At 3:05 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, I felt my house shake. My first thought was that something heavy must have fallen over and, god forbid, broken. It wasn’t until I logged on to Facebook and saw the multitude of “Did we just have an earthquake?” statuses that I even realized I had just experienced a 4.0 magnitude earthquake.
I know earthquakes happen, and that they occur often in some parts of the U.S. So why was everyone making such a big deal over a non-lethal quake? Because earthquakes don’t happen in Boardman, Ohio.
In fact, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, there was not a single earthquake recorded with an epicenter in Youngstown (or in the encompassing Mahoning County) until 2011. Just to make sure, I checked out the U.S. Geographical Survey’s map of all recorded earthquakes in Ohio from 1776 until 2007. Again, not a single earthquake originated in all of Mahoning County.
However, eleven earthquakes had epicenters around Youngstown in 2011. Pretty anomalous, right? Something must have changed. After all, what reason could there be for a sudden proliferation of earthquakes in an area that had never experienced them before?
Authorities suspect that a D&L Energy, Inc. injection well that handles waste from horizontal hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as “fracking”, may be to blame. The well injected millions of gallons of fracking fluids 9,000 feet underground, and ten of the quakes had epicenters less than five miles from the injection site. Coincidence? An increasing number of Youngstown residents think not. The fact that no earthquakes originated in Youngstown before March 2011, coupled with correlations between fracking and earthquakes in Arkansas and Oklahoma, was compelling enough evidence for the state to close down the well on Friday, December 30. Even though the well is shut down, scientists warn that pressure exerted from the waste may persist for days or weeks.
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