Expert Says Earthquake in Ohio Man-Made, Caused by Hydraulic Fracking

Is this the beginning of the end for ‘fracking‘? The evidence continues to mount proving the practice creates clear causal links to lethal water pollution and now fracking is being blamed for causing earthquakes. If you needed any confirmation that there was an energy crisis underway, the American corporate oligarchy is so fearful of falling into the grips of an oil crisis that they now seem to consider causing earthquakes as collateral damage to extracting domestic oil.

Won-Young Kim, a research professor of Seismology Geology and Tectonophysics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, is the latest expert to directly link hydrofracking to a swarm of earthquakes in Ohio. Slow down and think about this: man-made earthquakes are now a reality. We always thought we’d hear that some tin-foil hat claim that the U.S. had weaponized earthquakes turned out to be true and HAARP really was for nefarious purposes. But no, the reality is much more mundane — in order to maximize profit and domestic oil production, U.S. industry is now actively pursuing a methodology that creates earthquakes as a side effect.

Kim cautions this is not a short-term problem, and in fact the recent earthquakes are just the beginning:

None of this should actually come as a surprise to the hydraulic fracking industry itself, which has been seeking to quash public outcry since becoming aggressive with the practice in the wake of the ‘foreign oil is a National Security risk’ meme. It doesn’t take a scientist to realize that the idea of drilling over two miles into the Earth’s crust (10+ Empire State Buildings) to pump massive amounts of water, sand and chemicals with the express purpose of fracturing the Earth might be dangerous. Anyone who’s seen the movie Armageddon knows that.

There’s apparently one poor guy manning the Ohio seismology station and we assume the energy companies would like to keep it that way. But the Web is starting to wake up more and more to the dangers of fracking. We hope you add your voice to the growing opposition against this suicidal technology. Not that we have anything against the end of the world — but we’d prefer not to be responsible for it.

Cholera Kills Over 7,000 in Post-Earthquake Haiti

It’s being called “one of the largest epidemics of the disease in modern history to affect a single country” by the U.N. World Health Organization’s Pan-American Health Organization. Over 7,000 Haitian citizens are dead after widespread sanitation problems wreaked havoc on the population following the devastating 2010 magnitude-7 earthquake that left over 300,000 dead.

Cholera is a nasty bacteria that infects the small intestine, primarily contracted by drinking dirty water or eating compromised food. It kills 100,000–130,000 people per year worldwide, and not in the nicest way either — watery diarrhea and vomiting eventually result in often lethal dehydration. As one of the few bacterium that can make it through the acidity of the human stomach, they present one of the biggest threats to third-world populations.

Louise Ivers, senior health and policy adviser for U.S.-based aid organization Partners in Health and a Haiti, told USA today that Haitians simply don’t have access to the kind of fresh water resources we have. In their country, tossing out a half-finished bottle of water would send hundreds scrambling for your trash.