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Chevron Gives Residents Near Fracking Explosion Free Pizza
Lasrick writes "Chevron hopes that free soda and pizza can extinguish community anger over a fracking well fire in Dunkard Township, Pennsylvania. From the story: 'The flames that billowed out of the Marcellus Shale natural gas well were so hot they caused a nearby propane truck to explode, and first responders were forced to retreat to avoid injury. The fire burned for four days, and Chevron currently has tanks of water standing by in case it reignites. Of the twenty contractors on the well site, one is still missing, and is presumed dead.' The company gave those who live nearby a certificate for a free pizza and some soda."
Scientists Create Pizza That Can Last Years
As a bonus, Dunkard Township residence can reheat the pizza with their kitchen faucets
[everyone stares at the skinny guy in glasses]
Skinny guy: What?!? Everybody likes free pizza?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What they really needed to go with the pizza bread is a community performance of the Cirque du Solei. Why bother with figurative bread and circuises, when you can get literal ones?
Learn to love Alaska
. . . that is just part of life, especially something as dangerous as extracting oil or natural gas. When that happens, it only seems reasonable to do something to generate good publicity. However, it is better to do nothing at all (except apologize) than to attempt some insulting gesture. It makes it seem like the residents' exposure to potentially toxic smoke is worth nothing more than a coupon for free pizza. It is insulting. Maybe they should actually pay to send out some doctors or some other meaningful assistance for the residents.
But... if I boycotted every corporation that did something so outrageous as this, I would have no car, no gas to put in it, no clothes to wear, no shoes, nothing to eat or drink nothing to see, hear, or read. we as a people are deeply indebted to evil, and/or depraved assholes. so thank you, you despicable worms... thanks for making our modern world possible.
They should have given them hot dogs and marshmallows instead, to roast if it reignites,
There lawyers are really really clever.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A Pizza is more than most people get as the result of a class action lawsuit...
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
I have to say, in many years I've yet to have a pizza explode - no matter how hard you shake it.
Just another notch in the belt of Pizza as superior food item.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry 'bout poisoning your drinking water. Here, have a pizza and STFU.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Chevron has a sizable industrial accident in a community. They take losses in it (insurance likely covers direct losses) and lose a contractor. I'm sure that wherever damages did occur, Chevron is on the hook and is likely paying up. The nearby residents had zero damages and weren't owed a thing. Chevron is not getting off cheap or abdicating responsibility through a pizza giveaway.
The situation is comparable to having a tall tree in your yard that falls over on your car. You don't owe your neighbor a pizza, but maybe you buy him dinner anyway just for giving him the jitters.
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
I work for a hydrofrac company, and frankly, I'm fed up with the media and their bullshit. The only relationship this incident has to 'fracking' is that, the well was likely stimulated at some point in the near-past. The frac company has come, got 'er done, and gone. They didn't cause the fire, nor have anything to do with it.
Straight from the goddamn Chevron website:
Update No. 3: Pennsylvania Incident
Feb. 11, 2014, 10:50 p.m. EST – At approximately 6:45 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 11, a fire was reported on Chevron Appalachia's Lanco 7H well pad in Dunkard Township in Greene County, Pennsylvania.
The Lanco well pad has three natural gas wells. The wells were in the final stages of preparation before being placed into production. There was no drilling or hydraulic fracturing taking place at the time. At the time of the incident, preparations were being made to run tubing, which is often done prior to bringing wells into production.
Because wellhead fires, explosions and dead workers are entirely unique to fracking. Nothing like that has ever happened in the oil/gas recovery business ever.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I don't think it is. I think it's mainly just NIMBY syndrome; same with nuclear power.
Greenpeace likes to cite Fukushima as evidence for why there should be no more nuclear power, but the actual results of Fukushima don't bear that out.
Fukushima taught us that living in an earthquake zone at the time of an earthquake/tsunami hurts a lot more people (16,000 confirmed dead, 2,500 missing) than a meltdown at a modern nuclear power plant (zero dead, liberal estimates of 1,000 potential cancer cases in the future - may never see a single one though.)
Are there risks with fracking? Other than the safety risks common in every other industrial work environment, not really. Some people suspect earthquakes, but so far there isn't anything other than confirmation bias to suggest it actually happens.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
And by the way, I live 50 miles from the largest nuclear plant in the US. Doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
When I grow up, I'm going to go to Bovine University.
When there's a big explosion and fire, there's definitely a possibility that nearby residents were directly affected.
Is the best kind of pizza. Now if they could just keep my water from exploding, too. In general I like my food and drink to be in the non-exploding category.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
They didn't say the missing worker's family got free pizza.
Explosion-Free Pizza, that is.
Everyone should get some.
People were fine 50 miles from Hiroshima so you are setting the bar pretty low :)
IMHO the biggest problems people had with the US nuclear lobby were the "clean" and "too cheap to meter" lies instead of the reality that is impressive enough in itself. The "clean" thing was counterproductive and held up nuclear waste management for over two decades on synrok alone (I saw an example of it in 1987, almost identical to the finished product when they finally got some funding about five years ago) not even considering other solutions. The rabid response to anyone that questioned safety resulted in the cancellation of a thorium project after the person in charge of it pointed out the potential safety benefits over existing reactors.
From the pictures of the site Chevron didn't have to give out too many certificates. The area is REALLY sparsely populated.
OMG, it didn't show up on a 5 second google search so it doesn't exist!
Bobtown is the name of a town in Dunkard, Pennsylvania.
It's safe to assume Bobtown Pizza is in Bobtown.
The phone number on the voucher also has the area code for Bobtown.
There's a difference between natural disasters and man-made ones.
If anything, Fukushima thought us we shouldn't build nuclear plants in an earthquake zone (I know, all Japan is, this should push us towards better international cooperation, in a perfect world).
Right, so you're saying that having a fracking well explode is so common as to be unremarkable. Message received.
that was tried in limited trial but 80 percent of participants upchucked their pizza upon subsequent Slashdot Beta reloading
It is a sign that the situation is not being completely ignored. That has some value. Contact has been made and it's a implicit opening for communication instead of just being angry and feeling ignored. Maybe they'll get a lot of people ringing them up saying "you think you can buy me off with a pizza" ranting, and that's the end of it instead of a lot of expensive legal action.
I can see the point of "we've fucked up, here have a pizza" as being better than silence.
I'm saddened to hear there are ACs in the future. BTW, how does Beta turn out?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This topic is about fracking wells, not being well fracked.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
They get a free ham.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Where there is fire, there is smoke. Where there is smoke from an oil well fire, there are carcinogens in the air
Riots correlate to food shortages. http://necsi.edu/research/soci...
Gently reply
False analogy. It wasn't that big of an accident, and Chevron isn't a small company in danger of going bankrupt over the damages associated with this case.
Also you might want to clean up your spelling a bit.
Are there risks with fracking? Other than the safety risks common in every other industrial work environment, not really. Some people suspect earthquakes, but so far there isn't anything other than confirmation bias to suggest it actually happens.
So, what happens to all that dirty water pumped pumped in deep injections "wells"? Maybe it's "spare" water when surface water becomes even more scarce then in some areas of US already?
I think all this activity is playing poker with the future where one side in the present holds the better card.
Fukushima WAS a natural disaster, stop trying to pretend otherwise. It was caused by the earthquake!
Or do you consider large numbers of the deaths also to not be natural, because people were hit by debris from buildings that broke up, trapped in
cars, etc? Pretty much the same thing.
The point is it has caused next to no deaths, whereas the main disaster did - and yet people rant on about the one that really didnt impact.
Get some damn perspective.
What were they thinking?! What's the number one thing that picket lines and rioters and protesters want? Duh, pizza and soda! That's just fueling them!
Chevron has a sizable industrial accident in a community.
At least we agree on this. :)
They take losses in it (insurance likely covers direct losses) and lose a contractor.
If Chevron was a privately owned little mom-and-pop operation and the "contractor" was their son-in-law I'd have some sympathy. But, in this case, it's hard to imagine that anyone with any real decision making power (that is, responsibility) suffered at all. Somehow I doubt the CEO of Chevron will put a picture of the deceased contractor's family on his desk as a permanent reminder to never let something like this happen again: for a company that size, a few human lives here and there are merely the cost of doing business.
I'm sure that wherever damages did occur, Chevron is on the hook and is likely paying up.
With a fire that burned for four days and the loss of life I'm pretty sure that the local government provided some services somewhere along the line.
The nearby residents had zero damages and weren't owed a thing.
I have a young nephew who, when he gets mad, runs around swinging his arms randomly hoping to "accidentally" hit someone. I suppose technically there's nothing wrong with his behavior because he's not guaranteed to succeed in hitting anyone and, even if he does, it's not "intentional". But real life isn't quite so simple and black and white: there's also this notion of negligent activity that puts others at risk.
Chevron is not getting off cheap or abdicating responsibility through a pizza giveaway.
Last year the CEO of Chevron got about $30 million in compensation. In a standard 2,000 hour work year (50 weeks at 40 hours/week), that works out to $15,000/hour or $250/minute (there was time when I thought lawyers who charged $250/hour had it good). Now, Chevron apparently gave away about 100 pizzas at a cost of $12 or so per pizza - for a total cost of about $1,200. So this pizza give-away is equivalent to just a bit less that 5 minutes of the CEO's time.
The situation is comparable to having a tall tree in your yard that falls over on your car. You don't owe your neighbor a pizza, but maybe you buy him dinner anyway just for giving him the jitters.
A better analogy would be that cut down a tree on your property without taking adequate safety precautions and it all goes horribly wrong and falls on a fedex delivery person who was trying to deliver a package to your house and your neigbor tries to give the delivery person CPR but the delivery person dies in your neighbor's arms - not too mention the tree almost fell on your neighbor's house which might have killed your neighbor's family. So you give your neighbor just one single penny to compensate for the distress and risk you caused - and walk away self-righteously feeling that you've given your neighbor far more compensation than your neighbor actually deserved.
So, what happens to all that dirty water pumped pumped in deep injections "wells"?
Over thousands of years it slowly seeps through the rocks and just kind of hands around down there. These wells are far, far deeper than the deepest wells drilled for pumping water up from underground aquifers and the water table. By the time the 'dirty' water ever makes it anywhere important the rocks will have filtered all the crap out of it.
The actual point of concern from fracking is not about the fluids, the water, or any of the bullshit you see people ranting about. The problem is that they are re-using old wells which were drilled a long time ago, and those wells go through the water table and natural aquifers in many cases. Those old wells tend to have shoddy and/or degraded casings (the walls of the wells are lined usually with some type of concrete or metal tubing to prevent them from collapsing), so when they are pumping the shit down the well they can tend to leak somewhat.
Maybe it's "spare" water when surface water becomes even more scarce then in some areas of US already?
Surface water is becoming "scarce" because of the massive demands which come from agriculture, large industry, and most of all large population centers.. especially when you put a city somewhere that doesn't normally have water (like the Nevada Desert) and have to pipe a shitload in from elsewhere.
But the water isn't getting more scarce, it's just ending up in the oceans faster than the weather is recycling it up into the high elevations in the form of rain and snow.
The solution to water shortages isn't to cry about frakking, it's to start advancing our de-salinization technology. Or start catching some icy comets and dropping them into the atmosphere. We pump far more water out of underground aquifers which do not naturally replenish quickly than we will ever put back into frakking wells, and if the global warming alarmists are right we could stand to put a dent in the ocean levels.
I think your comment is pretty insightful, but you are mistaken on one point.
Fukushima taught us that [...] a meltdown at a modern nuclear power plant (zero dead
Fukushima taught what happens when an ancient nuke plant melts down, not a modern one. Fukushima was due for decommissioning... it was a second-gen design that had been in operation for over four decades! That's the original planned total lifetime of the design. (Although with upgrades it is possible to keep operating a gen-II past the four-decades mark.)
I want to see a large buildout of gen-III+ or fourth-gen design nuke plants, and yes you can build one near me if you like. Even a crappy old nuke plant doesn't kill everyone when a giant tsunami hits it, so I'm even less worried about a modern "inherently safe" design, and plus I don't live in a tsunami zone.
Anyone who honestly believes in human-caused climate change must be in favor of nuke plants as they release no CO2. We should be building modern nuke plants and closing down coal plants. And yes, build modern nuke plants and closing down the four-decades-old nuke plants. And invest in research on thorium, traveling wave, etc.
And go ahead and build solar power too while you are at it. Just shut down the damn coal plants.
Are there risks with fracking?
Groundwater contamination, for one. Especially, flammable tap water. Perhaps you dismiss that as anecdotal, but it's not as if scientist have been given the access, data, and funding to run these claims to ground... that will take another ten or twenty years, by which point the perpetrators will have long since taken off with the profits while the general public gets stuck with whatever environmental catastrophes this created.
Don't get me wrong... I wish fracking was as safe and plentiful as proponents claim. And maybe it's worth some amount of contamination even if it isn't safe. I just wish these things could be determined objectively and scientifically in the best public interest instead of this same old sh*t where the powerful simultaneously exert influence over corporations, media, government, and public opinion to effect the fattest profit instead of the utilitarian good.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Yup, don't like fracking - it carries too high a risk of polluting my landscape, and quite likely turning a beautiful view into a rubbish-tip. In the UK, the government has even gone on record to say the extracted oil & gas won't reduce anybody's energy bills. It will, however, make a shit-load of money for some people who already have too much, and who seem willing to rig the deck to make sure they get their way.
Don't like nuclear fission power either - it produces *filthy* dirty waste, that we have no idea what to do with. AFAIK, not a single nuclear power station has yet been decommissioned and cleaned up anywhere in the world - quite a few are mothballed, while an alleged "decommissioning" process achieves almost nothing and stretches endlessly into the future at vast expense to the tax-payer (cos poor little private sector can't take the pain, so public sector has to take that task on, or private sector will take its ball home).
Both these technologies are amateurish, half-assed, ill-thought-out, poor examples of our abilities at this climactic moment of the 21st century, and I'm embarrassed to be a member of the same species that wants to do this crap. Come on ... we're capable of better than that.
For some reason, many of my peers in this /. community seem to take umbrage whenever there is any criticism of any industrial process if there is some kind of "technology" aspect to that process. There appears to be a belief that so long as a process makes money and is technological, it must be undertaken, irrespective of the impact on this one uniquely precious planet that we have here. I will continue to try to understand this point of view, but I fear its exponents are blinded by the flashing lights.
Sigh.
If you don't pray in my school, I won't think in your church.
This topic is about fracking wells, not being well fracked.
Bravo. Well played.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Groundwater contamination [vanityfair.com], for one. Especially, flammable tap water [youtube.com]. Perhaps you dismiss that as anecdotal, but it's not as if scientist have been given the access, data, and funding to run these claims to ground... that will take another ten or twenty years, by which point the perpetrators will have long since taken off with the profits while the general public gets stuck with whatever environmental catastrophes this created.
The thing is, in large groups, secrets are extremely hard to keep. Is it bothersome that they are quiet about these kinds of things? Yeah. But at the same time, I know exactly why they do it: PR is a very delicate thing. A lot of companies are tight lipped about even the most innocuous things that go on within their company because it's stupid easy for somebody to misconstrue it and damage your reputation horridly.
For examples of this, see the recent events where Gabe Newell openly talked about the DNS cache issue, or that MS UX designer who admitted even senior executives at the company are reluctant to talk about internal happenings. Sometimes it's not just the concerns over their bottom line, sometimes it's concerns over just how stressful it can be to deal with public opinion on a large scale. The developer of that game flappy bird was bringing in $50k a day but stopped because he couldn't handle the PR stress, the developer of Fez quit the games industry for the same reason.
Something more closely related to this: Why did the Hadly CRU keep their data so tightly restricted before the email scandal? That's why. Some journalist whose life mission is to get a Pulitzer prize will comb for just the smallest bit of interesting data to create a media shitstorm, no matter how meaningless that data might be. Even when it is debunked, the damage is still done and it is permanent, mainly because of the way urban legends never die. (People still think Bill Gates said we don't need more than 640k of memory, or that Richard Gere put a gerbil in his butt, but neither of these things ever actually happened.)
Likewise, I'm sure the energy companies involved keep their data hidden for similar reasons. Meanwhile hundreds if not thousands of engineers and scientists work for these companies. I'm pretty sure that if there was something going on, one of them would say something. I mean shit, if it can happen to the NSA, it can happen to anybody.
They aren't going to outright deny any of these claims either, because that can make things worse. Here's a perfect example: I'm sure you've heard of that "unfair campaign" before, where they say you can't see racism if you're wrhite. Speak all you want about how that's such a bullshit claim, (which it is) but if you're a white guy you automatically have no credibility. And worse, if you go around calling BS on it, then people will point fingers at you calling you a racist for denying racism. It's a shitty situation, but unfortunately that's how you have to deal with stupid people.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Well, the risk of environmental contamination is pretty real and the consequences severe. Fracking works by injecting ridiculous large quantities of chemicals and water into bedrock and then the pressure from the heat and gas sends a lot of those chemicals and water back to the surface where it is collected in ponds. While there might not be clear evidence of the fracking process itself contaminating the groundwater, leaks of chemicals at the surface have happened and the consequences can be particularly nasty. To add insult to injury, many of these fracking companies have traditionally considered the cocktail trade secrets, so local residents, first responders, and regulators don't always know exactly what the contamination risk might. Fracking leading to fire shooting out of your faucets might be an urban legend like nuclear explosions at power plants. That does not mean that there is not a real risk of a significant catastrophe. The nuclear industry is tightly regulated. Fracking regulations, until recently, have been largely nonexistent.
The Colorado floods were a natural disaster, but there were only a few deaths. The environmental consequences are much higher, part of which are all the fracking fluids that got spilled.
Talk about a lack of perspective.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
do you get super-cheap electricity?
when it was built, they probably didn't realize it. Really, the sodium and thorium reactors should be built to replace it somewhere else, but at least those are far safer, smaller, less waste, etc.
That's a pretty good deal. Cause a huge explosion, (probably) kill someone, and blow up a truck, and pay the town off with a pizza and 2 liter.
If *I* caused a huge explosion.. no, lets just say a small explosion, like just the propane truck. Say one person caught a tiny piece of shrapnel that was picked out with tweezers and fixed with a band-aid, I'd be in jail for an awful long time.
That doesn't quite seem fair.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
See, guys! Fracking isn't a bad thing at all!
Well, that's a load of felgercarb. Muffit? Sic 'em!
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Especially, flammable tap water.
Great, an example of flammable water where they actually have established that something has changed. This puts it leaps and bounds beyond most such claims.
However "the amount has changed" is not a proof that it is caused by fracking (correlation and causation and all that). It would be pretty easy to measure the amount of C-14 in the water, which would immediately tell whether it is old methane or methane from recent biodegradation. Until such a test has been performed, this goes in the "interesting, but not conclusive" category.
You killed my brother, but since you gave me free pizza and soda pop I'll let it go this time.
Surely I'm not the only one who thought of the Lorax upon seeing the headline?
"Now I'm offended by this. But I'm gonna eat it!"
Unfortunately, I could not find a suitable YouTube clip of that little quickie to link here.
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Mmmmm... Ham...
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If they shook the soda bottle up just before handing it over and then added some toxic sludge to the Pizza they could call it a "fracking special"
What I find most interesting is that since 2005 the EPA has specifically excluded the fracking industry from following regulation or reporting results. Until republicans remove this specific exclusion, all we have available is correlation as causation.
I'm not sure I'd call a sodium reactor more safe. Heck, liquid sodium explodes in contact with concrete, and the very reactor itself is built out of concrete. They have to clad it in thick steel as a precaution, and after a sodium leak in Japan, the sodium ate over halfway through the steel. Liquid sodium is not nice, friendly stuff.
And I don't think there's anywhere *near* enough data on thorium reactors. All the happy-go-lucky stuff sounds all too much like the sort of sales pitches that accompany each new generation of nuclear reactor.
If I had to pick one that I thought had the most promise, it'd be lead-bismuth. Now, they have their own set of corrosion problems, no question. But at least there's a damned lot of data from the former USSR on how to prevent it. Beyond that, leaks are pretty harmless (apart from economically) - your worst case scenario is that your reactor entombs itself in lead, which most people would consider *desirable* in a worst-case reactor leak. There's no explosion risk from lead-bismuth. It's a breeder approach like sodium, so little waste and highly efficient fuel usage. And the emergency circulation in modern designs is mostly passive.
But honestly, the biggest issue I have with nuclear is cost. The nuclear industry is one of the few industries out there that has demonsingtrated a long-term *negative* learning curve in terms of cost. That is, the longer we run nuclear power plants, the more added risks we learn we have to address (which costs money), the higher the disposal cost estimates versus earlier estimates, and on and on. Scaling factors mean that plants usually have to be very large which means that you don't learn as much from building lots of them with varying approaches. And the generally best way to deal with a problem of escalating costs on a design - start anew with a radically different design - means you start the learning curve over, which takes decades on nuclear due to the slow pace. And the newer approaches are often more complicated in order to solve the previous problems, which introduces new potential avenues of failure.
It's a real problem. All issues of safety and the environment aside, if nuclear can't address the cost issue, it has no future. Cost kept investors out of nuclear more than NIMBY for three decades. They've been trying again with this latest round of nuclear construction (often with citizens picking up the financial risk if not outright the tab), but the results thusfar haven't been very appealing, with lots of cost overruns.
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
http://img.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/pizza-extra-crispy.jpg
Well put. It's important to realize that by the very nature of there being trapped gas, that means that there is at least one (generally several) layers of highly impermiable cap rock above the natural gas, so thick and durable that they've contained a highly-mobile gas for millions of years (despite earthquakes and the like), all of which is several kilometers down - versus the groundwater which is a couple dozen to a couple hundred meters down. Creating cracks a couple dozen centimeters long several kilometers well below the cap rock down has essentially no effect on the leak rate from the reservoir up through *kilometers* of rock (which would take ages for anything they're injecting now to reach anyway). The problem is the well, which by its very nature must pierce through each layer on its way down - including your groundwater layers. Even new wells aren't perfect (as we well know). Reusing old wells is a recipie for leaks.
I don't know... desalinization generally takes crazy amounts of energy to produce enough for agriculture, just by the very nature of the energy state of saltwater versus fresh. There is one concept I read about a few years back which I thought was pretty clever that might work around that, though - it was to use open evaporation pools to create super-saline water and to have it flow past two ion-specific membranes (one for negative ions, the other for positive) connecting to adjacent pools, creating a salt gradient pressure into those pools. Each of those pools in turn have their opposite ion-specific membrane connected to a final regular-saltwater pool. For an ion to follow the diffusion gradient and leave the super-saturated pool into an adjacent pool, that adjacent pool must suck an opposite ion from the final saltwater pool - which it will do if the gradient from the super-saturated pool is strong enough. The final pool stays balanced because ions are being lost to each adjacent pool. Eventually the final saltwater pool will become freshwater.
That which I find really neat about this concept is that it doesn't use electricity beyond basic water pumps and the like - the energy powering it is simply evaporation of seawater, which is ridiculously easy to achieve in many desert locations. In many places a mere jetty is enough to turn hundreds of square miles of ocean into an evaporation pool. The challenge is of course mass production of sufficient flow rate ion-selective membranes and keeping them from clogging.
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
Blast-Tossed!
I mean c'mon guys, this is Capitalism at it's finest. The people living in the town are to blame.. if they had capitalized on the liquid gold under their feet then no-one else could have. I mean, someone has to get rich out of this don't they? There is no sense of responsibility or ownership of anything anymore.. it's just a 'faceless' corporation making multi-billions of dollars of profit per quarter.. you simply can't expect anyone to actually CARE do you?
What I think is poetic justice is the fact that the price of gas from this whole 'drill baby drill' bullshit and massive exploitation and ruination of our own backyards has benefited us (the american people) almost exactly zero. Notice the price of gas lately? I think it's actually gone up now that we are actually outproducing the middle east in oil. MASSIVE natural gas shortages too... even tho we are out producing Russia in that too. Prices soaring.
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
Chevron has a sizable industrial accident in a community. They take losses in it (insurance likely covers direct losses) and lose a contractor. I'm sure that wherever damages did occur, Chevron is on the hook and is likely paying up. The nearby residents had zero damages and weren't owed a thing. Chevron is not getting off cheap or abdicating responsibility through a pizza giveaway.
The situation is comparable to having a tall tree in your yard that falls over on your car. You don't owe your neighbor a pizza, but maybe you buy him dinner anyway just for giving him the jitters.
Not that Chevron is off the hook with this pizza, but I was actually impressed that they bought the certificates from a locally owned and operated pizza place and didn't just run out and buy 100 gift cards from Pizza Hut or something. At least they were dumping money into a local business with this ploy.
Those burning faucet videos have been proven to have no connection to gas well drilling. Many, many water wells are drilled into rock formations that contain natural gas. My own great uncle had one that produced so much gas he tapped it and used the gas to heat his house; had to drill a water well somewhere else.
To bad the article doesn't actually mention how Hydraulic Fracturing could have had anything to do with the explosion. We could change the title to "Oil well, that happened to be hydro fracked, exploded." I'd still have a problem with it because, according to the lack of info in the article, the fact that it was fracked before it exploded had nothing to do with it exploding.
...Is an adequate reward for an eighty-hour work week.
You should give him his medal, bitch!
This topic is about fracking wells, not being well fracked.
That's a well established frack.
(||) Nehmo (||)
Either Polish people are uniquely predisposed to thyroid problems around the turn of every millenium, or there's some indication that Chernobyl's effects on human health extended quite a bit beyond 50 miles.
I made it out in 1984, so I guess I dodged that bullet. Any Polish expats I know that left after 1986 have had thyroid surgery and/or will be taking thyroid meds for the remainder of their lives. All this, just from living hundreds of miles away from Chernobyl when it blew its top.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Only the crappy ones who can't get a better job (with a few exception of those who don't live in a tech center and have a good reason not to move...I feel for those people).
That said, I'll take a 80 hour week over living near a fracking site, thats for sure.
I'm saddened to hear there are ACs in the future. BTW, how does Beta turn out?
He had to post AC because his account hasn't been activated yet - he's from the future, remember?
No, "we've fucked up here's pizza" is worse than nothing, because it basically puts a dollar value on the damage done, and they estimated that value as "very little." Reminds me of a movie I saw about the french revolution, and to show how heartless the royals were, their stagecoach runs over some kid and they flip a coin to the parents. "Sorry your kid's dead or crippled, here's a buck for your troubles."
They should have just made a pledge to clean up the damage and brought in some extra engineers.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Looks like Papa John's pizza. Mmmmm!
Forget Fukushima, the greenies managed to turn public opinion against nuclear power when Three Mile Island happened, even though that was almost a textbook example of how the safety systems _prevent_ dangerous things from happening.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
You cannot possibly be serious. It's obviously a token effort and I doubt many people are going to be stupid enough to see it as any sort of real compensation. Are you pretending to be that stupid just to have something to argue about?
Are you suggesting that they are not doing that?
Especially, flammable tap water.
Free Flaming Moe's for everyone!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Philip Wylie, the author of Gladiator, the novel of the first superhero that predated and probably inspired Siegel and Schuster's Superman, wrote a number of admonitory books during his lifetime. In high school, I read one of his last, "The End of The Dream" (1972). In it he cast a future history which ended with the world, hungry for energy, drilling into Antarctica's ice cap to uncover the coal buried deep under the ground. The fossil-fuel mad world, which he nailed, BTW, capped the seams and burned the coal in situ within the ground to generate electricity. Plausible.
The novel ended with the underground fires joining up and expanding, burning out of control. The smoke slowly built up, moving north like the wrath of an unstoppable god of hell, until the earth died under the cloud.
It was the end of a long litany of excellent *science* fiction. He extrapolated future actions of humans acting under the Law of General Stupidity, in which business always triumphs the hippies because, you know, they are hippies. You can call it the reaction of least energy expended, or simply conservative thinking - Everything Is Awesome.
When I head of fracking - it snuck up on me - Philip Wylie's sad voice came back to my memory, singing that same old song of mankind's monkey stupid snarling resistance to change, especially when there are trillions of dollars to be made digging up those ancient forests underground and setting them on fire. It didn't have to be. But it will be. America has no left, no intelligent people in power. We have businessmen. And businessmen don't do science. They do money and power. And Americans like things the way they are: the 1950's eternally reenacted, a never-changing world of cars and new houses and more and more and more... what is coming next is as predictable as those black clouds of Hell coming up from the Antarctic in Wylie's last warning. We will change the world. And it will be another business opportunity: mass relocation, new housing, new agriculture, potable water as precious as gold, cleaning up toxins, disposable houses, so so many ways to make money off overpopulation and the utter bovine imbecility of the human race.
My grandpa was 50 miles from Hiroshima, in the navy. He died of thyroid cancer in 2008.
but unfortunately that's how you have to deal with stupid people
not the only way!:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
You cut off quoting me before you got to the part about the dollar value Chevron gave being very, very low. That's a token, insulting gesture. It would be better if they had done nothing and just said "we're sorry."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
g. It's a slab of bread with thin slices of melted sausage and a small amount of cheese-like substance. Totally not worth it. If you don't have enough money for a good enough pizza, choose other toppings?
Unlimited toppings?
>>a modern nuclear power plant (zero dead, liberal estimates of 1,000 potential cancer cases
No. it was 573 official deaths, 10 months after.
http://enenews.com/yomiuri-hea...
aaaaaaa
No need to worry. Usually it takes some years for the first symptoms to arrive.
Near Hanford : http://www.nbcnews.com/health/...
aaaaaaa
The portion I did not quote is not relevant because the idea that this cheap PR effort is actual compensation is incredibly stupid. Please stop pretending to be so dim to create false drama or whatever game you are playing.
That's what I'm saying. It's not actual compensation. It's a token effort, and an insulting one. It's like saying, "Yes, we realize you should be compensated. Here's an insultingly small amount." I don't know why this is so hard for you to understand. It's basic reading comprehension.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I would have thought that groundwater contamination was enough of a risk? Perhaps you need to go check out what happens when groundwater becomes unfit for human or animal consumption and what crap is pumped into the bedrock to force out the gas?
Whilst you're completely right about nuclear, the question "Are there risks with fracking?" combined with the answer "..., not really", has to be one of the most stupid things I've ever had the misfortune to read.
I must, however, congratulate you on your ability to mix completely sane logic and reason with utter crap and sell that dish as a package.
Mmmmm pepperoni....
Coincidental Captcha: coupon
FTFY
I'm very sorry, but I do not think that is a reasonable interpretation and I think you are vastly underestimating the intelligence of people by assuming they are going to think it is anything other than a damage control PR exercise.
I also don't get why you are pretending to be so stupid as to think it is compensation yourself. Is this some sort of idiotic debating tactic they teach in US high schools or something? You cannot possibly be as stupid as your are pretending to be.
It is not about testing for gas in the well, the issue here is the fracking fluid, which, courtesy to excluding the fracking companies from environmental protection, contains number of poisonous or carcinogenic substances. There is no way to get that stuff out from the ground once it is there, and it will slowly move around and spread with groundwater movement. If they just used water and sand, the issue would be just CO2 emissions which can at least be mitigated by plant life, but as it is now, the long term effects are destructive, and profit-makers will leave the mess to others to clean up. This would be equivalent of allowing nuclear industry to dump the the used fuel to rivers and sea and leave any possible accident costs to taxpayers. Oh, wait...
What ? In the future they don't know how to read (because of text-to-speech and text-to thought technologies), so he couldn't work out what to do with the Captcha?
(Actually, I don't think I know if there's a captcha on the sign up page; it was probably before captcha came along,
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
What ? In the future they don't know how to read (because of text-to-speech and text-to thought technologies), so he couldn't work out what to do with the Captcha?
(Actually, I don't think I know if there's a captcha on the sign up page; it was probably before captcha came along,
I think you misunderstood. He signed up in the future, so now that's he's back here in this time, he hasn't signed up yet, so his login doesn't work and he's commenting AC.