Valley Fracking Activists plan open meeting

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

Frackfree Mahoning Valley is planning a town-hall-style public meeting in Youngstown on March 13.

Further details will be released about the meeting time and its location in the coming days.

The meeting will focus on two documents recently obtained by Frackfree Mahoning Valley from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

The first one showed the state denied a permit in September for Rex Energy to inject waste into a Mahoning County injection well.

The second document was a response from the company, which mentioned a possible appeal of the decision, and a request to allow limited injections into the well during deliberations.

Frackfree Mahoning Valley calls for ODNR to stand by its Sept. 24 decision to deny the permit.

Earthquakes have been linked to fracking operations in the Mahoning Valley since 2011, according to Vindicator files.

A magnitude-4.0 earthquake struck shortly after 3 p.m. New Year’s Eve in 2011 under the D&L Energy Inc. brine-injection well in Youngstown. That quake followed months of newspaper reporting about the links between that well and a spate of earthquakes.

On March 10, 2014, a quake with a magnitude of 3.0 shook Poland Township. That and subsequent quakes were linked to a fracking operation by Hilcorp Energy Co. at the Carbon Limestone Landfill.

In a March 23, 2014, Vindicator story, geologists outside of an ODNR investigation considered the link between that fracking operation and the earthquake, something that mining officials previously insisted was not possible.

Later that month, however, ODNR confirmed that fracking was a “probable” trigger of the earthquakes and indicated that fracking aggravated a small, undetected fault.