There's an ocean beneath our feet, unseen yet no less real. It seethes in scolding temperatures under a crushing mile of rock and soil. We'll christen it the Offal Ocean because it is a body of water thick with industrial discharge.

Scientific American reports that the volume of this ocean is 30 trillion gallons. But unlike the surface oceans, this subterranean sea is highly fragmented, and its volume and expanse increase daily.

In actuality, the Offal Ocean is the totality of all the industrial sludge buried beneath every one of the more than 680,000 injection and frack wells.

An injection well is the quick fix for industries to dispose of their watery waste. It is simply injected deep underground.

Bluntly, the pharmaceutical, agricultural, chemical, and scores of other factories are using injection wells as toilets. They simply flushed away their liquid waste.

Recently, high-volume, slick-water, horizontal fracturing started to add to this toxic load.

Though injection wells and frack wells have different definitions, it is a distinction without difference. Both wells function the same; they pump chemically charged liquid deep below ground under brutally high pressure. In essence, frack wells are injection wells.

An EPA risk analysis concluded that upward migration of waste water through thousands of feet of overburden to contaminate freshwater aquifers was highly unlikely if not impossible.

Then the impossible happened.

Between 2008 and 2011 state regulators reported 150 instances in which refuse from injection wells reached freshwater aquifers.

Clearly more regulations were necessary. But regulations are based on the opinions of experts and opinions are not hard scientific evidence.

“There is no certainty at all in any of this [fracking], and whoever tells you the opposite is not telling you the truth,” said Stefan Finsterle, a leading hydrologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

He specializes in understanding the properties of rock layers and modeling, predicting how fluid flows through them.

Finsterle explained that rock strata are not the neatly stacked layers as pictured in diagrams. They are bent, wavy, sometimes even folded over each other. He continued: “When you introduce additional liquids under high pressure you change the equilibrium and dynamics of the system. No one really knows what's happening down there.”

Neither is the effluvia trapped under impermeable shale. True, shale is impermeable but the strata are not. They are riddled with clefts and cracks. When industrial waste or frack fluid is forced-pumped into one of these layers, fissures can be lengthened by half a mile or more, perhaps connecting with other fissures. For example . . .

A recent study that used computer modeling showed that when man-made fractures intersect with natural faults in the Marcellus layer, the “contaminants could reach the surface in tens of years or less.”

But if injection wells and frack wells are so potentially harmful, why aren't we hearing more about contaminated water wells and people and livestock sickened? It's because money talks and never so persuasively as when there is lots of it.

Take the somewhat typical case of Chris and Stephanie Hallowich of Washington County. They claimed that NG drilling had polluted their drinking water and effected their health as well as that of their two children. They had two choices: go to court and battle the drillers for years or settle out of court. They chose the latter and were paid $750,000 in exchange for their silence.

But then the Hallowich case took an unexpected turn. Two newspapers challenged the confidentiality agreement in court. Arrayed against the newspapers were five NG companies and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection---that's right, the DEP. Astonishingly, the newspapers won. Last March the gag order was lifted and the court records unsealed.

The ruling was rued by the drillers but cheered by those who wanted to expose the water well contamination caused by NG drilling, which according to Pennsylvania's DEP is 274 water wells in just four of the state's 40 counties where there is NG drilling. (How many more ruined residential wells are under the tip of this iceberg?)

The implications of this precedent-setting decision and the future effects of the ever-growing sea of industrial sewage underfoot have yet to be fully realized. When they are, will it be too late?

Sincerely,

Bob Scroggins

New Milford, PA