14 DAY TRIAL // It turns out there really is something about Christmas that makes people more giving. News from England says that, this past December 16, a bunch of greenheads gifted an exploratory drilling site in Salford, Greater Manchester, with a ginormous wind turbine blade, red ribbon and all.
Local media reports say that the environmentalists arrived at the drilling site bright and early in the morning, at about 5.30 a.m. local time.
They unloaded the 1.5-ton wind turbine blade's three segments from their cars, and assembled their Christmas present for IGas, i.e. an independent oil and gas exploration and production company, on the spot.
According to EcoWatch, the environmentalists even accessorized the blade with a fairly large red bow.
Unfortunately, it looks like the greenheads were not early risers and therefore still a tad sleepy, hence their placing the wind turbine blade smack at the entrance of the exploratory drilling site and therefore blocking access to it.
By the time police officers called in by a security guard arrived at the scene, the environmentalists were already done spreading the Christmas joy.
The same source tells us that this protest was organized by a group dubbed Frack Free Greater Manchester, whose members are anything but happy about the fact that IGas has been given permission to drill a 3,000 meters (about 10,000 feet) test well at Barton Moss in Salford.
By the looks of it, the company is looking to extract both coal bed methane and shale gas from the area, and plans to resort to hydraulic fracturing to achieve this goal.
Fracking has thus far been associated with earthquakes, groundwater contamination and even endocrine disruptions, so it should not come as a surprise that many are utterly against this practice.
“We’ve delivered this early Christmas gift to IGas to remind them that we don’t need damaging, risky and polluting energy sources like oil and gas to power the UK,” explains Sandra Denton, one of the greenheads who took part in this protest.
“I didn’t know today’s action was going to happen but I’m very glad it did. We’d like renewable energy for the future—not the destruction of our towns and countryside with thousands of drill sites,” adds local resident Pearl Hopkins.