First, the scary video. Have you seen it? Two minutes, warning of explosions in Greenwich Village and a new cancer risk you can’t avoid without moving to a different neighborhood. In New York, this video is going viral.
But there are already natural gas pipelines throughout the City and they don’t generally blow up . . . and new pipelines, I would guess, are less likely to blow up than old ones, though I have no expertise in this area.
The concerns about fracking unquestionably deserve close consideration. This recent article in Popular Mechanics is at least somewhat reassuring: “Is Fracking Safe? The Top 10 Controversial Claims About Natural Gas Drilling.” (Did you know, for example, that the famous water faucet we all saw on TV that caught fire when a match was lit wasn’t related to fracking after all?)
In a perfect world, an article like this would accompany that viral video.
This is not a perfect world.
All comments welcome.
