[Occupymendocino] The MInes That Fracking Built

[Richard Karch]

http://truth-out.org/news/item/16095-the-mines-that-fracking-built

This story is the first installment of Truthout's Fracking Road Trip series on the wide-reaching impacts of the fracking industry.  
The bluffs rise up gently from the rolling hills and farmlands of Wisconsin's Chippewa County. For years, the bluffs stood silent as small farming communities grew around them. The bluffs are too steep to farm and most of the trees in the area grow on the tops of bluffs and around their rolling slopes and steep faces. It's unusually cold for April and trees stand as silhouettes against a layer of snow.
This scene is quickly interrupted at the intersection of two county roads in the small township of Cooks Valley. A large bluff behind a farm has disappeared. The bluff has been blasted, churned up and turned into giant piles of sand. The sand will soon be trucked off to a processing plant, loaded back into trucks or perhaps onto a waiting train and then shipped to oil and gas fields in other states.
The sand will be mixed with water and chemicals and forced deep underground to break up rock and release precious fossils fuels. This isn't the kind of sand you find at the beach; it's silica, or "frack sand," a carcinogenic dust and a key ingredient in the hydraulic fracking process which has facilitated a nationwide natural gas boom and, according to opponents, an ongoing environmental crisis. Silica particles are uniquely shaped and prop open fractures in the underground rock to free the oil or gas.
Cooks Valley may be far from the oil and gas fields, but like the rural...
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