We’ve known for some time that fracking wells in communities pose profound health risks for residents and workers, but recently we learned that fracking companies had been dumping toxic drilling waste underground in Texas and other states that can create dangerous “forever chemicals,” all with EPA approval.
These “forever chemicals,” known as “PFAS,” can lead to low infant birth weights, effects on the immune system, cancer, and hormone disruption. While over 1,000 wells in the U.S. used these chemicals, those only represent the ones we know about. There could be many more fracking sites in Texas that pumped dangerous chemicals into the ground.
To learn more, see Rolling Stones’ article on the use of “forever chemicals” in fracking. The New York Times also ran an article on it.
You can also see where fracking wells that are known to have used the chemicals are located at Fractracker. We still don’t know the full extent of the problem, and we expect we’ll learn that many more wells were using similar compounds. If you would like to learn more about “forever chemicals”, watch this panel discussion for a breakdown of its harms.
If the report on chemicals from fracking waste wasn’t bad enough, a new report from the Center for Biological Diversity shows that fracking companies dumped over 60 million tons of wastewater into the Gulf since 2010. This is an area where there is already a high concentration of oil and gas facilities that generate large amounts of pollution.
Every month we’re learning more about the dangerous health impacts of fracking pollution and why we need to keep it out of our communities and away from our homes and schools.
These reports show not only the profound risk of allowing fracking near our homes and schools but also the dangers of state and federal agencies putting corporate interests over public health by failing to protect us from or evening hiding those risks. With Texas’ Railroad Commissions approving more and more drilling permits, we need to be even more vigilant.
