about the pits and not move near them. ExxonMobil had a block of 2 million acres, almost contiguous, in South Texas. These pits are not just on our ranch.
Sound advice. Thousands of Americans face increased health risks due to unsafe handling and disposal hydraulic fracking chemicals. While the industry is fond of pointing out that the chemicals are injected far below the water table, and therefore pose no threat to humans and the environment, they usually omit the part about recovering a significant portion of the fluid and often storing it in open pits. Sadly the above story not an isolated incident, but an frightening reality faced by many people living near gas drilling. Thanks Elizabeth.
