Texas Earthquakes Blamed on Fracking

            Companies that produce energy deny any links
David Hull blames damage to his Reno, Texas, home on earthquakes caused by hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — for natural gas. / Michael Mulvey/USA Today

RENO, TEXAS — The first time the earth shook their home, David and Meredith Hull thought it was a propane tank exploding outside.
Then it happened again. And again and again — more than 30 earthquakes since early November. One tremor tossed David Hull against the refrigerator and Meredith atop the stove.

"It felt like something was under the house literally lifting it up and slamming it back down on its foundation," said David Hull, 60, a retired sheriff’s deputy.

The Hulls are one of dozens of families here and in nearby Azle, about 17 miles northwest of Fort Worth, who say they’ve been hit with earthquakes since November. Residents and city leaders point to area oil and gas disposal wells as culprits.
The wells dispose of wastewater used in hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — for natural gas in the nearby Barnett Shale.

Firms: No evidence
Energy companies deny a direct link between the earthquakes and the wells, citing a lack of evidence. The vast majority of the 35,000 disposal wells throughout Texas have reported no seismic activity, said Bill Stevens of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. Still, the alliance has created a task force to investigate.

"We feel comfortable that there is not a crisis," he said. "But we’re also dedicated to pursuing it to the end."

North Texas isn’t alone. Earthquakes in Colorado, Oklahoma, Ohio and Arkansas over the past few years have all been tied to wastewater injection wells. New research presented at the Seismological Society of America annual meeting last month showed that disposal wells may be changing stress on faults and inducing earthquakes.

300 quakes recorded:While Reno and Azle residents have reported 30 earthquakes to the U.S. Geological Survey, area seismologists have recorded more than 300 quakes in the area since December — many too small for human detection — all clustered around area injection wells.

The earthquakes have been relatively small, less than a magnitude 4.0 — not big enough to cause major damage but alarming enough to spur state leaders into action. In March, the Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees the oil and gas industry, hired a seismologist to study the matter.

In early May, Texas legislators convened a House Subcommittee on Seismic Activity to gather testimony from affected residents and experts. A team of seismologists from Southern Methodist University in Dallas is also investigating a possible link between earthquakes and the wells.

The quakes have cracked ceilings in homes and left gaping sinkholes in fields, said Reno Mayor Lynda Stokes, who, along with Azle Mayor Alan Brundrett, testified at the subcommittee hearing l

Tremors near wells:
Earthquakes in Texas are historically rare. But in 2008, earthquakes began in the Dallas-Fort Worth area near where energy companies were fracking for natural gas, said Cliff Frohlich, associate director of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, who studied the tremors. Frohlich and others measured more than 60 quakes over a two-year period, all near injection wells.

Reno and Azle, as well as Dallas, sit on small fault lines several miles underground, Frohlich said. Wastewater blasted into disposal wells at high speeds could potentially disturb those otherwise dormant faults, causing them to slip and induce earthquakes, he said.

Witchy is up in arms :
First , I am a hardcore environmentalist . My partner and I will be bringing you news about our planet . This latest earthquake in Reno , Texas is only a skip and hop as the CROW flies as we say down here . We may not be able to fix it but we surely can slow it down .Considering that Texas /rarely/ had earthquakes beforehand, all of these mini-quakes are unnerving as hell, meaning that they have some right to panic when shit like that happens because to them it is a bit of a big deal.
That, and architecture in Texas is not made for continual earthquakes of any size; the foundations are suffering for it, if the house even is built on a solid foundation (meaning concrete rather than just being built over packed down dirt and pipework), which most of them are not.
Common sense tells anyone that if you keep applying pressure to something, eventually it is going to move.
Just sayin'