http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/03/does-fracking-cause-earthquakes-wastewater-dewatering
Turns out that when a barely regulated industry injects highly pressurized wastewater into faults, things can go terribly wrong.
republicans want to lead you into potential death traps for a dollar bill, Pres. wants to make sure you don't die before going after the thing that has made the right wing rich and is killing us with bad air, water and grounds. there is a difference in republican and progressive only one gives a damn.
Update (7/11/2013): A new study in the journal Science found that earthquakes thousands of miles away can cause increased seismic activity in areas with underground injection wells. The injections increase pressure on faults, which can trigger tremors in Prague and other Midwestern areas where there's been an increase in fracking activity.
AT EXACTLY 10:53 P.M. on Saturday, November 5, 2011, Joe and Mary Reneau were in the bedroom of their whitewashed and brick-trimmed home, a two-story rambler Mary's dad custom-built 43 years ago. Their property encompasses 440 acres of rolling grasslands in Prague, Oklahoma (population 2,400), located 50 miles east of Oklahoma City. When I arrive at their ranch almost a year later on a bright fall morning, Joe is wearing a short-sleeve shirt and jeans held up by navy blue suspenders, and is wedged into a metal chair on his front stoop sipping black coffee from a heavy mug.
His German shepherd, Shotzie, is curled at his feet. Joe greets me with a crushing handshake—he is 200 pounds, silver-haired and 6 feet tall, with thick forearms and meaty hands—and invites me inside. He served in Vietnam, did two tours totaling nine years with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then, in 1984, retired a lieutenant colonel from the US Army to sell real estate and raise cattle. Today, the livestock are gone and Joe calls himself "semiretired" because "we still cut hay in the summers."
On that night in November, just as he and Mary were about to slip into bed, there was "a horrendous bang, like an airliner crashing in our backyard," Joe recalls. Next came 60 seconds of seismic terror. "The dust was flying and we were hanging onto the bed watching the walls go back and forth." Joe demonstrates by hunching over and gripping the mattress in their bedroom.
He points to the bathroom. "The mirror in the vanity exploded as if somebody blew it out with a shotgun." When the shaking stopped, Joe surveyed the damage. "Every corner of the house was fractured," he says. The foundation had sunk two inches. But most frightening was what Joe discovered in the living room: "Our 28-foot-tall freestanding chimney had come through the roof." It had showered jagged debris onto a brown leather sofa positioned in front of their flat-screen TV. Joe shows me the spot. "It's Mary's favorite perch. Had she been here…" He chokes up.
hello America this is big business pushed by the republican party's rush to gush little if any research, just the classic right wing leap then ah crap.
Pres. is beat up by them who would destroy your life so they can further destroy it with prices and other uncertainty after it's been removed what then 10 years later?
The quake baffled seismologists. The only possible culprit was the Wilzetta Fault, a 320-million-year-old rift lurking between Prague and nearby Meeker. "But the Wilzetta was a dead fault that nobody ever worried about," says Katie Keranen, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Oklahoma.We're driving in her red SUV, just south of the Reneaus' property, when she stops to point out where the quake tore open a footwide fissure across State Highway 62. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) maintains a database of seismically risky areas. Its assessment of the Wilzetta Fault, Keranen notes, was "zero probability of expected ground motion. This fault is like an extinct volcano. It should never have been active."When the Wilzetta mysteriously and violently awakened, Keranen wanted to know why. So she partnered with scientists from the USGS and Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The morning after the initial foreshock, Keranen's team scrambled to install three seismometers around Prague.They did so in time to capture the quake system in unprecedented detail. She says, "We got this beautiful image of the fault plane." Within a week, her team and other scientists had placed a total of 25 devices around the fault zone. One is buried in the Reneaus' backyard.Now, having completed a yearlong study (just published in the journal Geology), Keranen's research indicates the Oklahoma earthquakes were likely attributable to underground injection of wastewater derived from "dewatering," separating crude oil from the soupy brine reaped through a drilling technique that allows previously inaccessible oil to be pumped up. "Pretty much everybody who looks at our data accepts that these events were likely caused by injection," Keranen concludes.
these are the studies the Pres. wants done before unleashing horror on you, the republicans want to do it and if you are still living after their fracking blows you all to hell they'll settle they have big bucks and like the gulf they are your friends and will help you get back on your feet provided you have any left.
it's deceptive business promoted by the right wing it is why they are fighting so hard and try to demonize the word "regulations" because it prevents them fom making more money by endangering you and yours. 2014 is the time to restate your claim to your land and ytour life void of deceptive technology that is half cocked. btw this same seed verbatim would apply to Keystone except it if completed would create the potential danger that could cut the country in half, right down the middle, and you would never see a drop.
