This July, an emergency room nurse named Cathy Behr wanted to tell Colorado's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission the story of how she nearly died after being exposed to a mystery chemical from a gas-patch accident.
Regulators said she wasn't scheduled to testify and they didn't want to hear it. But anyone concerned about natural gas development should listen.
Behr, who works in southern Colorado, at Durango's Mercy Regional Medical Center, fell ill last April after being exposed for 10 minutes to a gas-field worker who had come into the ER, his clothes damp and reeking. He'd come into contact with one of the "secret formulas" drillers use to hydraulically fracture oil- and gas-bearing formations.
Within minutes of inhaling the nauseating fumes coming off the worker, Behr lost her sense of smell. (She later told her story to the Durango Herald, a daily paper that has done excellent reporting on the incident: durangoherald.com.) The ER was locked down and the room ventilated by firefighters. But when Behr went home after her 12-hour shift, she still couldn't smell anything. Then the headache she'd developed got worse. A week later, her liver, heart and lungs began to shut down. She spent 30 hours in intensive care.
The Huff Post story is well above 550 comments at last check, but this story from the High Country News' Erin Frankowski is compelling and thought provoking about the dangers of even passive exposure from fracking.
Nothing about this process is safe, in fact it's all fracked up anyway you look at it.
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Too much secrecy in the whole process to suit me!
ReplyDeleteI can just hear Palin's next cutesy phrase: "Frack Baby Frack!"
ReplyDeleteattention when you drive around your communities and see a rally ugly blue and green car emblazoned with the words "cleanest car on the road."
ReplyDeleteThat's the gas industries latest attempt to convince us all about the wonders of fracking.
It's disgusting.