_{Staff Reports / The New York Times}

It’s hard to know how many of us citizens are monitoring the mess oozing from the ground in Ohio, where toxic waste water from fracking is bubbling out of the soil in dozens of places and is all but certain to show up one day in the drinking water of historic Marietta, Ohio, and other communities.

The radioactive mess should surprise no one. Ohio state officials have in the past few years approved more than 240 “injection wells” for the disposal of the waste oil and gas that are byproducts of fracking to mine the earth for natural gas.

By comparison, there are just 19 such injection wells in Pennsylvania, and a few dozen in West Virginia, both of which border Ohio.

State officials, like officials everywhere else, assured citizens the injection wells would safely entomb the water for ever.

That was, of course, a lie.

Beyond the toxic leaks oozing in yards, state forest, and farm fields are hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive fracking wastewater buried with the state’s blessings beneath the feet of Ohioans.

For years, it has arrived in a caravan of tanker trucks that come night and day to deposit the toxic brine in injection wells that pump it thousands of feet underground, where it is supposed to stay forever.

Except, oops. The poison brine is spurting to the surface, and locals fear it could soon contaminate the drinking water source for 32,000 people. “It would destroy the city,” said Susan Vessels, president of the Marietta City Council. “Once the damage is done, it cannot be undone.”

Vessels claims — though I’m absolutely not convinced — that residents and local officials were for years “completely unaware” of their place at the heart of an interstate marketplace for toxic waste. They’ve come to realize, she said, that their corner of Ohio has become a major destination for fracking brine.

What Vessels should have said is that she and others around Marietta were willingly blind to the destruction of Mother Earth. The photo of protestors at an Ohio fracking meeting comes from a February 2024 article, and there are news reports earlier than that.

This ecological nightmare didn’t come out of no where. It came with the approval of state and the silence of far too man local officials and citizens.

_{Read the original news report at The New York Times}

Valerie Turner lays lead guitar, handles lead vocals, and specializes in intricate Piedmont-style ragtime fingerpicking, while her husband and bandmate Benedict (Ben) Turner provides traditional roots percussion using the washboard, bones, harmonica, and harmony vocals. The two serve as cultural historians and educators preserving early African-American country blues.