Here It Is: The Impact Fee Bill

Inquir­ing minds are not as con­cerned about the impact fee as we are about the PUC becom­ing our new local plan­ning board as well as court of last resort.

Frack­ing = US chil­dren future com­pro­mised. Water is life.

So now the drillers are writ­ing the Commonwealth’s leg­is­la­tion & greas­ing the skids so the junk law passes — they must be pay­ing top dol­lar, b/c thou­sands of peo­ple have been phon­ing, email­ing and writ­ing, in oppo­si­tion to both HB1950 & SB1100 to both the house & sen­ate over the last week.  Take heart the 2012 Pri­maries are just around the cor­ner & every state rep is up for election. 

p 163, Chap­ter 33 “Local Ordi­nances Relat­ing to Oil & Gas Oper­a­tions” regard­ing com­pres­sor sta­tions says they are per­mit­ted if a cer­tain set­back plus “the noise level does not exceed a noise stan­dard of 60 dbA at the near­est prop­erty line or the applic­a­ble stan­dard imposed by Fed­eral law whichever is greater.” (Same noise restric­tions for NG pro­cess­ing plants). Just dis­cov­ered Amy Mall’s NRDC blog post from 2010 about low-frequency noise (LFN, also called vibro-noise or infra­sound) which turns out to be extremely inju­ri­ous to humans as stud­ied by Euro­pean sci­en­tists (http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/amall/live_on_tape_the_dangerous_noi.html) — read all her links, good place to start. The kicker is, while com­pres­sor sta­tion noise is annoy­ing in terms of that con­stant loud hum­ming, the harm­ful LFN fre­quency is too low to be heard by human hear­ing — it’s inaudi­ble! Never even heard of this before and there are med­ical jour­nals (in Europe) devoted to VibroA­coustic Dis­ease (VAD) caused by LFN whose health effects are not via the ear but whole body impacts. Symp­toms man­i­fest espe­cially in car­dio­vas­cu­lar and hyper­ten­sive effects as well as cog­ni­tive changes. If true that LFN is emit­ted by com­pres­sors sta­tions (to be allowed in res­i­den­tial areas with set­back), LFN not even men­tioned in HB1950 draft. Read the Por­tu­gal study from 2004 linked from Amy’s blog post. I will be research­ing as much as pos­si­ble to learn more and writ­ing to EPA, DEP, and elected offi­cials in Har­ris­burg. Already dif­fi­cult fight­ing radi­a­tion, air and water pol­lu­tion because of invis­i­bil­ity — now here’s some­thing that could be hor­ri­ble that’s inaudible.

When does this series of nearly-daily night­mares ever have the effect of slow­ing down this run­away train? No inde­pen­dent com­pre­hen­sive study of human health effects ever done on state or Fed level. Only in a cor­po­ra­toc­racy could this be hap­pen­ing, even with­out LFN. My God.