Cliff Frohlich figures his new study has good news and bad news for the oil and gas drilling business. First, the bad news. The senior research scientist at the University of Texas' Institute for Geophysics found that deep injection of oil and gas wastewater appears to be causing more earthquakes than previously thought. The good news, though, is that although drillers have to go where the oil and gas is to produce it, they can choose where they dispose of their wastewater.

PRAGUE, Okla. -- Seismologists have simple advice for oil and gas companies to avoid unleashing an earthquake -- don't inject millions of gallons of wastewater near active faults. That's advice Oklahoma's drilling industry and regulators have chosen to ignore. It's not an academic debate in this rural crossroads, halfway between Tulsa and Oklahoma City. People here learned they live above an active fault only after it jolted them Nov. 5, 2011, with the state's largest recorded earthquake.

PRAGUE, Okla. -- Jerri Loveland sees a connection between the oil drilling that surrounds her home and the earthquake last November that upended her life. The magnitude-5.6 convulsion inflicted about $50,000 in damage to the farmhouse she shares with her husband, John, and their two young children. Some of her neighbors in this rural patch dotted with cattle and oil wells blame "fracking," or hydraulic fracturing. But coming from an oil industry family, she sees the connection as having more to do with the millions of gallons of salt-laden water that comes up with the oil and gets reinjected in deep wells nearby.