The Wages of Fracking
By Oh fracking. You are so great with your cheap gas prices and profits for fossil fuel companies. Let’s just keep going full bore into this technology without adequate research on its impact on people or the land. Earthquakes? It’s just Jesus giving you a little shake. Keeping it real for you. As for fracking’s impact on workers, it’s just their sacrifice for the greater good:
A new study published in Environmental Health reveals air pollution data on major, in some cases previously underestimated, health risks from toxic contamination at gas production sites related to fracking. Air samples gathered around “unconventional oil and gas” sites by community-based environmental research teams contained unsafe levels of several volatile compounds that “exceeded federal guidelines under several operational circumstances,” and that “Benzene, formaldehyde, and hydrogen sulfide were the most common compounds to exceed acute and other health-based risk levels.”
This suggests fracking may bring risk of cancer, birth defects and long-term respiratory and cellular damage to local towns and farms. Building on other studies on drilling-related water contamination, the air pollution research may stoke growing opposition from communities near drilling sites, who must weigh the industry’s promises of new investment and jobs against the potential cost to the human health.
The findings also raise questions about the safety of fracking-site workers, who may have far less legal recourse over potential health damage than do local homeowners. Many work contract jobs under harsh, isolated conditions, in a volatile industry where pressure to pump profits is high and labor protections weak.
In contrast to other forms of oil and gas extraction, fracking is a particularly murky field because the process uses massive volumes of chemicals, with little regulatory oversight or corporate transparency.
It’s hard to see how this could lead to long-term health issues since American industry has never, ever, ever, ever, ever killed a worker through a lack of safety and health precautions.