At some point on Sunday, a shale drilling operation a few miles north of here sprung a leak and released an unknown quantity of fracking mud into what a drilling company spokesman calls "an unnamed creek near Beverly, Ohio."
"Unnamed," however, does not mean unknown or unloved. I know that creek! I have canoed on that creek! I intend to canoe on that creek again! It does not need to be polluted by fracking mud! Nevertheless, hundreds of barrels of drilling mud (75 percent synthetic oil, according to the news story here) spilled into a creek that flows through cornfields and cow pastures and into the Muskingum River.
In a textbook example of the use of the passive voice to obscure responsibility, the U.S. EPA reports that during the drilling process, "a pocket of unexpected natural gas was encountered." The drilling company, PDC Energy of Colorado, is also drilling at a site exactly 2.1 miles from my house and leases the gas and oil rights to our property. They can't drill here--our hollow is too narrow, providing no foothold far enough from our creek to establish a drilling operation--but horizontal drilling reaches far beyond the initial site, and spills such as the one reported Sunday pollute streams that connect to our homes and our hearts.
But let's not start the day by thinking about distressing news. Fortunately, today's Columbus Dispatch reports that Ohio has achieved yet another superlative: according to this report, my beloved state leads the nation in "insurance claims from metal thefts." Yes! Ohioans excel at filching metal ornaments from gravesites, breaking into empty houses to rip out copper wires, and stealing crosses from church steeples!
Or maybe Ohio is just better at catching metal thieves. According to the Deputy Director of the Columbus Department of Public Safety, "We are the leader in the state in trying to stop scrap-metal theft." So there you have it: we may not be so good at keeping fracking mud out of unnamed creeks, but by golly we can beat the record for filing insurance claims for metal theft! I'll be holding my head high today.
2 comments:
Oh, that's sad news about your creek. I'm so sorry.
It's not actually our creek but a creek a few miles north of here, but it still hurts.
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