Chevron: Fracking Blast? Uh, Here's a Pizza for That

Nothing like a little pizza to take the edge off ... a fracking explosion. Residents of rural Bobtown, Pennsylvania, were rocked by a fracking blast last week that sparked a five-day fire and apparently killed one rig worker, Gizmodo reports. But just days later, Chevron—which owns the fracking site—sent about 100 gift certificates to locals offering each one a free large pizza and a 2-liter soda, the Philadelphia Daily News reports. "We are sorry to have missed you," reads an accompanying letter that promises to "achieve incident-free operations."

The Tuesday blast was something else, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. First a fire started at the Marcellus Shale gas well, then the heat caused a tanker-truck explosion that "sounded like a jet engine going 5 feet above your house," said a neighbor. The blaze was so ferocious that firefighters had to fall back and police put up a half-mile perimeter around the site. The wells are still leaking natural gas into the air, Gawker reports, and a public-health assessment has found that the state's 6-year fracking boom is causing a wave of illness in Southwest Pennsylvania. (More fracking stories.)