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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."
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?
. . . 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.
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Scientists Create Pizza That Can Last Years
But that pizza is served just about room temperature. Now, if you store it close to that natural gas well site you could have some fracking HOT pizza!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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?
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.
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
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.
Man, I don't want soda, I want brawno! Because it contains electrolytes!
And they doused the fire with water? Like, from the toilet?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Cooked with natural gas, no doubt!
Seriously, though... I mean, "NEWS FLASH: Mass production of gas sought for its high energy and ease of combustion poses a fire risk!" Who here is surprised by this? Are there people in town going around saying, "My god, I knew they were producing *natural gas*, but I had no idea they were producing something that could *catch fire*!"
I will pull over this spaceship right now!
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.