EcoWatch Interviews Public Herald About Fracking & Triple Divide

EcoWatch_Screen Shot

With high-profile activists like Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon taking a stand against fracking, the controversial drilling practice has been pulled from the periphery and placed in the public's main line-of-sight at a scale sparking movement from Hollywood. Promised Land, a film starring Matt Damon as a salesman for a natural gas company, hits theaters tonight, lending cinematic drama to the issue of fracking. While the large-scale exposure is valuable, Melissa Troutman, co-creator of another film on fracking, is careful to iterate an important fact, "Promised Land is a story, but this [Triple Divide] is a true story." Triple Divide, a documentary by Joshua Pribanic and Melissa Troutman of Public Herald, carefully investigates the effects of fracking in the Marcellus Shale Region of Pennsylvania from the ground up, focusing its lens on the true accounts of neighbors who have lost their water well to contamination from drilling, and farmers, like the ones in Promised Land, who have lost their land to pollution from a nearby well pad. In their first live interview about the film, journalists Joshua and Melissa discussed Triple Divide and the impact of fracking with Stefanie Spear, Founder and Editor of EcoWatch, a news service designed to promote and build a community of grassroots environmental activism. You can watch the full interview above or at EcoWatch.

Norfolk Southern Mandated to Reduce Train Accidents: Investigative Report Explains Why

In a safety recommendation letter to the FRA dated two years before the collision in Graniteville ever happened, then-NTSB Chairwoman Ellen Engleman Conners wrote that “Safety Board railroad accident investigations over the past 30 years have shown conclusively that the most effective way to avoid train-to-train collisions is through the use of positive train control systems." If a positive train control system had been in place, Seeling would have received a warning that he was approaching a switch that was directing him off the main track.