Today, one of the most diverse meetings ever assembled to address Marcellus Shale gas extraction concerns is being convened by the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities (CHEC) of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health and the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds. The goals of this meeting are to openly discuss the impacts related to Marcellus Shale development, form a data-sharing network, and announce the launch of FracTracker.org, a new web-based tool for tracking and visualizing data related to gas extraction in the Marcellus Shale region. FracTracker, hosted by the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds and managed by CHEC, was funded by The Heinz Endowments and designed by Pittsburgh-based Rhiza Labs.
The Marcellus Shale is a sedimentary rock formation underlying significant portions of PA, NY and WV, smaller areas in KY, MA, OH, TN and VA, and across Lake Erie into Southern Ontario; it is believed to hold trillions of cubic feet of methane gas, as well as other explosive gases and vapors. Serious economic, environmental and public health concerns surround the gas extraction process, including road infrastructure degradation, explosions and blowouts, agriculture and hunting and fishing impacts, water contamination from the disposal of waste fluids into surface waters, and human exposure to volatile organic compounds that off-gas from production facilities. FracTracker will enable people to better assess documented and predicted impacts and correlate them with the geographic location of wells drilled and accompanying production facilities. For the first time ever, people across many disciplines will be able to collaborate directly with communities and citizens in the collection and analysis of data that track these impacts across the Marcellus Shale play. Read More
