Police in Wilkes-Barre Township, Pennsylvania just made a very unusual
Facebook post.
The police department added a rather controversial item to their “lost and found box,” in the
form of a great big wad of crack cocaine. The drugs, estimated at a street
value of around $1,600, were found in the parking lot of a local shopping
center.
The presumably tongue-in-cheek post was made to the police department’s
Facebook page on Monday, offering to return the crack cocaine to its rightful
owner. You can read the full post below.
The police notice didn’t mention who found the crack cocaine, or whether
they actually expect someone to come and claim it.
While on the subject of drugs, Blasting News reported today on the story of two counselors at a facility for drug addicts who recently died from a combined heroin and fentanyl overdose.
Right
now, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is considering lifting a temporary
ban on fracking in New York, threatening communities' health, polluting
vital water sources and opening up peoples' lands to gas exploration.
You can help.
From Lady Gaga to Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, Artists
Against Fracking have got the backing of more than 200 artists in the
fight to end fracking. See the full list of artists here.
Digital Journal reported recently on the visit by Artists Against Fracking
to Pennsylvania, where Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Susan Sarandon and
Mahatma Ghandi's grandson, Arun Ghandi visited families living in the
area. These families have been severely impacted by fracking, which has
robbed them of clean ground water.
Fracking, or to give it its full name, hydraulic fracturing,
is a method of extracting natural gas and oil from rocks, at depths
from 2,000 to 10,000 feet. What they do first is to drill deep wells
straight down through the aquifer. The drilling then curves
horizontally below the earth's surface and into its shale rock
formations.
Once this is done, millions of gallons of water, laced with chemicals,
is injected at extremely high pressure into the rock formations. This
breaks apart the rock and frees trapped methane, along with other
dangerous materials.
There are currently more than 27,000 wells in the US, each of which uses
1-8 million gallons of water and 80-300 tons of chemicals each time it
is fracked. Wells can be fracked up to 8 times.
However, the danger is that only 4 of the 31 states that have major
fracking projects have robust drilling rules in place. The fracking
industry remains exempt from Clean Water, Safe Drinking Water and Clean
Air Acts, hazardous waste disposal and other federal regulations.
In the video above you can hear and see what has happened in Pennsylvania through the whole fracking industry.
While fracking was previously banned in New York State, Governor Andrew
Cuomo is currently considering a temporary lift to this ban, and this
could happen within the next three weeks.
Award-winning filmmaker Josh Fox
has made the short film about the visit by Artists Against Fracking to
Pennsylvania, where people can hear from residents living with fracking,
and explaining the problems resulting from the industry.
Artists Against Fracking are asking everyone to watch the film, and then prepare for a coordinated day of action on Twitter.
What they say is:
"Groups and communities across the country are organizing a "tweetstorm"
targeting Governor Cuomo on Wednesday February 6th from 1pm ET until
4pm ET."
"What's a tweetstorm? A tweetstorm is when people agree to use
twitter.com to tweet a message at a decision maker, pressuring him or
her to make a decision. Think of it as a virtual protest at the
Governor's office."
"Together we'll flood Governor Cuomo's Twitter inbox with thousands of tweets calling for a ban on fracking in New York."
If readers would like to get involved, here is what you should tweet:
Tell @NYGovCuomo #dontfrackny! Click to sign the petition @causes to protect clean & healthy communities: http://links.causes.com/s/clIHwX?r=gUBO
Yoko Ono and her son, Sean Lennon, started a petition
against fracking in New York. They were then invited to visit
communities in Pennsylvania to see the actual impacts and effects of
fracking, up close and personal.
Together with their friend Susan Sarandon, and
honored by being joined by Mahatma Ghandi's grandson, Arun Ghandi, they
headed off to Pennsylvania to find out for themselves the effects of
this controversial method of gas extraction. They also invited members
of the press to travel along with them.
They drove into the quaint town of Montrose, PA, only to be upset by the
sight of a gas pad of four drills, with a hissing pressure release.
There was a giant compressor station under construction, a drilling rig
which reached to the sky, and a whole load of huge trucks, full of sand
and toxic chemicals running around on narrow dirt roads. Not so quaint
after all.
However, the sight of the beautiful landscape being ruined was not all,
as the group then met the residents, whose homes and lives have been
forever changed because of fracking.
Among the people they met were Vera Scroggins, Craig Stevens, Rebecca
Roter, Frank Finan, Ray Kemble and the Manning family.
The video above
includes an interview with Tammy Manning about the pollution of their
well and ground water.
None of these
residents can drink water from their own wells any more, even though
they are on their own properties, due to the poisoning of the fracking
process. They cannot use their well water to drink, to wash dishes, to
bathe, do laundry or to cook food. In effect, these families have to
buy water every day, despite the fact that they have their own wells, on
their own properties, that used to supply them with fresh healthy
water.
As Manning says in the video, they have to run the water to prevent
methane gas from building up and possibly causing an explosion. When
they do this, they have to ensure that their windows are open, as the
gas could then poison them. It is a dreadful situation, and there is
apparently no way to reverse this.
Artists against Fracking
Sean Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Arun Ghandi visit with families impacted by dirty fracking operations in PA.
"Our water was bubbling in our well. It looked like a full running boil in our well," said Tammy Manning, 45.
"We don't want to have to leave," she added. "We just bought the house. But if we've no water what can we do."
Naturally, when their water went bad, their property values declined,
making it difficult to even sell and move to a healthier place to raise
their families. "I don't think we can sell it with no water. We're
stuck," said Manning.
What makes it worse is that the gas companies are accusing these defenseless people of lying. However, the Artists against Fracking group saw the brown smelly water in the homes they visited, and even took samples away with them.
Artists against Fracking
Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon and Susan Sarandon hold water from Ray Kemble's kitchen sink.
During their visit to Pennsylvania, the Guardian reports that the group
was somewhat attacked by filmmaker, Phelim McAleer, in Dimock, who is
pro-fracking. McAleer apparently approached the group's bus with a
cameraman.
McAleer apparently then loudly accused Ono, Lennon and
Sarandon of acting in the interests of the "1%" in their opposition to
the practice.
The Irish filmmaker then apparently lost his trilby hat in the mud when
he heckled the activists and got heckled back.
McAleer was also in the
news recently after accusing Matt Damon, star of the new film, Promised Land which deals with the subject of fracking, of being a "liar."
Apparently a panel discussion
about the movie featured Damon and Damon said that the movie wasn’t
political.
“I don’t want to call Matt Damon a liar but he’s a liar,
really,” McAleer said. “It’s a deeply political movie and it’s deeply
disingenuous for Matt Damon to say otherwise. … Matt Damon isn’t telling
the truth.”
In the latest incident in Pennsylvania, McAleer shouted at them and
cited EPA studies, that the group says are incorrect, saying that the
drinking water in Dimock was safe.
Yoko Ono sincerely hopes that Governor Cuomo will make the same tour as
they did before making any decisions on whether to allow fracking in New
York.
While its too late for Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, Ono is hoping
that Governor Corbett of Pennsylvania will visit the same families and
homes as the group did, to stop the industry from spreading further in
that beautiful state.
Ono and Artists against Fracking are also urging President Obama to take
a trip to Pennsylvania and to set aside any notion he may have of
depending on fracking instead of true clean energy. Ono says that
industry documents prove that these wells crack and leak, more and more
over time. This cannot be prevented and once it occurs, cannot be
fixed, thousands of feet below ground.
Anyone who wishes to prevent this same awful situation happening in New York can sign the petition here, and learn more about the dangers of fracking here.
