You can't live and work near the confluence of two major rivers without becoming deeply interested in water. Our waterways bring daily pleasure, whether we're driving to work beside the Muskingum, riding a historic paddlewheeler on the Ohio, or watching great blue herons fish in our creek. We faced our first flood a week after we moved to the area and many more since then, so we spend a lot of time thinking about where our water comes from and where it's going.
Our well at home is fairly shallow and far from the reach of the fracking brine injected into wells far beneath Marietta, but I work in Marietta and eat at local restaurants, so when our little town's water system gets into the New York Times, I pay attention (click here for gift article). That's my colleague Dr. Dave Jeffery sharing his considerable geological expertise on the topic of local geological formations that enable fracking waste brine to bubble up into gas and oil wells; he reminds us that no one seems to be doing the necessary tests to see how far the fracking wastewater has already migrated and how it may affect local drinking water.
Nobody is surprised to learn that once again Appalachia has been treated like a landfill. The 2019 film Dark Waters detailed the legal fight to force DuPont to take responsibility for polluting area drinking water with C8 just downstream from Marietta. Extractive industries left their mark on this part of Ohio for years, leaving behind strip-mined land and derelict gas and oils wells--including an orphaned well that injured six people when it exploded in the Wayne National Forest last fall (link here, though it may be behind a paywall). Chunks of coal from abandoned mines wash up in our creek regularly, reminding us that generations of individuals and companies that have profit from local resources while leaving behind a mess. And now a company wants to build a huge data center just a few miles up the Muskingum from us, drawing on the river's water for its cooling system.
I'm not an expert and I don't know the best way to address these issues while allowing necessary development, but let's give the scientists time to do their jobs, testing waters and examining environmental impacts before it's too late. We love our waterways and we need clean drinking water so we probably ought to sit down and take a breath instead of blindly opening the floodgates to more pollution.
That's too serious a topic for doggerel, so maybe it's time to sing the blues:
Well Pennsylvania sent its fracking waste to the Appalachian part of Ohio;
Yes the Keystone State sent fracking waste to darkest Appalachian Ohio;
They didn't want that gunk in their own state,
So where's they expect that nasty brine to go?
Well the fracking brine is seeping into cracks and gaps and bubbling into wells;
I said the fracking brine is seeping underground and bubbling upward into wells;
Will it pollute the local drinking water?
Only time (and serious testing) gonna tell.
Anyone want to take a stab at some blues? I'm too sad to add more verses.
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