Fracking Fallout in Ohio: ‘Throwing Up Until the Blood Vessels in My Eyes Burst’, Academy Award winning actress Melissa Leo brings life to the words of a fracking victim in the American Rust Belt

Fracking Fallout in Ohio: ‘Throwing Up Until the Blood Vessels in My Eyes Burst’, Academy Award winning actress Melissa Leo brings life to the words of a fracking victim in the American Rust Belt by Jon Bowermaster, August 17, 2012, Take Part
When Jamie Frederick bought her home outside Youngstown, Ohio, a little more than three years ago, she was unaware that her neighbor had already leased his land to a natural gas company. Neither did she know that the gas company had already fracked the shale beneath her home. I lay on the bathroom floor, night after night, thinking I would surely be dead soon. Throwing up until the blood vessels in my eyes and cheecks would burst. At that time, I did not know what fracking was, or that I was deliberately being poisoned. But I do now. When she first started to get sick—blinding headaches, nausea, mystery illnesses that ultimately took her gall bladder—she had no idea the two were related. But they were. While the human health impacts of fracking are still being documented, the natural gas industry shrugs off any such claims of a connection, contending there is no proof. Medical studies are underway to prove the linkage, but that will take years. In the meantime, it is not a stretch to imagine that pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals into the earth and groundwater will inevitably, and adversely, impact both land and man.

“Tests of our water revealed high levels of contaminants that are a result of the hydraulic fracturing and drilling process, such as high levels of barium, strontium, toluene and several others that I will not try to pronounce. My medical mystery was now solved. This was why I had been so sick for so long. At the time when I was most sick, I was drinking over 2 gallons of this water unfiltered each day. … Living through the drilling and fracking phase was a truly terrifying experience. We were given no notice whatsoever as to what was about to happen to us, and had nowhere to evacuate to with our three dogs and cats. We felt like we were trapped in someone’s idea of a sick joke. 24-7, nonstop. It would have been more peaceful to live on an airport runway.

“The gas storage tanks, and radioactive toxic waste tanks… I refuse to call it brine, I’m sorry, because that was just a lie, that is not what it is, it’s toxic waste … these tanks have been placed closer to my home than the well itself. They are right outside my bedroom window and just uphill from a fresh artesian spring on my property. The overflow hose that comes out of the radioactive toxic waste tank goes directly onto the ground and this is permitted because they get to lie and call it brine. … They are also permitted to bury toxic wastewater pit on my neighbor’s property, just uphill from our home.
 … They told him it would be no bigger operation than drilling a water well, and that the only thing left behind would be the size of a garbage can and surrounded by trees that they would plant. All lies. They also buried the radioactive toxic waste pit in the exact location where he told them he planned to build a home to retire in. He says that if he knew then what he knows now, he never would have signed and that he is very sorry. They have already destroyed the land that has been in his family for generations, dating back to the early 1800’s, and they are just getting started….”

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