We're drowning in headlines these days that I feel like this story really fell through the cracks. People who live near fracking really need to know this.
It’s not just those near it - places between the well and the dump site, near the rivers by the dump, near the truck stops, eating the crops the brine has contaminated, using the recycled pipes, washing workers clothes, living in the worker’s houses. If you were designing a dispersal system, you’d be hard placed to make a better one short of perhaps aerial spraying.
I grew up near a location in Texas in the 1970-1980's where oil well companies would truck in mud from wells, and dump it in a field to dry up and the liquid would run off, the water in the ditches had an oily sheen for miles (would ride my bike around town as far as I could go). I just checked and the field is still there and brown/empty but the company got replaced by a church and it's across the street from a junior high school now (and across a different street from the de facto segregated part of town where most of the African American kids got on the bus I rode to school).
It's amazing what that monthly check can make people look over when the wells are placed on private property.
That monthly check might not even be very large. Unfortunately, in many places (like North Dakota), mineral rights are severed from surface rights. So as a surface owner you might get a pittance for allowing a pad on your property, all the royalties are going to someone else who bought up mineral rights decades ago.