Children in Texas Towns Hit With Asthma Epidemic: Natural Gas Exploration the Culprit?

Children in the town of Argyle, Texas are now experience a high increase of asthma attacks and other ailments. Some are attributing this epidemic to the natural gas exploration taking place around the schools in that district.

November 9, 2010 | Source: All Voices | by Veronica P Roberts

Children in the town of Argyle, Texas are now experience a high increase of asthma attacks and other ailments. Some are attributing this epidemic to the natural gas exploration taking place around the schools in that district.

I received an e-mail from change.org, a non-profit advocacy group, which claimed that 2 year ago, Texas leashed land to natural gas companies to drill around schools in the town of Argyle.

Moreover, the town allegedly even gave permission to school council members to get in on the action by also leasing their land so that they could benefit from this natural gas financial bonanza.

Now the fallout is looking quite ugly and unhealthy for the town’s children. Parents of Argyle are highly upset because their young ones are allegedly becoming sick from a variety of ailments, including asthma attacks, dizziness, open sores and nausea.

Change.org also claims that Argyle is not the only town complaining to their city officials about the harmful effects of natural gas exploration or “fracking” as it’s commonly called.

Argyle is just one of the towns situated in the heart of North Texas’s “gas country,” where “fracking” is the new best financial boom in the state.

Toted as”natural,” and safe, fracking digs deep down under the earth’s rock formation to extract the “gases” located there.

However, critics of this industry say gas exploration is far from safe and have accused the numerous companies out there of knowingly releasing hazardous material into the surrounding towns and lands of the states they drill in.