The issue of whether hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” causes earthquakes has first-party insurance implications because policies typically exclude damage from tremors attributable to man-made causes as opposed to purely unnatural ones. We’ve discussed the issue in two recent posts after Insurance Commissioners in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania publicly warned carriers against denying earthquake claims on the basis that they were attributable to oil and gas drilling. The jury is still out on the issue, but scientific evidence linking fracking to the tremors is accumulating rapidly. At the present time, Oklahoma is at the “sharp end of the spear” with respect to this issue because the state experienced fully 567 quakes of Magnitude 3.0 or greater in 2014. That is the more…