Oklahoma's oil, gas industry blamed for state's earthquakes

Prague, Oklahoma

YANKED without warning from a deep sleep, Jennifer Lin Cooper, whose family has lived near here for more than a half-century, could think only that the clamour enveloping her house was coming from a helicopter landing on her roof. She was wrong. A 5.0-magnitude earthquake - the first of three as strong or stronger over several days in November 2011 - had peeled the brick facade from the US$117,000 home she bought the year before. Earthquake repairs have cost US$12,000 and forced her to take a second job, at night, to pay the bill.

At a packed town hall meeting days later, Ms Cooper, 36, said in an interview, that state officials called the shocks, including a 5.7 tremor that was Oklahoma's largest ever, "an act of nature, and it was nobody's fault". Many scientists disagree. They say that those quakes, and thousands of others before and since, are mainly the work of humans, caused by wells used to bury vast amounts of wastewater from oil and gas exploration deep in the earth near fault zones. And they warn that continuing to entomb such huge quantities risks more dangerous tremors - if not here, then elsewhere in the state's sprawling well fields.