FreshWater Accountability Project has continually interacted with the regulatory agencies in Ohio, often requesting public records, to determine how well the fracking industry is monitored and held accountable for its harms and to ask the regulators’ involvement to be protective of public health and the environment.

Unfortunately, due to the dismantling of important regulations at the federal level in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, often called the “Halliburton Loophole,” frack waste is falsely classified as “non-hazardous” and is processed and disposed of as such. The lack of regulation attracts Limited Liability Corporations to proliferate to take advantage of the profits to be made from the cheap disposal of toxic, radioactive frack waste. A recent records request has revealed some of the companies that have been referred to the Ohio Attorney General’s office by the ODNR because of violations. We are sharing those records as we can download and post them for your information. We believe the referrals are good news to show the ODNR is doing its job. Still, we also believe it falls short of the monitoring, regulating, and enforcement that could be done to adequately protect the harms of the highly toxic and unregulated industry of fracking.

We need more protective rules and regulations. That falls upon our elected representatives in Columbus to do so; unfortunately, we do not believe they are doing an adequate job to address the deficiencies in the regulation and monitoring of fracking and frack waste facilities. For now, we will continue to request public records and share them so people can see for themselves the inadequacies in the system that allows fracking to harm the environment and public health in the regions in which it operates.