Save UK Park lands

Britain’s treasured national parks could become drilling sites in a recent move by the government to open them up to fracking by big oil companies. It’s part of a wider government plan inviting oil companies to apply for licenses to drill for oil all across the UK — and about half the country is up for grabs.

The current process to get a licence to drill for oil in the UK is long and relatively robust, but Minister for Energy Matthew Hancock wants to speed up the process so companies can start drilling with six months of making an application.

And we all know what that means: cut corners and bad decisions.Unfortunately, once our national parks have been desecrated by fracking, there’s no coming back.

An Ohio disaster coming to the UK?

Ohio firefighters battled this blaze for an entire week. Before they managed to fully extinguish it, the fire caused some 30 explosions that rained shrapnel over the surrounding area; 20 trucks on the site caught fire; and tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals — including a toxic soup of diesel fuel, hydrochloric acid, and ethylene glycol — mixed with runoff into the nearby creek, killing an estimated 70,000 fish as far as five miles downstream. State officials physically removed the decomposing remains of more than 11,000 fish and other aquatic life in their efforts to reduce the damage to the waterway.

 

This could happen here: From Ecocidealert

Drinking Water Threatened
Severe damage to a local creek is troubling enough, but this particular waterway feeds into the Ohio River roughly five miles away where, just another 1.7 miles downstream, a public water intake on the West Virginia side of the river serves local residents.

Tell the government to immediately remove national parks from the list of areas open to fracking operations.

http://action.sumofus.org/a/national-parks-fracking/mtl