I read an article in the New York Times on the recent East Coast earthquake of 2011, August 23rd. You may remember that it didn't put the big numbers on the board (Magnitude 5.8) that the West Coast typically enjoys, but it had a much larger audience (like most of the eastern seaboard). Its damage was more symbolic than substantive. It put cracks in the Washington Monument and National Cathedral, compromising structures we typically think of as enduring and eternal, perhaps more so than the underlying institutions they symbolize.
I must confess some mild satisfaction in the event from a very selfish perspective. I had recently participated in an effort to secure bonding for a new high school in my blessed 'burb. I attended a community meeting as an advisor to our local disaster preparedness committee which was drafting a five year plan for pre-disaster planning and mitigation. The Committee was recommending that the new high school be designed to serve the Town as a much needed emergency shelter, and that its structure in key sections should be appropriately reinforced to sustain any likely earthquake or hurricane wind damage.
This particular community meeting was before a political town committee (it shall remain un-named). The intent of this meeting was to inform the party of the specifics of the proposal and answer any questions, to facilitate voting on the facts and not dogma, as well as to pre-empt false claims about the need for the school as a whole, and related emergency and energy related proposals in the bond proposal. One of those proposals also called for assuring emergency power generation (a logical component of an emergency shelter).
One grump in the audience huffed: 'When was the last time we had an earthquake! And the last hurricane was in '85 (Gloria)! Another waste of taxpayer money!'
The week of August 23rd saw a double-header. While the earthquake was modest by West Coast standards, and admittedly infrequent in East Coast history (once a century, whether you need it or not), it did more to shake us out of the complacency that 'it can't happen here'. Irene degraded from a Cat 3 hurricane to a tropical storm by the time it hit Guilford, Connecticut, and it did not do the damage to New York City that was expected, but it did much more damage as a tropical storm over a much wider area than was projected. Much of Connecticut and other areas were without power or communications for as much as a week. And this was, by many measures, a mild event.
I would very much have liked to time-travel back to that June meeting to confront the curmudgeon and say "Hah, you old fool!!!". But, since I am rapidly approaching the stage of old-fool-dom myself (and may already arrived), and since the bond issue subsequently passed, it is neither prudent, nor relevant, nor possible to do so. Especially impossible, although I note that the Republicans seem particularly adept at traveling back in time. The Democrats so far have failed to master traveling forward in time. The rest of us are mired in the present. But, I digress.
What really caught my attention in the NYT article was the passage below:
"The vast midsection of North America is ancient, having last experienced any kind of tectonic activity ages ago. “It’s old crystalline bedrock that hasn’t been deformed for in some cases a billion years,” Dr. Nettles said.
Compare that, Dr. Nettles said, to the tectonically active West, which is being deformed now as plates move against each other and magma comes up from far below the surface.
West Coast quakes, though potentially stronger than those in the East and Midwest, are not felt as far away. That is because actively deforming rock is hotter, more fractured and contains more fluid; older rock is colder and more contiguous."
Let's deconstruct these sentences and let them sink in.
The vast midsection of North America is ancient, having last experienced any kind of tectonic activity ages ago. “It’s old crystalline bedrock that hasn’t been deformed for in some cases a billion years,” Dr. Nettles said."
Is that the same mid-section that we are contemplating exploiting for "unconventional" natural gas by means of fracking?
"West Coast quakes, though potentially stronger than those in the East and Midwest, are not felt as far away. That is because actively deforming rock is hotter, more fractured and contains more fluid; older rock is colder and more contiguous." [ Emphasis added ]
Does this suggest that, if we frack on a sufficiently large scale, as it would seem we must to take advantage of the professed but yet unverified reserves to meet our verifiable energy gluttony, we will be trading the virtue of our cold hard East Coast rock for a more vibrant West Coast fracture?
Now, I'm an accountant, not a geophysicist. And I'll be the first to acknowledge that I don't know crack about frack. But I am aware that we've just begun to study the effects of fracking in Louisiana where an increase in ground-tremor activity has hypothetically been attributed fracking activity. Cause and effect? The jury is still out. But will we wait for the jury's verdict, or continue to rush head-long to the pre-conceived goal, damn the torpedoes and the tremors?
I am mindful of recent Exxon commercials touting the virtues of their fail-safe fracking processes, even as less exotic technologies continue to fail with disturbing frequency for Exxon and its industry cohort. Then there's that avatar that I refer to affectionately as 'The Babe in Black', appropriately dressed for the oil industry, who coos about all that oil does for us (true), and all the jobs it creates (true), and how safe it is (increasingly up for discussion).
So I have to wonder:
1. how precisely are the oil companies capable of fracking the targeted geological structures and keeping peripheral structures in tact for containment;
2. what happens if, after twenty years of aggressive fracking, the East Coast decides to rumble again off schedule, and the fracking generates further fissures which open groundwater to the theoretically contained fracking 'cocktail' and un-recovered gas; and finally
3. what is the 'fix' for such a potential calamity? (Remember, it's not a calamity until it's in your back yard, and your drinking water.)
Prudence and due diligence are not among our top ten national traits, so I fully expect that the practice of fracking will continue to progress unabated by public concern, founded or otherwise. But sometimes you've just got to wonder if we know what the frack we're doing.
Onward
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