Ohio earthquakes said to be caused by fracking wastewater disposal

Injection of fracking brine water into a well is said have caused 11 earthquakes in Ohio over the past year. Drilling for oil and gas in the area created thousands of gallons of wastewater each day that was being injected into a well near a fault line in Youngstown. The well was shut down Friday to allow authorities to investigate any linkage from the well to the earthquakes.

A 4.0 magnitude quake on Saturday was the largest of the 11 earthquakes that began last March. Though the well is now closed, northeast Ohio residents could still feel the shaky effects of the wastewater injections for a while.

“The earthquakes will trickle on as a kind of a cascading process once you’ve caused them to occur,” said John Armbruster of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “This one year of pumping is a pulse that has been pushed into the ground, and it’s going to be spreading out for at least a year.”

So far, there are no serious injuries or damages associated with the earthquakes.

Read more at nydailynews.com

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