Letter
Hydrofracking will have ‘devastating’ effects
By Susan L. Sprecher
Recent comments from gas industry spokesman John Holko and his lawyer sound like they are trying to blackmail Livingston County into accepting horizontal hydraulic fracturing extraction methods.
Holko threatens to close down vertical wells operating here since, he says, they function no differently from proposed hydrofracking wells. Untrue, John, untrue.
You might as well compare the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to the buzz bombs that hit London.
Hydrofracking will devastate this county. It’s not just that the tourists aren’t going to want to spend time here after fracking gets going; we aren’t going to want to live here ourselves.
Will our kids bring the grandchildren to visit when there are industrial gas flares burning off hydrocarbons every mile in all directions across the valley?
When waste-filled semi-trailers grind through town every minute not just of the day but all through the night? Where will you take the grandkids swimming when the lakes and farm ponds have contaminated slick water seeping into them?
How will the kids get a drink of clean water when you have to pump it out of a plastic water buffalo parked in the backyard?
We do not have to bow down before the extractive gas industry or hustle to their tune. That gas is not going anywhere while we wait for safer, less disruptive drilling methods.
Why not leave it in the ground until we can use it ourselves, instead of shipping it off to the Orient?
