Jobs make it OK to let frac’ers poison communities suggests Dawson Creek Councillor Mr. Jerimy Earl. FFS what a ghoul. Want frac’ing stopped? Stop making babies! Every new baby demands more frac’ing and harms to the already sacrificed. Frac’ing must be banned to protect water supplies and stop killing people, fish and wildlife. “Natural Gas” needs to be renamed “Poisonous Gas.”
“In the summer of 2023, 25 lung biopsies were performed in Dawson Creek, 23 of them came back positive for cancer.”
“Councillor Jerimy Earl said the topic needs considerate discussion, as many residents in Dawson Creek make their living through employment in the oil and gas sector.”
Jobs make it acceptable to poison and sicken people! FFS! What inhumane bullshit is this!?
Frac’ing must be criminalized! Cleaning up will provide plenty of jobs. Doctors and scientists have been raising alarms about health impacts from oil and gas industry contamination of air, land, water, homes etc, for decades. Always to be ignored or their concerns belittled like this to protect jobs where the workers too are poisoned. And sloughed off with the same old useless hopes, “shoulds” and promises.
And when air or noise pollution is being monitored (which is rare because it costs money and the oil and gas industry rich and their enablers like Mr. Earl hate companies having to spend money on health and safety for community), companies make sure the worst polluting facilities are turned off, or upwind.
And if blood tests are needed in Alberta, docs must go on bended knee begging the local politician for permission.
Never mind the permanent loss of water, cumulative harms to the subsurface and groundwater, and increasing violations of our charter rights to protect frac’ers and their enablers:
Researchers met with City of Dawson Creek council on Feb. 9 to discuss the potential harms and health outcomes of oil and gas activity in northeast B.C.
Dr. Ulrike Meyer, a Dawson Creek family physician of more than 30 years, said she’s seen the prevalence of rare cancers at an alarming frequency, and claims exposure to contaminants from nearby fracking is to blame.
“It’s our mandate as health providers to promote and to protect the public health and well-being. This also means to speak up and to inform,” she said.
“A number of my physician colleagues left our community citing concerns about the health impacts of living so close to fracking as one reason for the departure.”
In the summer of 2023, 25 lung biopsies were performed in Dawson Creek, 23 of them came back positive for cancer. Ten people were also diagnosed with idiopathic interstitial fibrosis from 2016 to 2018, a scarring of the lungs with no known cause.
The incidence of that type of lung scarring is nine per 100,000, said Meyers, who was startled by seeing ten cases in a population of just over 12,000 in just two years.
Fracking began in the Peace region in the early 2000s, said Meyer, who estimates 30,000 wells are located there.
Meyer was accompanied by Dr. Élyse Caron-Beaudoin, a PhD researcher with the University of Toronto’s health department and Dr. Margaret McGregor, a family physician with the University of B.C. department of family practice.
Caron-Beaudoin saidfracking chemicals can contaminate water and air, causing damage to human cells at the chromosomal level. “This damage at the cellular level is widely accepted as the underlying causal pathway for human diseases, including cancer, respiratory and cardiac issues, and harmful birth outcomes,” she explained.
For the past ten years, Caron-Beaudoin has been working to track the health impacts from exposure to oil and gas industry chemicals.
In 2016 and 2019, hair, nails and urine samples were collected from two groups of pregnant women in northeast B.C., in addition to collecting tap water and air samples from their homes.
Caron-Beaudoin said chemical levels were much higher in the two groups when compared to the general Canadian population.
McGregor said they identified 52 studies on populations living near fracked gas from 2000 to 2022, finding that a large majority of the studies reported greater risks for impaired fetal growth, premature birth, congenital malformations, childhood cancer and heart disease.
Councillor Jerimy Earl said the topic needs considerate discussion, as many residents in Dawson Creek make their living through employment in the oil and gas sector.
“Our first priority is always the health and safety of the public,” he said.
Liar! In my view, you, like nearly all the rest of our politicians, Mark Carney included, don’t give a shit about community and health and safety of the public other than to protect your beloved polluters. If you did, you would not allow frac’ing in your jurisdiction.
“We also have to be mindful that this is how a lot of people pay their mortgages and feed their kids.”
How fucking cruel of Mr. Earl! Imagine living frac’d in this community to now see many with lung cancer, with this asshat dismissing the many horrid health harms to pimp fucking shitty frac jobs that are also poisoning the workers.
Earl said additional air quality monitors have been installed throughout the region, noting the data from them should be publicly available.
Monitors will not fix heart disease or cancer or still births and birth defects! They are a con, like CCS, to let polluters keep sickening and or killing us. And, who does the monitoring? Usually the polluters, who happily engage in fraud to keep profit-raping and polluting.
He added the city maintains and treats its own water, with records that could be made available to the researchers.What good will those records do to people with cancer and lung damage?
The researchers intend to keep studying health outcomes in the Peace region in relation to the proximity of fracking activity.
“There has been a growing sort of awareness on the part of the scientific community based on this research that keeps coming out about the health harms of the gas industry,” said McGregor.
“There needs to be a very clear-eyed view of what the problems are and how to mitigate them.”Easy! Ban frac’ing! It’s the most stupid raping of earth for a shitty supply of energy which permanently removes water from the hydrogeological cycle.
For many years, drillers have insisted that they do not use toxic chemicals to drill for gas, only guar gum, mud, and sand. While much attention is being given to chemicals used during fracking, our findings indicate that drilling chemicals can be equally, if not more dangerous.
A proportion (25% to 100%) of the water used in hydraulic fracturing is not recovered, and consequently this water is lost permanently to re-use, which differs from some other water uses in which water can be recovered and processed for re-use.
Methylene chloride, a toxic solvent not reported in products used in drilling or hydraulic fracturing, was detected 73% of the time; several times in high concentrations.
Fracking is a hostage exchange program. Only the carcinogens go free.
“Shale development has been a nightmare for those exposed to the resulting pollution.”
Why should cancer patients in the United States and Canada — and those who love or diagnose them — care about a report about looming water shortages in distant countries such as South Africa and Argentina?
The report is “Fracking: The New Global Water Crisis.” Written by Food and Water Watch, it documents the many ways in which the technology called hydraulic fracturing threatens the world’s vital water resources.
2012: Mountain View County meeting where councillor Paddy Munro presented on the many harms of frac’ing, calling it crimes against humanity. Frac harmed mom Kimberly Mildenstein attended the meeting as above wearing bright pink t-shirt with “FRACK OFF CANCER”
Encana/Ovintiv dumping waste heavy (illegally) at Rosebud; it reeked of hydrocarbons. From Page 7, A Landowner’s Guide to Drilling Waste Disposal from Oil and Gas Wells by industry’s self regulator: “In this method, drilling wastes are sprayed at very low application rates. … Wastes containing hydrocarbons are not allowed to be disposed of by this method.”
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