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Clean water is our drinking water
Central and Western New York, the Southern Tier, and Catskills are home to small towns, family farms, and scenic rivers and streams, as well as extensive aquifers and reservoirs that provide drinking water for New Yorkers statewide.
Canoeing on the Delaware River.
Photo: Tracy Carluccio |
Amidst this natural beauty lie trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, trapped deep underground within the rock of the Marcellus and Utica shale formations.
Dangerous, dirty drilling threatens our water
Drilling companies propose to use a dangerous technique, called horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", to extract the natural gas. In other parts of the country, including neighboring Pennsylvania, fracking operations have polluted drinking water, worsened air quality, harmed human health, and ruined landscapes.
We can't let this happen in New York.
Simply put, fracking is a high-polluting way to produce a cleaner-burning fuel. Such drilling requires a lot of industrial activity and at least 2-4 million gallons of water per "frack" event to release the natural gas.
Diminished, dirty water threatens our communities and our economy
This can diminish and degrade water supplies needed for households, agriculture, tourism, and other uses. And the resulting millions of gallons of wastewater and waste products that result from fracking are laced with toxic chemicals that New York State is currently not able to recycle or to treat for safe disposal.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Dirty Drilling
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