How Fracking Is a Danger to Your Health

Amid controversy, New York will embark on a health impacts study, but residents living in the gaslands are already speaking out about their experiences.

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As a nurse I am trusted to be a health advocate, to be a confidante and advisor on healthcare decisions. If I worked in PA, if a patient had a drilling exposure, I could not find out the chemicals used without signing a nondisclosure agreement. To which I would be bound not to tell the patient nor my fellow doctors and nurses. I could not work under those bounds.

I know folks are suffering; I have talked to people from WV, PA, CO, NM, OH and WY who have suffered illness and whose animals have died. Their stories are systematically buried when they ought to be compiled. The governmental agencies, i.e., the DEP in PA and the DEC here [in New York], are underfunded and overworked. Time and again I have heard there is no place to go, to report, to test, to get advice, to get treatment and remediation and to get help.

The agencies issuing the permits are the ones enforcing the rules and promoting the resource is their task.

What we have is an extremely powerful industry that pierces and poisons our landscape, is given a pass on regulatory laws for massive volumes of hazardous waste and they are allowed to bury their stories of harm as it goes.

As a mother and a nurse and a lifelong resident of the Finger Lakes, I object.

I support no more subsidies for oil and gas. I support right now no more shale gas dollars allowed. I support wind, water, solar, biogas and other alternatives big but preferably small, moving forward. I support a healthy earth, and a thriving and sustainable economy that is frack free.

Sabrina Artel is the creator and host of Trailer Talk, a weekly radio show. To find out more about Trailer Talk's Frack Talk Marcellus Shale Water Project visit Trailer Talk.