Injection Wells in Darke County
By Bob Rhoades

Sometimes one has to wait to see what nuts fall out of the tree on the injection matter. They may not have all fallen yet, but here are some thoughts.

A few years ago, because of my job, I had to attend a Ground Water class at EPA School in Cincy. Over the course of a couple years, this turned into about three classes. I learned a lot about monitoring the underground and probably forgot more than I remember. Leaking underground storage tanks clouded our aquifers for years. In 1998 laws were put into effect that fixed that problem, cleaned up our underground streams and hopefully corrected our lack of concern for our own existence since Henry Ford put the first auto on the road.

The bottom line is this. We've pretty much scarred the earth by every means the human mind can think of. We fixed a lot of the problems. Here in Darke County, one of our legacies is that the earth was scarred by what became a global company, American Aggregates. The scarring of the earth by removing the generous deposits of gravel we had that was needed to build this great county and nation was monitored by one man, Fred Coppock president of AmAg. One man with some common sense! Fred's motto was "we will never scar the earth"! He engrained that into his employees.

One of the first gravel pits in the area was the Alter of Peace in Greenville City Park. It was reclaimed by the company to commemorate and serve the community. Another is the Village of Wayne Lakes which was called Wayne Lakes Park after being reclaimed. It is now a village and an asset to the county.

Since we live in a county that has had such high standards placed on it by our predecessors in regards to top of the earth, it makes little sense to "scar" what is beneath the earth. If there is the very slimmest of a chance that our ground water could be compromised it is a non-issue. It cannot and should not be even considered. Just as underground storage tanks were out of sight, it didn’t take long to find out they would not be out of mind.

A few years back a similar debate took place on whether we should allow CO2 to be injected into the earth below us. I wondered at the time why in the world we would want that when it could be captured and used. Finally someone with the wherewithal to do something about it did just that and now we have another industry in Darke County. The mixture that is used in the fracking process must end in a similar fashion.

This county feeds the nation! We can’t allow our own existence the possibility of being poisoned. It seems that Basic Environmental Law comes into play here. EPA regulations state that if you make a mess you clean it up, not take it somewhere else and make another mess with it!

The very fact that anyone would try to make this a partisan issue shows that few can keep a clear focus on the real problem. The debate should be only about the stewardship we have with this great planet we live on and certainly not on whether a proponent of either side of fracking is a Democrat or a Republican. There is enough of that crap in Washington DC and apparently some in Columbus.

We allowed one man to tell us that bringing sexual offenders into our county for rehab was a good thing. We probably don’t need any more of someone else’s problems brought here for us to deal with.