TESTING WATERS Farmers situated next to officially identified hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations need to conduct baseline analysis of their drinking water before fracking starts
Nonprofit organisation for cancer prevention the Cancer Association of South Africa (CANSA) has advised farmers whose farms border on officially identified hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations in the Karoo, in the Eastern Cape, to finance professional baseline analyses of their drinking water before fracking starts.
This will ensure that they are able to produce proof of water contamination, should that be the case after fracking has taken place, says CANSA research head Dr Carl Albrecht.
“Without such data, a farmer . . . would not have a leg to stand on in court because, to prove that the drinking water was polluted by fracking, one would need comprehensive before-and-after pollution data of the water in question,” he explains.
Albrecht says CANSA learnt last year through its research that the fracking fluid used by gas exploration companies is laced with up to 750 chemicals, of which about 150 are known carcinogens and/or endocrine-disrupting chemicals suspected of causing breast cancer.
“We were shocked to learn that carcinogens, such as benzene, which can cause leukaemia, are added to fracking fluid, and that formaldehyde, which is also added, was classified as a Group 1 carcinogen in humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer,” he tells Engineering News.
Albrecht says CANSA is concerned about an accidental spillage of fracking fluid in the Karoo, which could cause “major damage, resulting in illness and suffering because of a long-lasting carcinogen catastrophe”.
CANSA believes that, in every fracking operation, it would only be a matter of time before the fracking-well casings fail, which makes contamination inevitable.