Thursday, October 18, 2012

Blog 8 Ali Faraz Thursday,October 18,2012 Driller agrees to pay $84K federal fine for pollution in Washington County

                           Driller agrees to pay $84K federal fine for pollution in Washington County


October 18  4:10 am



On October 18 2012 Timothy Puko of Pittsburgh Tribune- Review reported that a Findlay – based drilling company has been charged an $84,506 federal fine for air pollution. Fine also included chemical violations, which occurred in Washington County region.  The EPA cited Atlas Energy for several storage problems in 2008 and 2009.  The company failed to respond about the hazardous chemical storage, improperly stored some of its products and had tanks, which leaked vapor. Nobody was harmed because of the problems but EPA spokesman Bonnie Smith said they found the problems through an investigation that started after a March 31 fire at a pit at one of the company’s wells.  The company has agreed to pay the fines and also stopped the drilling and production in Washington County while they review eight facilities for air pollution and other environmental risks. 
A lot of companies are not fully taking the responsibility towards an eco friendly environment.  In my last blog we saw something similar where Shell was not taking the responsibility of cleaning there own mess. This is a global issue because this is not a new story. Many big companies are abusing their powers and destroying the environment.  Some companies agree to pay the damages but some don’t even if they do pay the damages they will not accept their fault in front of the public. This is important to our class because we are at the peak of extracting natural resources from this planet but with that we are destroying the environment and creating a big problem for the future generations.  Fines are good way to prevent the oil companies from damaging our environment but if company continues to damage the society we should punish them more strictly. For example this company should have been fined in 2009 when the repeated the mistake second time. Why wait for the third time? This is our environment and we have to create every possible effort to keep it healthy. 


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