What’s done

More than sixty years ago I walked on to the campus of Marietta College. Many of my days there were spent along the rivers or in walking among the ancient burial mounds holding the remains of the peoples who lived on the land more than 2000 years ago. It is a place of old and sometimes wild beauty.  Marietta sits at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers, one of the largest watersheds in Ohio, covering more than 8,000 square miles, providing water for cities, small towns, farms, and forests.

It came as shock to see that drinking water of Marietta and much of the surrounding watershed may be poisoned with radioactive materials and heavy metals.

The cause of this is the waste waters produced by fracking. Community groups, elected officials, scientists and environmental groups are sounding the alarm and challenging the continued practice of injecting the waste waters of fracking into underground wells. But as the President of the City Council Susan Vessels said this could “destroy the city and, “Once the damage is done, it cannot be undone.”

DeepRock, the corporation responsible for this pollution and its political allies say the concerns are overstated.  To be clear the contaminated water injected into rock and now bubbling to the surface is reported to have “median levels of radium-226, a cancer-causing radioactive material, ranging from 428 to 1,800 times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s drinking water standard.”

Ohio State Senator Brian Chavez and DeepRock’s former chief executive downplayed the threat posed by injection wells. Mr. Chavez compared the radioactivity levels of the waste to that of a banana.

This looming crisis in Ohio holds important lessons for our own City Council. Just before going on August break, the Council approved a resolution opposing “the unmitigated use of Detroit’s water resources for the purpose of cooling AI data centers.” 

The push for Data Centers in our city and state is accelerating. Corporate powers, far more sophisticated than DeepRock, are backing candidates who promise to override the will of communities and bring Data Centers and “jobs.”

The concerns of people and communities about our air and water are brushed aside.  Most dangerous are those politicians accommodate corporate interests by promising to develop “regulations” or “safeguards” at the state and federal level.  The idea that massive uses of land, water, and energy can be rendered harmless by rules and regulations is foolish.

In Michigan, we already have 79 operational data centers, two are under construction, and 16 more are planned. The upcoming Stargate project in Saline will cover 250 acres of farmland, and it will use about as much energy as 1 million homes.  

The ecological damage is incalculable. The idea that our current power companies are capable of handling this kind of increased demand is contradicted by the daily experiences of people throughout the state after every major storm.

The City Council was right to pass a resolution to protect our waters. But we have much more to do to stop this mad rush for massive construction projects to serve corporate interests, not community needs.  As the republican City Council president in Marietta knows only too well, “once the damage is done, it cannot be undone.”