Hydraulic Fracturing'S Impact On Citizens In Gasland Part 2

‘Gasland Part 2(2013)” is a documentary which documents the impact of the gas boom of fracking or hydraulic fracturing. Fracking or hydraulic fracturing is using huge volumes of water and sand laced with chemicals to flush the gas from rock formations. This enables America to become an energy superpower, but with such power comes a heavy environmental cost.

The documentary interviewed several different families and how the whole water and fracking situation impacted their lives. Many of these families lost their water supplies and those who didn’t lost water supply, their waters were very polluted with many chemicals and gases. These chemicals and gases made the families sick causing illness making it very hard to drink, clean, and cook with the contaminated water.

The water was even sometimes very harmful to animals and pets that these families had. Also, because of the gases, it was very possible to literally light the water on fire. This can be very dangerous to the families especially when cooking and when someone doesn’t know that the water is contaminated. Eventually, these families were forced to leave their homes because of the water supply and the gas boom from hydraulic fracturing.

Although fracking is very devasting to our environment, there is a bigger case we need to think about, our system of government and climate change. The documentary says, “If what we are seeing all across America is people able to light their water on fire, why hasn’t our government done anything about it, why have our regulatory agencies failed to protect us?” (Gasland Part II). According to the Open Secrets website, since 2008 to 2012, 1 year before the documentary was released, the oil and gas industry has spent $780 million on lobbying (OpenSecrets.org). Lobbying is seeking influence for a politician or public official on an issue. In this case, oil and gas companies spent millions of dollars on lobbying to protect themselves that what they are doing isn’t causing any harm.

These can be backed up when investigations by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Dimock, PA, faded away, and when an independent investigation dropped its plans in Pavilion, WY. Both the EPA and the independent investigators, as well as many other agencies, have been controlled by the power of the gas and oil companies and their millions of dollars spend on lobbyists. Meanwhile, this documentary shows proof that this is obviously not the case. The documentary also mentioned that the gas and oil companies even went as far as buying the properties of homeowners with the water contaminations just so they don’t disclose any agreements on the situations involving fracking.

To conclude the documentary, I believe that this is one of the reasons why you shouldn’t trust media or even news reports. Company’s who are trying to protect their data and their credibility could simply pay news reporters to hide the real facts of what’s actually going on. This is why we should always find reliable sources or do further research into the topic to find out ourselves if what we hear and see online is actually true. Also, if possible, one can investigate themselves into the case. For example, with the documentary, the EPA or the independent investigators should have continued and investigated themselves to figure out if the lobbyist were actually telling the truth instead of trusting them and stopping their investigations.