A terrible fire broke out in a large oilfield. The ecological disaster happened in the Indian reservation lands of Northwest New Mexico.36 oil and gas tanks broke into fire. This led to a horrifying chain reaction of numerous explosions. Because of the fire a major highway had to be closed and 55 residents of the area had to be evacuated from their homes.
It was announced that the fire started in San Juan County at a fracking site.

This fracking location is a property of the Oklahoma-based WPX Energy. The company was given a work permission by the Farmington Field Office. The local office of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) allowed WPX Energy to drill the area in December. The drilling stopped in May and the company had only been producing oil about a week before the accident.

The fire burned out in the Mancos Shale deposit area. This is an area with a great potential for energy production because of its great gas and oil reserves. Because of the strong interest BLM already leased about 90 percent of the territory under its control. These are 1.6 million public land acres which are being managed by gas and oil companies.
BLM is now being blamed by the critics that no proper assessment of the negative environmental impacts was made. As a result, now the local residents of the area and nature are paying the price.

The 6 wells under the supervision of WPX drilled are just about 6 months old. None of them was installed in accordance with the neededResource Management Plan Amendment or Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

According to Mike Eisenfeld - the energy and climate program manager of San Juan Citizens Alliance the location in which the explosions took place was a new facility. It includes six wells drilled to shale formations. These formations were never carefully analyzed for possible negative impacts or safety concerns.

Is the Risk Reasonable?

The defenders of the hydraulic fracturing claim that the collective reduction in energy justifies the risk of environmental disasters. But since such accidents have become happening more often is the time to reconsider whether the risk is really reasonable.

In order to make the right assessment, we need to have a look at the whole picture. Let us start with water. Only the che costs to water resources in the fracking areas are huge. 

Also, the citizens who live close to the fracking spots have health problems which can be connected with the fracking practice.

Fracking involves injecting sand, water, and various chemicals into the underground rocks. This leads to the breaking up of the rock and releasing of fossil fuels. As a result, the negative impacts of fracking both on environment and humans are terribly high. The common "frack" engages up to 8 million gallons of water. Also, almost 40,000 gallons of chemicals need to be used for a single frack.Having in mind that a single well could be fracked up to 20 times this means about 160,000,000 gallons of water and800,000 gallons of chemicals. By itself, this sounds like a real ecological disaster.