Pure water. Unfortunately, we can’t take it for granted any more. And that’s why TTM’s Water Group and Food & Water Watch have joined forces to participate in the Global Frackdown on Oct 19, 2013. We will meet from 12 NOON to 2 PM at Plum Street Mall in Media, PA. The purpose of the event is to raise awareness about the harm that gas fracking is causing in our state and to ask people to call Senator Erickson to support SB#1100, the Natural Gas Drilling Moratorium Act. We’ll invite people to engage with us to learn about the issue and we’ll offer printed information. Please join us to learn about fracking and/or support our efforts! Sign up here.
And in case you haven’t heard…
A Duke University study, Impacts of Shale Gas Wastewater Disposal on Water Quality in Western Pennsylvania, is the first to use isotope hydrology to connect the dots between shale gas waste, treatment sites and discharge into drinking water supplies.
Published on October 2, 2013, the study examined the water discharged from Josephine Brine Treatment Facility into Blacklick Creek, which feeds into a water source for western Pennsylvania cities, including Pittsburgh. Scientists took samples upstream and downstream from the treatment facility over a two-year period, with the last sample taken in June this year.
Elevated levels of chloride and bromide, combined with strontium, radium, oxygen, and hydrogen isotopic compositions, are present in the Marcellus shale wastewaters, the study found.
Radioactive brine is naturally occurring in shale rock and contaminates wastewater during gas fracking. Sometimes that “flowback” water is re-injected into rock deep underground, a practice that can cause seismic disturbances, but often it is treated before being discharged into watercourses.
Radium levels in samples collected at the facility were 200 times greater than samples taken upstream. Such elevated levels of radioactivity are above regulated levels and would normally be seen at licensed radioactive disposal facilities, according to the scientists at Duke University. Hundreds of disposal sites for wastewater could be similarly affected, said Professor Avner Vengosh, one of the authors of the study.
Read the entire article.
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