I was reading the "conversation" online at the end of the PG's movie review " 'Promised Land' Delves Into High Cost of Fracking" (Jan. 4) and was amazed at the baseless yet animated opinions. Back and forth, challenging each side to "do your homework." Yet neither side had done anything but rely on propaganda. Here's a tiny bit of homework they should be doing.

I chased the "Truth Land" movie/website thread suggested by a pro-fracker. Over and over, "Truth Land" said that fracking fluid was 99.5 percent water and sand. The 0.05 percent was portrayed as being equally innocuous. I followed that thread to fracfocusdata.org, looking for a better description of the 0.05 percent minuscule, inconsequential portion of the fluid. I found it with specifics.

The Vivian Harbison 3H well drilled near my old home in Eighty Four, Pa., was fracked with just less than 2.4 million gallons of fluid. Chesapeake Appalachia LLC provided the fluid composition data. Dimethyl formamide is a corrosion inhibitor making up a mere 0.00063 percent of the total fracking fluid. Innocuous? Material Safety Data Sheets are produced for every chemical we might come into contact with, even the Wite-Out on our desks. One MSDS says that dimethyl formamide has the potential to mutate human genes and is a possible male and female reproductive toxin at levels as small as 10 parts per million.

The drillers are not hiding the facts; they're hiding behind our unwillingness to chase the truth. Is cheap gas worth a single baby with a birth defect? There's always a cost. Do you care?

GREG GENSHEIMER
Monteverde, Fla.

First Published: January 12, 2013, 5:00 a.m.