Writing at ProPublica, Abrahm Lustgarten examines the toxic waste well injection industry’s track record over the last twenty years. With 680,000 waste wells nationwide — where structural failures are routine — communities in the US that supply drinking water are now faced with the increasing threat of aquifers contaminated with acids, asbestos, PCBs, phenol and cyanide. No longer confident in an EPA that doesn’t even collect all data, let alone make sense of it, the citizenry exposed to such wastes as sewage, dioxin and radium must now deal with a present and future where millions of oil and gas wells intersect leaking waste wells and municipal water supply systems. Originally conceived as an alternative to surface dumping of industrial wastes, the out of control deep well injection experiment is no longer out of sight, out of mind.
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