"A 2011 report released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee listed 750 additives, 29 of which are known carcinogens, that are routinely used by the scores of gas drillers who are poised to ship their toxic frack wastewater to Niagara Falls for treatment and discharge into the Niagara River.
Hang [Walter Hang is president of Toxic Targeting, Inc., an Ithaca, N.Y.-based consulting firm] contends that the Niagara Falls treatment facility is incapable of effectively filtering many of the toxic compounds, which vary according to the unique additive recipes employed by the scores of different drillers who could potentially send their frack water here.
"There is no place in the country as lax as Niagara Falls with respect to regulatory violations involving water quality," Hang told me in a phone interview. "The granular activated-carbon process is inadequate for filtering and removing the frack constituents."
Where Will "They", Dump It? / Who Are They?
Niagara River, already burdened with a toxicity beyond belief. So who cares, A Little More Poison, No Big Deal!
The Niagara Falls Water Board, the Andrew Cuomo administration, local environmental groups and the media have all been strangely silent in the wake of a story first reported here two weeks ago detailing a massive plan to import toxic gas drilling wastewater for treatment and release into the Niagara River.
The saga began with the invention of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," a technique that made possible a natural gas drilling gold rush presently centered around northwestern Pennsylvania. Drillers had been merrily dumping the used frack water into rivers, streams, lakes and ponds, or onto fields and along roads, and when they got busted for doing that, they began directing it to municipal water treatment facilities.
Then folks living along the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh were informed that they couldn't drink the water anymore because of contamination originating from an upriver treatment plant engaged in frack water processing...continued...
