Letters to the editor
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While on a recent stay in Central Pennsylvania, I found the hotel parking lot was full of gas drilling company vehicles at night -- many with the reassuring name of Halliburton stamped on the side. Out-of-town drillers have taken over most of the hotels in that region.
Why does it seem that our state and local government is willing to hand Pennsylvania over to Marcellus Shale drillers? The gas extractors are using the lure of quick money and "new jobs" to pillage Pennsylvania. Drinking wells have been poisoned and people and animals have become sick from the chemicals companies use to extract natural gas.
Why allow drilling permits within Pittsburgh city limits, within range of hundreds of thousands of people, and rivers that flow into the largest watershed in the eastern United States? It is incomprehensibly irresponsible.
The powers that be need to protect our environment and drinking water supply from Marcellus Shale drilling, especially by supporting legislation to make the companies disclose their frack water contaminants, denying drilling permits in highly populated and environmentally sensitive areas, pushing for more regulation of the industry and setting heavy local taxes on drillers. We need the industry to be taxed enough to balance the environmental impact it will impose. These companies should be in no position to set their own customized standards while they extract our resources.
We need our leaders and residents to stand up to an industry that will take everything it can and potentially leave a mess behind.
NICOLE WALSH
Banksville
Blame Rachel
I am writing regarding your photos on the first page of the July 24 Local News section showing members of PricewaterhouseCoopers raising money for insecticidal malaria nets.
It is a crying shame that a million people a year, almost all of them children in Africa, have to die from malaria because of the lies and misinformation published in Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." Minuscule amounts of DDT sprayed on a dwelling's walls once or twice a year would save almost all of those people.
First Published July 31, 2010 12:00 am
