TV News LIES

A week after the dumping of at least 20,000 gallons of toxic and potentially radioactive fracking waste into a storm drain that empties into a tributary of the Mahoning River in Youngstown, Ohio, by Hard Rock Excavating, state regulators have yet to disclose information about the quantity of waste and the chemicals involved.

Environmental advocates are urging the state to act quickly to prosecute the perpetrator and look beyond the one incident to take more aggressive steps to protect the state’s public health and environment from future threats.

The recent natural gas boom has put hydraulic fracturing, an old practice now being utilized on a massive scale, in the hot seat. Fracking has been linked to a growing list of environmental hazards, not the least of which include earthquakes and poisoned water.

Those alarmed by the widespread adoption of fracking in recent years have tried desperately to expose the water-chemical cocktail that gas companies inject into the ground to access gas deposits. Unfortunately, the industry does not require disclosure of this fluid’s ingredients, even though it’s very likely to end up in the public water supply.

Up until now it’s been deny, deny, deny, but a recent industry report has exposed fracking for the deadly practice that it is.

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Judy Armstrong Stiles had no idea what she was signing away when she and her husband Carl agreed to let Chesapeake Energy operate natural gas wells on their Bradford County land.

That was three years ago. For Carl, it was a lifetime.

Soon after the company started using hydraulic fracturing to develop the horizontally drilled wells, both she and her husband began suffering severe rashes. They also complained of stomach aches, dizziness, fatigue, aching joints and forgetfulness, Stiles told Shalefield Stories in November 2012.

A federal judge on Tuesday approved an agreement for BP PLC to plead guilty to manslaughter and other charges and pay a record $4 billion in criminal penalties for the company's role in the 2010 oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Before she ruled, U.S. District Judge Sarah Vance heard testimony from relatives of 11 workers who died when BP's blown-out Macondo well triggered an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and started the spill.

The dash for unconventional gas may have brought financial benefits to some, but for struggling dairy farmers in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, the arrival of drilling wells could be the final nail in the coffin. Dimiter Kenarov reports

When Sheila Russell decided to move back to her ancestral home in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, she wanted to start a new life. A seventh-generation Russell, whose family had settled the land in 1796, the last year of George Washington’s presidency, she left her corporate job at a catalogue company to do what she loved best: farming.

Its contents remain mostly a mystery. But fracking wastewater has revealed one of its secrets: It can be highly radioactive. And yet no agency really regulates its handling, transport or disposal. First of a four-part series on radiation in fracking wastewater.

Randy Moyer hasn’t been able to work in 14 months. He’s seen more than 40 doctors, has 10 prescriptions to his name and no less than eight inhalers stationed around his apartment.

Forecasters are predicting explosive intensification this weekend for an extra-tropical storm in the North Atlantic that is expected to eclipse the intensity of last October's superstorm Sandy.

Unlike Sandy, the nameless North Atlantic superstorm poses no threat to land. But it does highlight the power such storms can attain.

It's forecast to develop winds of up to 98 miles an hour, while the air pressure at its center – expected to reach a low between 920 to 930 millibars – would rival that of a category 4 hurricane, according to forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Ocean Prediction Center in College Park, Md.

Dave Cogar counts down the days until he's fracked.
Through a haze of cigarette smoke at the Brass Rail bar here, he laments about living on welfare. He still finds jobs where he can -- working construction or fixing computers around this small town south of Pittsburgh -- but he says he's fallen short of creating the life he wants for himself and his teenage son.

So he's come to the conclusion that natural gas hidden in the Marcellus Shale, thousands of feet beneath his rural Pennsylvania land, may offer him a second chance.