We told you so. But now a Harvard study also says it: the FracFocus registry designed and operated by the drilling industry (and its close friends) fails to meet the public's right to accountability and complete disclosure of chemicals pumped into underground formations that may impact people's drinking-water wells.
News stories about the April 17, 2013, explosion of a fertilizer storage plant in the town of West, Texas that killed 15 people have so far focused on the plant operator's risk-disclosure failure, instead of the likely fact that government agencies knew the nature and magnitude of the hazard — or should have known. The bigger story is the regulatory failure — and industry's decades-long campaign to keep the public ignorant of the threats they face. Photo: AP/LM Otero/Available through Creative Commons.
"PYRAMID LAKE, Nev. -- For most fishermen a 20-pound trout is a trophy, but for Paiute tribe members and fish biologists here the one Matt Ceccarelli caught was a victory."
"When Texas promised to protect a threatened lizard in the oil-rich Permian Basin, state officials entrusted the day-to-day oversight to a nonprofit that sounds like an environmental group: the Texas Habitat Conservation Foundation."
"KALAMAZOO, MI -- Members of the Kalamazoo community gathered at a public forum Monday to learn more about the Allied Paper landfill site and to voice concerns with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to consolidate and cap the site in Kalamazoo's Edison neighborhood."
"U.S. officials and experts have expressed strong reservations about the plan to operate a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Aomori to recover fissionable plutonium while most of the nation's reactors remain shuttered, a Japan Atomic Energy Commission member said."
"It's the first environmental health screening tool of its kind in the country. California's Environmental Protection Agency is rolling out 'Cal Enviroscreen' which helps pinpoint communities that may be particularly vulnerable to pollution."
"A federal appeals court ruled today that U.S. EPA's 2011 retroactive veto of a major West Virginia mountaintop-removal mining project was legal."
"BP's largest new oil project in the Gulf, called Mad Dog Phase 2, sits atop a 4 billion barrel oil field. BP blames 'market conditions and industry inflation' for delay."
