To give voice to 35 workers killed on the job over the past 35 years at a massive refinery in Texas City, hundreds of surviving family members, co-workers and friends gathered there last month to erect white crosses marked with their names.

This week, NPR broadcast an interesting report about a researcher who has been studying health effects on workers on frac crews. Not familiar with hydraulic fracturing, he expected to find the workers exposed to toxics in drilling fluids when he want on location. What he found was very different.

Despite this reality and the enormous cradle-to-grave ecological costs and consequences of fracking, public officials have their "heads in the sand" - both literally and figuratively - with regards to the frac sand mining boom.