Many New Yorkers don't want fracking to come to their state - and with good reason, the author says.
Last August in Denver during the keynote speech at an energy industry conference, Dave Lesar,
the CEO of Halliburton, conducted a remarkable demonstration: drinking
from a glass of hydraulic fracturing fluid. This was done apparently to
prove how safe fracking fluid is, for people individually, underground
water supplies particularly and the environment generally.
Lesar did not do the drinking himself; for reasons that are unclear, he
passed the glass to another Halliburton executive, who quaffed and did
not drop dead. The corporate food tester was subsequently identified
publicly as Halliburton Chief Financial Officer Mark McCollum. He reportedly pronounced that fracking fluid “tastes like beer.” McCollum presumably has been a teetotaler since.
This antic recalls Richard (Dicky) Riker. Back in the early 1830s in
New York City, Riker claimed that he drank a pint of Manhattan Co. water
every morning and that he and his family “enjoy good health.” Riker was
the city’s longtime chief legal officer and, in that capacity, was also
an ex officio director of the Manhattan Co., the notorious water
business founded 30 years earlier by Aaron Burr.
Burr’s water company, established with the unwitting blessing of the
state Legislature, proved to be a cover for his chief purpose, founding a
bank. The company’s monopoly water operations, employing foul local
wells and leaky wooden pipes, were deficient and deplorable and, after
preventing a proper solution to the city’s freshwater needs for 40
years, eventually ceased; the company’s bank, however, matured into what
is today JPMorgan Chase.
Riker’s drinking claim, given during Common (now City) Council debate
in 1831 on whether the Manhattan Co. should be stripped of its charter,
made him the subject of lampoon and ridicule as a company apologist
until the end of his days in 1842, amid citywide celebrations for the
completion of the Croton Aqueduct. The iconic Croton, supplying pure and
abundant water from the Westchester mainland, delivered the city from
disease and was the first piece in the city’s now vast modern supply
that fracking opponents and certain public officials are concerned about
preserving.
The Manhattan Co. was the first water tragedy for New York City. Its
monopoly water powers, fiercely defended by company lawyers to preserve
the company’s associated banking rights, prevented the emergence of a
better private or public supply until Asiatic cholera killed 3,500 — one
in 70 — New Yorkers in 1832 and prompted civic-minded political leaders
to secure the Croton over diminishing Manhattan Co. resistance.
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