Read Online The Real Cost of Fracking by Michelle Bamberger, Robert Oswald - Free Book Online

months while they searched nearby for a home that would be big enough to accommodate all their animals. But most importantly, Sarah said at this time, “I just want a place to live and my kids to be healthy.”
    In June 2012, Sarah’s family finally found a house to rent. She and the children began to recover their health here, and their animals’ health improved, too; the cats lived with the family, but all the remaining animals—a horse, a donkey, a dog, and rabbits—lived with friends and relatives. Sarah’s family felt settled for the first time in many months, but in May 2013 was forced to move again to another rental property.
    As compressor stations and well pads continue to blot the landscape, Sarah realizes that any move is a gamble. At the end of a recent tour of her neighborhood, she pointed to a hill—fifty acres—owned by a friend who was approached by a company to lease the land for a compressor station. He knew everything that David had gone through, and Sarah warned her friend that it wasn’t worth it: “If you want to ruin your family, your kids’ and all your neighbors’ lives, then go right ahead.”
    According to Sarah, the compressor station was never built, because people living beside the fifty acres refused to allow pipelines to cross their property. “They were worried about health problems,” Sarah said. “They knew everything we went through.”
    In August 2013, Sarah decided to buy the second rental home, even though it wasn’t large enough for all the animals and she hadn’t sold her first home yet. The family was tired of moving, she told me, and I could hear the weariness in her voice, born of fighting for her family’s health and her home for too many years.
    Once more, I dare to hope that things will begin to turn around for this family. But Sarah’s faith in her ability to survive this ordeal was tested again soon after she purchased the new home. During a routine check of her family’s first home, she found that the doors had been ripped off, the wood burner and air conditioner stolen, copper piping and sinks ripped out of the walls. Police and insurance investigators’ questions kept her too long at this house—where she seems to become ill more quickly with each visit—and after more than three hours, she was sicker than she has been in a long time, with stomachache, headache, a metallic taste in her mouth, and burning in her nose and throat. These things will clear up soon if she stays away, she told me, but the rash on her face has returned with a vengeance, and this will take a long time to resolve.
    More than four years have passed since Sarah and Josie’s neighborhood was invaded. Both women dream of selling their properties, but who will buy homes with tainted water and air and located in a neighborhood surrounded by well pads, compressor stations, and impoundments? Who will buy a home that has been vandalized because it has been sitting too long and subsequently lost its homeowners’ insurance (as Sarah’s did)? As more wells are drilled, more neighbors are experiencing the impacts that Sarah and Josie have described: the noise, the smell, the changes in the water, the health problems. And during that time, other neighborhoods have been invaded. More water buffaloes have appeared outside homes. More people spend as much time as possible away from their neighborhoods, and when home, stay inside with the windows shut. More community meetings are being held, more people shout and sob, and more representatives from the drilling company sit at the front of the room, wring their hands, look away, and deny responsibility for any problems.
    Many proponents of gas drilling consider families such as these sacrificial lambs. They have lost their way of life so that the rest of us can continue to enjoy ours. We can purchase our 100,000-BTU barbeque grills and heat our poorly insulated homes to seventy-five degrees in the dead of winter. They are told that they are being