For the drilling itself, millions of gallons of water will be drawn from our rivers and aquifers. Anyone who assumes that natural gas is “clean” and comes without a price has been sold a bill of goods by the gas industry.

Moreover, for many of us who own homes near well sites or the roads to and from them, property values will decline precipitously. Once the wells run dry and the drillers depart — the inevitable endgame of this boom-and-bust industry — lingering fear about the safety of the land and water will make it unlikely that anyone would want to purchase homes or property anywhere near previous well sites.

Is this really where we want to go?

LAURIE FENDRICH

Callicoon Center, N.Y., April 17, 2013

Having spent a number of years as a drilling engineer in Texas and Oklahoma, I have seen the exploration and completion process close up, and I am deeply conflicted about horizontal fracking.

It is absolutely true that “a reasonable case can be made that the gas resource is too important to ignore.” But I also agree that “the environmental issues are too important to dismiss.” The ocean is far more resilient than any groundwater aquifer, and exploration and completion of wells are in the best of circumstances fraught with risk and the unexpected. If any of the myriad things that can go wrong do go wrong, it can have a major environmental impact.

The key is systems that are fail-safe and with multiple redundancies, coupled with monitoring and swift, certain enforcement. The states, with far more experience and far more competence than the federal government, still need to review and upgrade their regulations and adequately finance the monitoring and enforcement.

Likewise, exploration firms need to realize that it is in their best interest to adopt all the safeguards possible. We saw what can happen, in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, when human error and equipment failure met shoddy quality control and rampant shortcutting.

ERIC W. ZEPP

McKinney, Tex., April 17, 2013

Until there is absolutely no risk to our water, fracking should be banned. We already have vast amounts of “natural” gas that can be produced from city sewage and from livestock waste. These resources are far from glamorous, but would provide renewable energy far into the future and would also serve double duty in cleaning up the huge “reservoirs” of organic pollutants that our animal-eating society constantly produces.