Correspondence from Bill Woollam - Re: Banning 'Fracking' in your municipality

Email Correspondence

From: Bill Woollam
Sent: June-20-14 10:40 PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: with proper links: ban 'Fracking' in your municipality
Attachments: Request for Moratorium on Fracking .pdf; Burnaby Council Adopts Resolution on Fracking.pdf

Mayor, Council, and Administrators:

Is it not vital to look into the future and envision the environmental impact on our land and water systems for our children and fellow citizens? Contained in the attachments is a Burnaby, BC City Council Resolution for a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing. Please have your own city council write up a similar resolution banning fracking in your region.

I am hoping that the short term dollar gain by unconventional natural gas drilling/extraction methods cannot justify the contamination of our limited drinking water sources here in BC.

Cement casing failures in the fracking shafts used in unconventional drilling extraction for natural gas range from one in twenty to as often as three out of four, according to a 2014 study "Oil and gas wells and their integrity: Implications for shale and unconventional resource exploitation", by Richard J. Davies et al. This breakdown of the concrete casing acts as a conduit for toxic chemicals in the fracking fluid (and even radioactive radium) to escape into aquifers, wells, ponds, and rivers as they make their way to the surface due to high underground pressure. Tailing ponds which hold fracking waste-water often leak, or overflow, into surrounding creeks and rivers.

Another process known as coal bed methane extraction is just as questionable. In an area of Wyoming which entails a group of 82 wells, one and half million gallons of water a day are dumped locally (enough to fill a football field ten feet deep in just 57 hours). The surrounding dumping area becomes saturated with salts and sodium brought up from these deep coal bed methane wells. http://www.watershedsentinel.ca/content/coal-bed-methane-new-gas-wells-promise-vancouver-island-blast-past

Even scientists are warning of earthquake risks from fracking operations. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/05/140502-scientists-warn-of-quake-risk-from-fracking-operations/

Or consider what a simple hauling truck spill, http://www.planetexperts.com/fracking-waste-dumped-illegally-karnes-county-texas/ , would do to an entire pond or lake where just one part per million of toxic fracking fluid is enough to contaminate and kill the life in that water system. See: What is in Fracking fluid? http://www.watershedsentinel.ca/content/whats-frack-water

There is growing peer-reviewed scientific evidence of the harmful effects of shale gas development. Meanwhile, 'pro-fracking’ opinions focus on the big bucks and ignore the detrimental effects on our limited, freshwater systems.

For those who would like to understand what 'fracking' is....and why drilling for natural gas contaminates aquifers.... Here is a worthwhile 17 minute documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEB_Wwe-uBM

There is also a growing list of communities, towns, cities, states and countries banning the unsafe process of hydraulic fracking for natural gas. http://keeptapwatersafe.org/global-bans-on-fracking/

Sincerely Bill Woollam