Yesterday morning I was sitting at my desk painting, when I felt a wobble in my chair. It lasted a short time, long enough for me to wonder if I was experiencing an earthquake. I looked over to the cup of water I use to clean my paintbrushes, and saw that the water was swaying back and forth, which sort of confirmed that there was an earthquake happening. It was all very gentle, but still, it was an earthquake. I noted the time; 7:42, and wrote it and the word, “Tremble” on a scrap of paper, thinking I would check later to see if an earthquake had indeed occurred.
I kept painting, then blogging, and sort of forgot about it about the wobbling I had felt. Later when I was eating my lunch while watching TV, I noticed one of the banner headlines scrolling across the bottom of the screen said there had been a 4.7 earthquake in Alberta. Remembering my experience that morning, I went to get my iPad where I have an Earthquake App, to see exactly where the earthquake was.
You can see the screen I saw above. The blue dot is where our house is. The earthquake happened about 100 miles away, and some news reports said it was even felt in Prince George, 200 miles away. It was caused by fracking.
They do a lot of fracking in Alberta and also up in the Peace River area in BC. Fracking operations pump a lot of toxic water down deep into the ground, and that often causes earthquakes in the surrounding area, but usually those earthquakes aren’t so powerful and aren’t felt in such a huge area.
It is yet another impact of the Oil Industry.
View my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
No comments:
Post a Comment