EcoWatch
A proposal to lease the mineral rights underneath the Lowellville Cemetery in Poland, Ohio has created a bizarre and morbid turn on the fracking debate. Photo by Don and Margaret.
The fracking debate has officially taken a strange and morbid turn.
According to the Associated Press, township trustees of Poland, Ohio—a small, eastern Ohio enclave—have received a proposal to lease the mineral rights underneath the 122-year-old Lowellville Cemetery for $140,000 and a 16 percent share of royalties. Similar offers have been reported at other nearby cemeteries.
It seems that, in addition to friends, family and loved ones, there’s a lot more beneath the surface. Rich deposits of natural gas locked into shale formations thousands of feet beneath the ground have invigorated a bizarre and polarizing debate around how to proceed.
Fracking in cemeteries is the latest in an expanding list of places that any sane person would think inconceivable to undermine, such as residential properties, playgrounds, schools and parks. In areas where fracking operations have moved forward, air quality is degraded, noise pollution skyrockets and water quality is dangerously compromised.
At this point, disrupting the final resting place of the dead seems a perfectly illogical extension of an ongoing debate that defies good sense.
“I think it’s a dumb idea because I wouldn’t want anyone up there disturbing the dead, number one, and, number two, I don’t like the aspect of drilling,” said Marilee Pilkington of Poland, Ohio, according to the Associated Press. Pilkington’s father, brother and nephew are all buried in Lowellville.
John Campbell, an agent for Campbell Development LLC based in Fort Worth, Texas, declined a request for more information on his proposal. He said only that the offer was not accepted, according to the Associated Press.
Nearby residents of Youngstown, Ohio are fired up about the proposal in Poland after experiencing an equally bizarre string of earthquakes that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources linked to wastewater injection wells virtually pinpointed to the earthquakes’ epicenters. Youngstown is now battling for a citywide drilling ban.
“You know what it is, it’s emotional,” said Poland Township Administrator Jim Scharville, according to the Associated Press. “A lot of people don’t want any type of drilling. There’s something about disturbing the sanctuary of a cemetery. We’re not talking about dinosaurs now and creatures that roamed the earth millions of years ago. We’re talking about loved ones who have died, people we knew.”
Unfortunately, the case in Poland isn’t unique. Cemeteries in Pennsylvania and Texas have already been drilled.
Visit EcoWatch’s FRACKING page for more related news on this topic.
Fracking is unsafe, toxic and should be banned. One injection well near downtown Youngstown caused 12 area earthquakes in one year. You know the old saying, he’d sell his grandmother for a buck. Well, selling a cemetery for commercial purposes is crass and insensitive, to say the least.
FRACKING SHOULD BE BANNED NATIONWIDE! Write to your Senators and Congressional house members and insist on a nationwide ban!
Since when did fracking cause a damn earth quake. Fracking is just another form of or drilling for fossil fuels that should be banned yes. It is however still being done in many countries so its not going to stop until the resorces run out
Not when the resources run out, but when so much land has been polluted and our aquifers destroyed, that we’ll need DE-salinizaton plants built along the coasts to supply our fresh water needs. Water companies wouldn’t mind that though. Fracking needs to be stopped and banned, to many unknowns that will more than likely bite our asses in the future.
http://www.ewg.org/analysis/usgs-recent-earthquakes-almost-certainly-manmade
I shudder to think what these people would do if they discovered a way to capture the methane produced by all those decomposing corpses.
frak u I say… the whole world will cave in one day as we suck the life blood from the earth. we’re all gonna die.
These fracking greedy people need to stop now! The more I learn about this the more I want everyone everywhere to know about this and I mean everything. The only thing I see is that the people who are making fracking happen are all out for money and don’t care about how they get the gas and the harm it will cause. Please by all means talk about it to anyone who will listen (the fracking industry does not want the people to be educated on any of this matter) the less you know the more they grow. What do they say when caught in the lies they advertise and tell us? Sorry… not even that I’ll bet they’ll morph it into something else and try to sell it safe. It’s all B.S. and bad for everything. Maybe they could clean-up the messes they’ve already made!