How Rural America Got Fracked | The Nation

How Rural America Got Fracked | The Nation

click link for hell of a story


“It's huge,” said a US Geological Survey mineral commodity specialist in 2009. “I've never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.” That year, from all US sources, frac-sand producers used or sold over 6.5 million metric tons of sand—about what the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs. Last month, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Senior Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Tom Woletz said corporations were hauling at least 15 million metric tons a year from the state’s hills.

By July 2011, between twenty-two and thirty-six frac-sand facilities in Wisconsin were either operating or approved. Seven months later, said Woletz, there were over sixty mines and forty-five processing (refinement) plants in operation. “By the time your article appears, these figures will be obsolete,” claims Pat Popple, who in 2008 founded the first group to oppose frac-sand mining, Concerned Chippewa Citizens (now part of The Save the Hills Alliance).

Jerry Lausted, a retired teacher and also a farmer, showed me the tawny ridges of sand that delineated a strip mine near the town of Menomonie where he lives. “If we were looking from the air,” he added, “you’d see ponds in the bottom of the mine where they dump the industrial waste water. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the hills that are going to disappear.”