Hydrofracking
Hydraulic fracturing (called "frac jobs" or "frac'ing" in the industry and recently, "fracking" by the media) is a process that results in the creation of fractures in rocks. The most important industrial use is in stimulating oil and gas wells, where hydraulic fracturing has been used for over 60 years in more than one million wells. On the other hand, high-volume horizontal slickwater fracturing is a recent phenomenon. The fracturing is done from a wellbore drilled into reservoir rock formations to enhance oil and natural gas recovery.
Hydraulic fractures may be natural or man-made and are extended by internal fluid pressure which opens the fracture and causes it to grow into the rock. Man-made fluid-driven fractures are formed at depth in a borehole and extend into targeted rock formations. The fracture width is typically maintained after the injection by introducing a proppant into the injected fluid. Proppant is a material, such as grains of sand, ceramic, or other particulates, that prevent the fractures from closing when the injection is stopped. Natural hydraulic fractures include volcanic dikes, sills and fracturing by ice as in frost weathering.
Considerable controversy surrounds the current implementation of hydraulic fracturing technology in the United States. Environmental safety and health concerns have emerged and are being debated at the state and national levels.
~ Wikipedia
Statement on Hydraulic-Fracturing (March 4, 2009)
Hydraulic-Fracturing
The Haudenosaunee consist of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora Nations. The Haudenosaunee Nations and its people have a unique spiritual, cultural, and historic relationship with the land, which is embodied in Gayananshogowa, the Great Law of Peace. This relationship goes far beyond federal and state legal concepts of ownership, possession, or other legal rights. The Haudenosaunee people are one with the land and all that depends on the land, and consider themselves apart of it. It is the duty of the Nations’ leaders to work for a healing of the land, to protect it, and to pass it on to future generations.
Haudenosaunee Statement on Hydrofracking
The Haudenosaunee have a unique spiritual, cultural, and historic relationship with the land, which is embodied in Gayananshogowa, the Great Law of Peace. This relationship goes far beyond federal and state legal concepts of ownership, possession, or other legal rights. The Haudenosaunee are one with the land and all that depends on the land, and consider ourselves part of it. It is the duty of the Nations' leaders to work for a healing of the land, to protect it, and to pass it on to foture generations.
Headaches, Heartache, and Hydrofracking: Haudenosaunee visit Hedgehog Lane in Bradford, PA
In August of 2009, the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force and the Onondaga Nation’s environmental team visited Bradford, PA to talk to neighbors there and witness first-hand the impacts of hydrofracking.
I was getting a headache. We’d only been there for ten minutes, but the periodic strong whiffs of propane gas were already getting to me. “It was worse two days ago,” Yvonne Shafer explained to me, “the whole outside and inside of the house would smell like that, about every half hour. At its worst, I spent two hours in the basement because it was the only place I could breathe.”
