A pickup truck ran over a British anti-fracking activist who was standing in the middle of a road as a form of protest Wednesday.
Witnesses said the man was knocked over by the truck and sustained minor injuries while slowly walking down the middle of the street to impede traffic to a fracking site. Fellow activists filmed the incident near a fracking site in Lancashire, England.
“We try to create a form of obstruction on the highway,” Danny Llew, an anti-fracking activist who’s also unemployed, told The Mirror. “I’ve done it before. It has been used for quite a few years as a peaceful protest method.”
“Sometimes we will stand on white lines and other times we might stand in the middle lane to slow down traffic. Regardless of the situation, pedestrians have the right of way,” Llew said.
The driver of the truck was not arrested, but police officers say they have spoken to him.
“Upon leaving the fracking site, a works vehicle has come into contact with a campaigner despite the driver taking evasive action to try and avoid him,” a Lancashire police spokesman said in a statement. “The driver of the vehicle was indeed spoken to by police, provided a negative breath test and all other personal and vehicle checks were correct and in order.”
Llew said, “we are campaigning against fracking because of the impact it can have on the environment, which is the most important part of this, but also there’s the impact it has on health, communities and it creates wealth that is going to benefit only certain people.”
The U.K.-based energy company Cuadrilla began assembling the country’s first large-scale fracking site in Lancashire in January. British officials approved the operation last October, and Cuadrilla expects to begin full-scale drilling in the second quarter of 2017.
Read more at Daily Caller
Guys like Llew make unemployment a career, except when they can find work as a traffic cone. No damage to the truck, carry on.
I wonder if this jerk was told Not to Play in the Streets or look both ways before crossing the street? These anti-fracking idiots reminds me of that idiot who lost both legs when him and some fellow protesters sat a railroad track to protests against the Arms Race
“Sometimes we will stand on white lines and other times we might stand in the middle lane to slow down traffic. Regardless of the situation, pedestrians have the right of way,”
Not in this case. They’re not crossing – they’re blocking traffic. That’s interference. No right to that at all.
“….The vast majority of studies conclude that fracking worsens air quality, contaminates water sources and harms public health, according to a new review of scientific literature.
More than 15 million Americans live within a mile of a fracking site that has been drilled in the past 15 years. Numerous studies in the past decade have indicated that natural gas drilling and fracking are inherently dangerous, posing threats to the air and water and to residents living close by, according to the report’s authors.
A compendium of fracking research published this week by Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility, two public health nonprofits, includes reviews of more than 500 fracking-related studies and concludes that there is “no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health.”
“For years we heard stories. … Now that anecdotal evidence is being confirmed by scientific evidence,” Kathleen Nolan, a pediatrician