Forum Post: Fracking Florida and Other Gas Fed Nightmares

"Disney. The Everglades. Migrating Birds. Tourists.

Fracking?

Fracked wells and impoundments were once a far-fetched possibility in Florida, but soon they could be hitting close to home.

As industry interest in bringing fracking to the Sunshine State intensifies, environmental groups worry about risks ranging from contaminated groundwater, disruption to some of the county's most bio-diverse ecosystems and aquifers sucked dry.

"The camel's nose is in the tent," said Mary Jean Yon, legislative director at Audubon Florida, which has started a petition opposed to hydraulic fracturing (otherwise known as fracking) in Florida. "We know there is an interest."

A state House panel earlier this month OK'd two bills that would require the industry to report chemicals used in fracking. In a partisan 8-4 vote, the two measures passed through the majority Republican House Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee, as state legislators grapple with the potential of Florida becoming the Fracking Frontier."

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21642-fracking-florida-could-florida-become-the-new-fracking-frontier

"or the past several years, I’ve been writing about what happens when big oil and gas corporations drill where people live. “Fracking” – high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which extracts oil and methane from deep shale – has become my beat.

My interviewees live in Pennsylvania’s shale-gas fields; among Wisconsin’s hills, where corporations have been mining silica, an essential fracking ingredient; and in New York, where one of the most powerful grassroots movements in the state’s long history of dissent has become ground zero for anti-fracking activism across the country.

Some of the people I’ve met have become friends. We email, talk by phone, and visit. But until recently I’d always felt at a remove from the dangers they face: contaminated water wells, poisoned air, sick and dying animals, industry-related illnesses. Under Massachusetts, where I live, lie no methane- or oil-rich shale deposits, so there’s no drilling.

But this past September, I learned that Spectra Energy, one of the largest natural gas infrastructure companies in North America, had proposed changes in a pipeline it owns, the Algonquin, which runs from Texas into my hometown, Boston.

The expanded Algonquin would carry unconventional gas – gas extracted from deep rock formations like shale – into Massachusetts from the great Marcellus formation that sprawls along the Appalachian basin from West Virginia to New York. Suddenly, I’m in the crosshairs of the fracking industry, too.

We all are."

• See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/fracking-about-arrive-your-doorstep#sthash.Y1V5eoxP.dpuf