@wandeljw,
Try this, might make more sense.
Is Fracking Causing Blackbird Deaths and Earthquakes?
1 comment January 6, 2011 in Conspiracy
Alfred Hitchcock must be smiling. Officials are still telling people the recent fish and bird deaths in Arkansas and Louisiana are perfectly normal – while also admitting they have no idea what really caused the die-offs.
Stepping into that information vacuum, bloggers are asking if there’s a link between the deaths and nearby natural gas fracking operations. Fracking can release toxic chemicals into the water supply, and there are more than 3,000 wells scattered across the region.
This part of Arkansas has been suffering from a plague of earthquakes. And while experts are claiming no connection between the fracking and the quakes, that’s not convincing many locals:
Residents in North Central Arkansas are understandably on edge. Since the first of the year [2010] there have been more than 340 earthquakes reported in that part of the state ranging from a .2 all the way up to a 4.0, about a third of them near the small town of Guy. The quakes have been happening in the heart an area known as the Fayetteville Shale where natural gas drilling is occurring.
…Many Arkansans are questioning whether drilling is causing the tremendous number of quakes. Guy mayor Sam Higdon says he doesn’t know but most of his town has an opinion.
Sam Higdon says, “They think it’s the drilling, just the people you talk to.”
And one state official at least is looking into the matter. Scott Ausbrooks, geohazards supervisor for the Arkansas Geological Survey, is investigating whether reinjection wells used to dispose of fracking fluids could be causing the quakes.
See map, left, for blogger proamlib’s helpful juxtaposition of the quakes, the dead fish and birds, and the Fayetteville Shale formation (click for a larger image).
Flockopalypse
Locals are asking: Could there have been a methane release that killed fish in the river and birds in the air? There were six earthquakes in the 48 hours before the bird deaths, centered near Guy (about 50 miles from Beebe).
Three thousand birds don’t just drop out of the sky every day. And it’s not reassuring when officials tell you then know for sure it’s nothing out of the ordinary – when they also admit they have absolutely no idea what the cause is.
“Wildlife officials say the fish deaths are not related to the dead birds, and that because only one species of fish was affected, it is likely they were stricken by an illness.” But if they don’t know what caused the deaths, how can they possibly know they were unrelated?
Likewise, if they have no idea what killed 100,000 drumfish and a handful of other species (5% of the fish were NOT drumfish), then how can Arkansas Game and Fish officials tell people “it’s fine to fish“?
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…
Why is it public officials’ first instinct is to say “No problem”, whether it’s in the movie “Jaws” or the reality of Texas and Arkansas?
Consider Cleburn, Texas, in June of 2009. They’d never ever had an earthquake, but they had a whole lot of fracking going on.
When the town was rattled for the first time in its history by a 2.8 temblor, “Everyone called it a coincidence.”
In the next week, four additional quakes were detected in and around the city. Although the tremors were mild – as low as magnitude 2.1 – they still were noteworthy for North Texas.
“If you look at the history of earthquakes in Texas, it’s unusual to have any down there,” said Paul Caruso, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.
“I’d be somewhat concerned about what’s going on if I lived there,” he said.
No wonder the folks in Beebe aren’t reassured by officials telling them “Everything is just fine.”
Bye, bye, blackbird
Because there were reports of loud banging sounds at around the time birds started falling like feathery black hailstones, officials are trying to blame New Year’s revelers setting off fireworks.
Dan Cristol, a biology professor and co-founder of the Institute for Integrative Bird Behavior Studies at the College of William & Mary, questioned the fireworks theory, noting that was very unlikely unless “somebody blew something into the roost, literally blowing the birds into the sky.” And nobody is reporting birds with powder burns.
What they were reporting: birds dropping from the skies.
Around 11 that night, thousands of red-winged blackbirds began falling out of the sky over this small city about 35 miles northeast of Little Rock. They landed on roofs, roads, front lawns and backyards, turning the ground nearly black and terrifying anyone who happened to be outside.
“One of them almost hit my best friend in the head,” said Christy Stephens, who was standing outside among the smoking crowd at a party. “We went inside after that.”
Sure doesn’t sound normal.
“It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced and I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” Keith Stephens of the Game and Fish Commission says. “I’ll bet you I’ve had 100 calls today, I’ve done 25 interviews. I did Al-Jazeera live last night.”
Unhelpful speculation
As USA Today noted (via Planetsave),
Robert Meese, an avian ecologist at the University of California-Davis, says: “I don’t see any way that they could have flown into obstructions, because then the birds should have been at the base of the objects. … This was a scattering.”
And the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, which had folks on the scene, says they weren’t flying INTO buildings – they were dropping from the sky ONTO buildings
Starting at 11 p.m. Friday, the Beebe Police Department received several complaints about dead birds falling from the sky, landing on roofs and littering yards for about a mile long stretch between U.S. 367 and the Arkansas State University campus.
It’s also been noted that at 11 pm, Redwing blackbirds are sleeping, not flying high.
Birds die all the time, right?
Various officials tried to make the case that it’s not uncommon to have large numbers of bird deaths. Another die-off happened a few days later, about 300 miles away in Arkansas, and while nobody really has any idea what killed those 500 birds either, they’re trying to use that to show this is just business as usual in the bird world.
But is that really the case? Let’s go to the numbers.
The United States Geological Survey has a handy chart of bird death events, located on their website.
Scroll down through it. Most of the die-offs are in the dozens, not the thousands. Where the events affected larger numbers of birds, the time frame tends to be in weeks or months, and they list a definite cause, like avian cholera or parasites. The largest event, 4300 birds, was a parasite outbreak that lasted almost three months
The Arkansas event has now passed that number with as many as 5,000 birds, and is the only large event to happen over a single day.
“It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced and I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” Keith Stephens of the Game and Fish Commission says. “I’ll bet you I’ve had 100 calls today, I’ve done 25 interviews. I did Al-Jazeera live last night.”
So what’s the answer?
Is it fracking? Fireworks? Methane? An act of God?
Responsible officials should be taking possible dangers seriously. And if they’re going to decry irresponsible speculation by bloggers, they shouldn’t indulge in irresponsible speculation themselves.
Possibly the weirdest theory (from Arkansas Online):
For conspiracy theorists – Edward Beebe is a world renowned particle accelerator physicist. Robert J. Sawyer – top sci-fi awards winner, canadian sci-fi author of fiction FlashForward where a particle accelerator is used to down birds in Somalia – such a test run apparently by character Dyson Frost (not Campos or Simcoe characters). Consider in real life Swayer served as real life Writer-in-Residence at Canadian Light Source — Canada’s national synchrotron research facility and its largest particle accelerator — Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 1 June-31 July 2009; first ever writer-in-residence at this cutting-edge physics lab; position created specifically for Sawyer. Note Flashforward tv show is cancelled before April 2009 disclosure of explanation for blackout. Swayer may be a modern day Dyson Frost? Beebe, Swayer and other particle scientists may be working on an experiment in Beebe, AR – chosen coincidently for physicists’ last name? LHC/Cern completed two particle collision in real life and are closer to a FlashForward kind of event.
Update: This is weird. And silly.
I guess I wasn’t the only writer who thought of Hitchcock. The Bennington Vale Press reports this was a failed publicity stunt for a remake of ”The Birds”.
A studio executive, on condition of anonymity, told The Bennington Vale Evening Transcript, “The stunt was a gross miscalculation. We were trying to help get audiences interested in the remake with a small scare. Unfortunately, the planes dropped the birds over Arkansas instead of Northern California where our marketing crews were waiting to hand out movie posters and swag bags.”
“Reboots of Hitchcock films have a history of poor box office performance,” the source continued. “Look at the shot-by-shot update of ‘Psycho.’ Boring. I kept waiting for Vince Vaughan to don a leisure suit and take off for Vegas with a bottle of Dewar’s. But yes, in hindsight, this was about the stupidest thing we could’ve done. Apart from remaking another classic, that is.”
Considering another headline on the site, “Horrifying Indiana Earthquake Spurs Mellencamp Divorce“, I’m guessing this is NOT the actual solution to the mystery…. But Kiran Adithan at Mediabistro.com was taken in by the spoof. LOLZ!
More on the issue of fracking:
Pennsylvanians are Fracked
Interior Department on the right track on fracking, but some Members of Congress get it wrong
Putting the Brakes on Natural Gas Fracking
First State to Address Dangers of Fracking: Wyoming
(Map image via ProAmLib)
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