Source: Inside Climate News

Excerpt:

In Marianna, Pa., the headaches began just as soon as the drilling did. 

Seated in her living room in the Washington County borough of around 500 on an afternoon in August, Kimberly Laskowsky flipped through pages of notes she’s kept through years of deteriorating health. She started chronicling after EQT’s Gahagan well pad was built 850 feet away in West Bethlehem Township.

Laskowsky recorded 374 migraines in one month after the drilling began in 2019. “Like someone stabbing my head with a knife,” she wrote.

Laskowsky recalled her granddaughter, Samantha, crouched in pain in front of the post office, gripping her head in her hands. “Make it stop! Make it stop!” she had cried. Laskowsky’s neighbor, Tammy Boardley, experienced similar migraines, as did Wesley Silva’s wife, daughter and granddaughter two streets over. 

She had always had low blood pressure, but since the frack it’s been chronically high, “up near 200,” she said. In August 2021, Laskowsky collapsed on her bathroom floor.

Read more: ‘It’s Just Too Close’: Pennsylvanians Who Live Near Fracking Suffer