Residents Blockade Injection Well One Week After 1,000 Gallon Fracking Waste Spill

16.7.12

[For updates check ohiofracktion.com]

16.7.12

[For updates check ohiofracktion.com]

Con­cerned res­i­dents blocked access to an injec­tion well in Trum­bull Coun­ty this morn­ing, protest­ing the fail­ure of Ohio reg­u­la­tors to ade­quate­ly test and mon­i­tor dump­ing of tox­ic frack­ing waste. At least one pro­tes­tor has been arrest­ed and at least two oth­ers have been detained.

Trum­bull Coun­ty res­i­dents, along with support­ers from Frack Free Mahon­ing and Ohio Frack­tion, are gath­er­ing at the well site on Sodom Hutch­ings Road in Vien­na Town­ship, to express con­cerns about the con­tents of the 1,000 gal­lons of frack­ing waste­water that spilled along five miles of road in Fowler Town­ship, a near­by res­i­den­tial area on July 7.They are demand­ing that Ohio’s Divi­sion of Nat­ur­al Resources (ODNR) begin sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly test­ing out-of-state frack waste that is inject­ed into over 170 wells through­out Ohio. One sup­port­er has locked him­self to the gate to pre­vent all trucks car­ry­ing frack­ing waste from enter­ing the site.

Accord­ing to spokesper­son Mike Set­tles, emer­gency respon­ders from Ohio’s Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA) con­duct­ed only a sim­ple pH test of the spilled frack waste lin­ing the roads of Fowler Town­ship. As far as fur­ther test­ing for radi­a­tion, heavy met­als, and oth­er chem­i­cals, Set­tles explained that EPA doesn’t “have the resources” to per­form test­ing unless there is a “legit­i­mate con­cern” of envi­ron­men­tal dam­age. Thick, rust col­ored residue was still vis­i­ble on the road over a week after the spill.

Lib­er­al Town­ship Trustee Jodi Stoy­ak expressed her frus­tra­tion with EPA’s response in a July 12 let­ter to Mr. Set­tles, not­ing “many of the chem­i­cals used in [frack­ing] and con­tained in the waste are offi­cial­ly clas­si­fied indi­vid­u­al­ly as haz­ardous…. This, in my opin­ion, is a huge envi­ron­men­tal con­cern.”

ODNR offi­cials have ignored numer­ous writ­ten and oral requests from Ohio res­i­dents to order test­ing of the count­less gal­lons of out-of-state frack waste inject­ed under­ground into Ohio each year. In response to a recent pub­lic records request ask­ing ODNR to release all test­ing rel­e­vant to frack­ing waste, ODNR Geol­o­gist Tom Tomas­tik pro­vid­ed no results tak­en after 1989.