"A world in which the leading petrostate is a liberal democracy," The Economist sniffed recently, "has much to recommend it." Yet it would appear there's an unexpected side effect to fracking's political and economic benefits.
A recent AP data analysis seems to indicate that traffic accidents in areas where fracking is practiced are up — way up. Fatalities in some areas have quadrupled, even as overall traffic deaths in the country as a whole have decreased.
In North Dakota drilling counties, the population has soared 43 percent over the last decade, while traffic fatalities increased 350 percent. Roads in those counties were nearly twice as deadly per mile driven than the rest of the state. In one Texas drilling district, drivers were 2.5 times more likely to die in a fatal crash per mile driven compared with the statewide average… the hydraulic-fracturing process… extracts oil and gas by injecting high-pressure mixtures of water, sand or gravel and chemicals. It requires 2,300 to 4,000 truck trips per well to deliver those fluids. Older drilling techniques needed one-third to one-half as many trips.
There are now apparently attorneys who specialize in accidents caused by vehicles participating in fracking, presumably because the pockets of the defendants are so deep as to be effectively limitless. Are the additional highway fatalities balanced out in any way by lives saved elsewhere — on oil tankers, in under-regulated foreign oilfields, in the United States Army? That's a calculation too large for even the AP to make.
from The Truth About Cars http://ift.tt/Jh8LjA
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