Viewing toxic contamination from the lens of trauma offers a deeper understanding of its impacts to human and community well-being. Yet at its core, although less discussed, toxic contamination can be a source of trauma, and the manifestations of trauma interact with each of these processes that have been the focus of studies of toxic contamination. Victims experienced complete upheaval in their beliefs, and for many their experiences with contamination and fears of future exposure have come to dominate their lives.Įnvironmental sociologists have provided compelling evidence that toxic contamination can be distributed inequitably, is a violation of democratic principles, a source of community conflict and collective mobilization. Residents describe acute impacts to their health, land, livestock and loved ones, but these traumas were then exacerbated by the failure of authorities to respond in a manner expected, and the corrosion of communities. The current study explores the toxic contamination experienced by local residents due to nearby hydraulic fracturing activities in rural communities in southern Alberta, a conservative, upper middle class agrarian region with strong links with the oil and gas industry. While environmental sociologists tend not to analyze toxic contamination from the lens of trauma, doing so may shed important insights into such events and their human and social consequences. Toxic contamination events nonetheless often have a number of characteristics in common that render such events unique forms of trauma, including the invisibility and ambiguity of threats, an association between the threat and sources of livelihood and identity and the absence of resources necessary for resolution and recovery. Technically that's an EPA violation, but with something like 6 regulators covering all of America's oil fields good luck catching them.Trauma, the experience of sudden, dangerous, overwhelming events that render victims powerless, is an apt description of many experiences with toxic contamination. But when the crew rigs down, the extremely concentrated chemicals in their hoses are regularly dumped out on the ground. When shit's pumped down there, the only way back up is through the pipe of an oil well. What they DON'T want you to talk about is SURFACE contamination.įrom the ground down is pretty secure. If it did, it should be headline news because it's a smoking gun. AFAIK, That dye hasn't come back up since. Plus, from time to time we even had guys injecting nuclear tracking dye into what we were pumping down so it could be proven that the water was coming up through the water table. Even under the most freakishly extreme condition you couldn't get above 6000ft below. We knew how big cracks we were making were, and could calculate the tallest they could possibly be. The bosses I worked with loved it when environmentalists complained about the chemicals coming up from the well because it was super easy to disprove. Water tables stop well short of 1000ft below. The oil wells I was on were drilling horizontally (and sucking oil from) around 10,000 feet below. At a $25mil++ investment, there's alot of very rich eyes with very explicit contractual wording making sure they aren't losing an ounce of profit due to shoddy construction.
Plus, the "straw" sucking the oil out of the ground wouldn't operate as well, which means lower profits.
Otherwise the fracking process would blow out the entire well pretty dramatically. Namely, issues with nasty chemicals isn't from the bottom up.Īll the below-ground well stuff is pressure-tested and rated to hold way more than what normal operations will ever see. I was a fracking field engineer for a bit.
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