| RDA strives to educate the public about the many consequences of natural gas operations. The gas industry spends millions of dollars every week in national and local advertising, often inflating the benefits of natural gas, but never mentioning the many negatives of their activities. RDA is constantly researching and reading the latest health, environmental and other studies / articles connecting the gas industry to potential or confirmed negative impacts.
We are providing here information we feel that homeowners / residents should be aware of. We invite you to check out the items on this page, each of which refers to a study or article (and its date). We provide a brief analysis and / or brief quotes from the article or study. Click on the link to connect to the original source. | Analysis: U.S. drilling boom leaves some homeowners in a big hole12/12/2013Real estate brokers say they see more signs of prospective home buyers worrying about the health and environmental effects of living close to a well. "For the most part, it renders those houses unsellable," said Phyllis Wolper, a Denton, Texas, realtor who has several clients who live near oil and gas wells and have been unable to sell their homes.” A University of Denver study found that a majority of 550 people surveyed would decline to buy a home near natural gas drilling. The study, to be published in the Journal of Real Estate Literature, also found up to a 25 percent reduction in bid value for homes located near these "fracking scenarios." The fracking/real estate conundrum |
Drilling DownDocuments: Mortgages and Gas Leases10/2011"Gas/oil leases are generally NOT accepted by lenders such as Wells, First Place Bank, Provident Funding, GMAC, FNCB, Fidelity, FHA, First Liberty, or Bank of America. It would be difficult, if not impossible to meet the ‘acceptable if commonly granted’ rule." The New York Times’s Drilling Down series has assembled an extensive collection of relevant documents on mortgages and gas leases. Sunday Times review of DEP drilling records reveals water damage, murky testing methods5/19/2013Statements from this review: "State environmental regulators determined that oil and gas development damaged the water supplies for at least 161 Pennsylvania homes, farms, churches and businesses between 2008 and the fall of 2012, according to a cache of nearly 1,000 letters and enforcement orders written by Department of Environmental Protection officials and obtained by The Sunday Times." "The letters confirming contamination or water loss from drilling and the orders that require companies to fix the damage provide what is likely the best official count of the industry's impact on individual water supplies in Pennsylvania because the state does not track the disruptions." This amount of damage to water supplies should definitely be a concern to people living near gas operations. Fracking by the Numbers - Key Impacts of Dirty Drilling at the State and National Level10/2013The below reference is a very large comprehensive overview of the natural gas industry and the hazards it can present, from air and water pollution to land and forest destruction. Some of the data presented comes from state and federal agencies. There are also many studies of health and environmental impacts by very credible researchers included in this report, some of which may have been refuted by the gas industry. However, the amount of evidence in these studies is overwhelming and points to a need for both more oversight of the industry and additional studies. Quotes from this reference: "People who live close to fracking sites are exposed to a variety of air pollutants including volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, xylene and toluene." "These chemicals can cause a wide range of health problems..." "Even the limited data that are currently available, however, paint an increasingly clear picture of the damage that fracking has done to our environment and health." |