Re:You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill dee...
by masklinn on Saturday February 26, 2022 @10:17AM
(#30478189)
In every state where fracking got authorised, earthquakes above 3.0 have increased by an order of magnitude (or even appeared where they were considered essentially inexistent).
Hundreds if not thousands of buildings have been damaged across OK and TX because they’d been built with no quake resistance as they’d been built in zones considered inactive, insurers have jacked up their rates and the USGS had to revise their risk maps.
The risk to populations is also non-negligible, because aside from a lack of quake-proof constructions the populations are not trained for or aware of quake safety for the same reason that the areas are historically stable.
I don’t think that’s happened yet in the US (as no fracking quake has exceeded 5.0 yet), but in 2019 fracking started killing people in china: the Sichuan basin, historically a geologically very stable region, got hit with 4 quakes between 4.9 and 6.0, at least 15 died and hundreds were injured.
Hundreds if not thousands of buildings have been damaged across OK and TX because they’d been built with no quake resistance as they’d been built in zones considered inactive, insurers have jacked up their rates and the USGS had to revise their risk maps.
The risk to populations is also non-negligible, because aside from a lack of quake-proof constructions the populations are not trained for or aware of quake safety for the same reason that the areas are historically stable.
I don’t think that’s happened yet in the US (as no fracking quake has exceeded 5.0 yet), but in 2019 fracking started killing people in china: the Sichuan basin, historically a geologically very stable region, got hit with 4 quakes between 4.9 and 6.0, at least 15 died and hundreds were injured.