Kudos to the Washington County Commissioners for stepping up on behalf of their constituents on the issue of injection wells. All three commissioners (President Charlie Schilling, Jamie Booth, and Kevin Ritter) were in attendance at the June 2 meeting regarding the proposed additional injection well in Little Hocking, which was scheduled by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management).

At that meeting 34 people offered comments and questions about the proposed injection well #2 –not one person spoke in favor of the application, which was submitted by an out-of-state company.

The format of the meeting which was set by ODNR officials, made a mockery of the term, “public meeting.”

There was no opportunity to get questions answered; when one of us asked the ODNR official who presided over the meeting about the format, he replied, “There will be no dialogue.”

One of the major reasons that ODNR even agreed to a public meeting was that the county commissioners requested it.

After the public meeting Commission President Charlie Schilling, arranged a meeting with the director of ODNR and officials from the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management at their offices in Columbus.

At this June 16 meeting Mr. Schilling asserted his interest in obtaining answers to the many questions from his constituents about the proposed injection well and the whole process of public review of injection well applications.

He was able to extract a commitment from these officials for modifying the format of public meetings on injection wells so that questions can be addressed and for informing relevant county commissioners and township trustees when an application for an injection well is first submitted to ODNR (in the case of the application in question the applicant submitted documents in March 2021; ODNR reviewed the application for a full year before making the public announcement about the application, and gave the public–including public officials–30 days to respond).

The process of applying, reviewing, and requesting public input on injection well permits has been under the radar for years.

Over these many years Washington County has achieved the distinction of having the highest volume of brine waste of any county in the state–in 2019 8.5 million barrels of this toxic and radioactive waste (Radium 226 and Radium 228) has been pumped under the ground of our county.

Fracking waste, aka brine water, contains carcinogenic substances, chemical toxic metals, and when they are injected into permeable rock, they can migrate up to abandoned oil and gas wells.

This seepage of brine waste has led to the damage and destruction of oil and gas production wells. Leaking injection wells can also contaminate aquifers (containing drinking water), rivers and lakes, thereby pose serious threats to human health. Washington County has had enough with serving as the trash heap for fracking waste from eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

George Banziger

Robert Lane

Marietta