My Water’s On Fire Tonight is a video that went viral back in May. It is a production of Studio 20 students in the NYU school of journalism (Music by David Holmes and Andrew Bean, Vocals by David Holmes and Niel Bekker, Animation by Adam Sakellarides and Lisa Rucker) in collaboration with ProPublica, as part of their Explainer project.

What I particularly like about this video is that it has two explaining “levels”. The video itself is sufficient enough to briefly inform and educate about the issue of fracking. But, if anyone wants to learn more (or has problems with some of the statements in the video due to ideological biases), one only needs to look at the lyrics which are posted on the Explainer site and linked at the YouTube video itself. The lyrics contain links to in-depth ProPublica articles that support each of the statements made in the video. A thorough reader can go from these and dig even deeper, looking at primary sources identified in the articles, and so on.

Here are the lyrics (with links) so you can see for yourself:

Fracking is a form of natural gas drilling
An alternative to oil cause the oil kept spilling
Bringing jobs to small towns so everybody’s willing
People turn on their lights and the drillers make a killing

Water goes into the pipe, the pipe into the ground
The pressure creates fissures 7,000 feet down
The cracks release the gas that powers your town
That well is fracked….. Yeah totally fracked

But there’s more in the water than just H2O
Toxic chemicals help to make the fluid flow
With names like benzene and formaldehyde
You better keep ‘em far away from the water supply

The drillers say the fissures are a mile below
The groundwater pumped into American homes
But don’t tell it to the residents of Sublette Wy-O
That water’s fracked…. We’re talking Benzene…

What the frack is going on with all this fracking going on
I think we need some facts to come to light
I know we want our energy but nothing ever comes for free
I think my water’s on fire tonight

So it all goes back to 2005
Bush said gas drillers didn’t have to comply
with the Safe Drinking Water Act, before too long
It was “frack, baby, frack” until the break of dawn.

With the EPA out it was up to the states
But they didn’t have the money to investigate
Sick people couldn’t prove fracking was to blame
All the while water wells were going up in flames

Cause it’s hard to contain all the methane released
It can get into the air, it can get into the streams.
It’s a greenhouse gas, worse than CO2
Fracking done wrong could lead to climate change too

Now it’s not that drillers should never be fracking
But the current regulation is severely lacking
Reduce the toxins, contain the gas and wastewater
And the people won’t get sick and the planet won’t get hotter

What the frack is going on with all this fracking going on
I think we need some facts to come to light
I know we want our energy but nothing ever comes for free
I think my water’s on fire tonight.