A SMALL town in Texas called Azle, where fracking is taking place over a wide area, has experienced as many as 30 earthquakes within a month, measuring up to a magnitude of 3.3. 

Up to 1,000 residents met in a school to protest about damage to homes, broken water pipes and disturbed sleep, but they were left frustrated by a lack of answers.

Considerable research links seismic events to injection wells, which dispose of millions of gallons of waste water very deep underground.

Many other areas of Texas have been affected, including Reno, and in 2008/9 several small earthquakes near Dallas-Fort Worth airport caused researchers to identify a small injection well as the plausible cause.

It was stopped from working in 2009, after which the earthquakes also stopped.

Dennis Barton, Woodthorpe, York.