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Frack the Dead: Gas Companies Want to Drill in Graveyards

Gas companies are risking a PR shitstorm to try to convince cemeteries to hand over the leasing rights to the land underneath the dead, so they can frack away below thousands of embalmed corpses.

So let’s say your parents are buried in a grassy midwestern cemetery, on a nice little plot underneath the canopy of an oak tree. You’d saved up, gone halfsies with your sister to buy that space, and you picked out the somber but respectful headstones. R.I.P., they read, along with the names and dates. Nothing fancy. And now a gas company wants to drop its gigantic, earthquake-causing fracking drills directly below them, blasting away with toxic chemical cocktails.

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And they do, all over the country. Gas companies are risking a PR shitstorm to try to convince cemeteries to hand over the leasing rights to the land underneath the dead, so they can frack away below thousands of embalmed corpses.

Here’s the AP: “cemeteries – including veterans’ final resting places in Colorado and Mississippi – join parks, playgrounds, churches and residential backyards among the ranks of places targeted in the nation’s shale drilling boom.”

Drillers want this Ohio cemetery. There’s natural gas under those corpses. Via NewsOK.

Drilling companies say that they can get at the gas without disturbing any graves by using a horizontal drilling techniques. But fracking already has everyone uneasy, and drilling on sacred ground is a bridge too far.

In eastern Ohio, gas companies had the balls to propose drilling under a 122 year-old cemetery in the same region where fracking had recently set off a round of earthquakes. They offered $140,000 and 16% of the royalties. Which evidently would have covered the entire graveyard’s budget for 20 years. But overwhelming community opposition scuttled the deal. Residents called it “a dumb idea” and most rallied against it.

Not everyone’s so squeamish. The Catholic Cemetery Association of the Diocese of Pittsburgh signed over the rights to 15 cemeteries in Pennsylvania back in 2010, though it caught some major flack for doing so.

Most of the complaints about fracking are environmental and health-based—the methane leaks, the aquifer contamination, the flammable drinking water, the greenhouse gas emissions, the land degradation, etc. But this is caution on spiritual grounds; fracking makes us uneasy enough to draw the line at allowing the practice too near the sacrosanct. It’s discomfiting on a fundamental level. On that note, it’d be interesting to see if there’d be the same kind of opposition to a wind turbine in a cemetery, or solar panels. I doubt it. Someone should do a poll to confirm, because there you’d have it—producing renewable energy is holier than fracking for gas.

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