While that particular victory might have been pyrrhic, it did get people’s attention, and Victoria had to give Arrindell credit for her tenacity and for her research. Even Arrindell’s most ardent critics had to admit that—unlike Victoria in those first days after Cabot had arrived—Arrindell had done her homework. She had made it her life’s work to collect and disseminate a vast collection of horrifying anecdotes, nightmare accidents, and stunning examples of the environmental damage that natural gas drilling can cause, and much of that research was now piled up on Victoria’s kitchen counter. Taken together, these accounts painted a picture of an industry run amok, supported with a wink and a nod by conspiratorial politicos in Washington and in state capitals across the country, aided and abetted by federal and state regulatory agencies that, she believed, were all part of a vast conspiracy of greed to rape the land and keep secret their nefarious machinations.
There was, for example, the case of a nurse in Wyoming who was poisoned when she touched the clothing of a gas field worker who was being treated after accidentally dousing himself with a significant amount of ZetaFlow, a substance used in fracking fluid. The contact had little impact on the worker himself, but for days, the nurse was near death. And when the doctors treating her demanded to know precisely what ZetaFlow contained, the company that produced it, Weatherford, refused to disclose specific information, citing trade secrets. Ultimately, Weatherford relented, providing key state agencies with a list of the chemicals used in their version of the compound, and the state commission that oversees oil and gas drilling has since established tighter regulations over the handling of the materials.
Arrindell had patched together reports from a host of sources that detailed examples from existing gas fields of how the noise and chaos of drilling operations had disrupted once bucolic farming communities in Texas, and Oklahoma, and Wyoming, and she had posted them on the group’s website. She had collected testimony detailing how the massive diesels that power the rigs and the massive pump trucks that channel the fracking water into the bore holes had polluted the air and how they have tainted the ground with periodic spills. And she wrote and spoke passionately about how the operation, even once the wells were completed, would scar the land, how the drill pads and pipelines and flowback basins—large plastic-lined ponds gouged into the land to catch the water that flows back from the fracking process—remained, sometimes for years, after the initial drilling is completed, so that the drillers can return to frack the well again when production starts to taper off.
No issue was as critical, she argued, as the question of water. She cited peer-reviewed scientific reports detailing examples of cases where those flowback ponds had leaked, sending their chemicals leaching into groundwater aquifers. Ominously, Arrindell pointed to the fact that in 2005, Halliburton and some of the other gas industry leaders succeeded in persuading Congress to exempt them from the provisions of the Safe Water Act and the Clean Water Act, in effect, she said, proving government collusion in the gas companies’ bid to extract riches whatever the environmental cost.
Even Barbara Arrindell’s critics acknowledged that her fears were not without substance.
On average, it was estimated, a typical horizontal well in the Marcellus would use about half a million gallons of fresh water, in some cases up to a million gallons, which would then be treated with the list of chemicals and the “sand,” a substance that contains millions of tiny spherical grains, most often bauxite, pumped at thousands of pounds per foot of pressure into the well bore. Between 30 percent and half of the fluid, typically, would flow back immediately into the well bore, and it would then be channeled into a holding pit, where it could later be siphoned off and disposed of.
As Arrindell and other critics described it, the process created two insurmountable challenges. First, they believed that the delicate watersheds of the region, principally the Delaware River watershed, which provides drinking water for New York City and its suburbs, and the Susquehanna River Basin, which feeds the Chesapeake Bay and is governed by a water authority representing four states, could never keep up with the demands that the industry would place on it. Their second and more pressing fear was that the drillers, either intentionally or inadvertently, would allow the flowback water from these wells, with its mix of potentially harmful contaminants, to mix with surface and groundwater and poison drinking water supplies.
Victoria’s own research by that point had indicated that Arrindell, while she might have been extreme in her position, did raise some valid concerns. Victoria had come to regret that she hadn’t shown more of her environmentalist father’s innate skepticism when the landman first showed up, and now she was making up for it, plowing into research, studying maps from all across the country, and identifying places where streams and underground aquifers had been depleted by the demands of drillers. She found more than a thousand instances in which surface and underground water supplies had been contaminated by natural gas, by diesel fuel spilled during drilling, or by chemicals used in the fracking process at the nation’s 450,000-plus drill sites, and though many of those accidents occurred in coal bed methane fields, places where the gas deposits were far closer to the surface than they were in Pennsylvania, or in places where the rocks were younger and more brittle and thus more prone to seepage, such incidents were cause for concern.
VICTORIA’S ANXIETY WAS AMPLIFIED by what she and her neighbors were coming to perceive as the lax oversight by state and federal agencies. Of course, the drillers and state officials in Pennsylvania were insisting that the commonwealth, though its DEP admitted it was understaffed and underfunded, was in a better position than other states to monitor and enforce regulations designed to protect water supplies. But Victoria had her doubts.
Nor did she take much solace in the insistence by both the drillers and the state that Pennsylvanians needn’t worry about sharing their water supply with the drillers. The drillers and their allies had calmly insisted that unlike the largely arid gas-producing states of Texas and Oklahoma and Wyoming, Pennsylvania was and still is literally awash in water, and there is some truth to that. The state does boast more surface water than any other state in the Union except Alaska, and both the industry and its regulators have noted that most of the water that would be used to develop the Marcellus would be drawn from the state’s rivers and their tributaries.
They insisted that the state has a long history of exerting more control over its water than virtually any other state in the nation, and has since the 1930s, when Governor Gifford Pinchot—a noted conservationist who was the nation’s first forester, appointed with the help of his close friend, then vice president Theodore Roosevelt—mounted a campaign to have the state assume control of all its water resources. The law was finally adopted after his term as governor ended. As a result of his efforts, the state of Pennsylvania is the owner of every drop of water that falls from the sky above it or percolates up from the ground beneath it.
The responsibility for monitoring that water fell to the state’s environmental agencies, principally the state Department of Environmental Protection. But in large portions of the state, that responsibility did not belong to the state alone. Three decades ago, after scientists determined that noxious runoff from farms and industries all along the Susquehanna River and its tributaries was killing off shellfish in the Chesapeake Bay, a multistate commission was established to regulate water usage from the Susquehanna. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission was now responsible for issuing permits for every drop of water taken out of the river, while the DEP was charged with making sure that no new toxins were dumped into it. A similar agreement existed in the Delaware River Basin.
The gas drillers, along with the DEP and members of the SRBC, all argued that appropriate safeguards were already in place to prevent the watershed from being sucked dry. They noted that even if the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania were to be fully developed—if thousands of wells were to be drilled simultaneously in the state—they would still
require only about 1 percent of the amount of water consumed annually in the state.
And it was also argued that the development of the Marcellus would use only a fraction of the water used to create other fuels such as ethanol, which can require anywhere between 263 and 2,100 gallons of water to create a single gallon of the biofuel, depending on how the source crop is irrigated. Gas from the Marcellus was likely to produce anywhere from 2,000 to 17,000 more BTUs per gallon of water than did ethanol.
Certainly, there were mainstream environmental groups such as Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future, part of a coalition of environmental organizations willing to support the development of the Marcellus—admittedly, with reservations—provided that there were sufficient safeguards in place to protect against overburdening the state’s water supplies, and that they were appropriately enforced. To that end, the SRBC, the agency overseeing water usage from the Susquehanna and its watershed, had established protocols for the drillers to collect water from municipal water suppliers, who in turn drew it from the river. Water was to be taken during what are usually high flow periods for the river, such as springtime, when the rivers are flush with snowmelt. But even those environmental groups that supported the idea of drilling in the Marcellus also admitted that there were no guarantees that the current safeguards would be adequate down the road, and there were serious questions, not the least of which were “What will we do during periods of drought?” and “What will happen when the water is low and the price of gas is high?”
And solving the question of where the water comes from was going to be far less daunting a question than what to do with it once it was used.
There is no single formula for the fracking fluids that are used in the Marcellus, or anywhere else, for that matter. Every company that spuds—or drills—a well had its own formula, its own specific mix of surfactants and biocides, its own special blend of sand, and each tended to jealously guard those formulas, arguing that they are trade secrets.
And while that information was provided to the DEP, both when the wells were approved and when the resultant wastewater was to be disposed of, that information had not been widely shared with the locals. Even the Susquehanna Emergency Management office, the agency that would be responsible for the initial response in the event of an accident, had no idea what was in the stuff that was now being stored and used around Dimock and elsewhere in the county, and had had no training whatsoever on how to respond in the event of a spill.
In fact, Victoria told me, she had discovered that the local fire department had effectively been told to keep out of Cabot’s way and let the company handle it if an accident were to occur. They were told directly, for example, that if a fire were to break out at a drill site, a not entirely unheard-of accident at drilling rigs, and if they were so presumptuous as to put the fire out, Cabot would instruct them to set it ablaze again and let the experts deal with it. No one in Dimock was sure whether Cabot had been kidding when they said that.
But despite all that, despite her growing preoccupation with the dangers that might be lurking and her genetic predisposition, inherited from her father, for community activism, Victoria was trying to force herself to remain in the background, letting Ken Ely and the handful of other neighbors who formed the nucleus of her own small watchdog group take the lead role when it came to explaining their worries, not just to the authorities but to the neighbors who were not as troubled by the developments.
The way Victoria saw it, it was probably best that she remain in the background. After all, she knew, a lot of her neighbors still looked at both her and her bicycle-racing husband as rather peculiar. At the very least, she understood that some of them found her a little flamboyant, and it was common knowledge in her adopted neighborhood that ostentation of any kind could provoke draconian punishment. One of the first stories she had heard when she moved into the neighborhood was the tale of the midnight ride of the Pumpkin Brigade. The way the story went, a few years earlier a farmer’s wife who had become a little too fond of Martha Stewart had decided to decorate her house for Halloween with an elaborate and cloyingly rustic display of pumpkins. She had spent hours carving them, and she set them on her fenceposts and porch in what some of the local boys decided was an entirely too presumptuous manner. By the time she woke up the next morning, her entire property looked like an unbaked pumpkin pie. The Pumpkin Brigade had sent her a message, shattering every one of the pumpkins.
The last thing Victoria wanted to do—and the last thing Jim would permit her to do—was to attract that kind of negative attention from their new neighbors. Adding urgency to her desire to remain low-key was the fact that only a few months earlier, Victoria had narrowly dodged the bullet of local notoriety.
It had happened during the hotly contested Pennsylvania presidential primary race in 2008, when Victoria had seen it as her civic duty to volunteer for the Obama campaign. Working a local phone bank, she had been stunned by the reaction she had gotten from some of the people she called. One voter called Obama her “boy”; another said the African American candidate “should be hanging from a tree.” Another told her “You should be ashamed of yourself for making these phone calls.” Victoria was flabbergasted. “These were Democrats,” she told a coworker, as it slowly dawned on her that racism, at least in that part of northern Appalachia, might not be widespread but was certainly bipartisan.
Victoria hadn’t realized that the coworker she had confided in was not a local but a paid worker for the Obama campaign, and that worker relayed the information to the campaign’s national headquarters, which in turn relayed it to a reporter named Kevin Meredith of The Washington Post, who a few days later interviewed Victoria and a few other campaign workers who had similar experiences and wrote about it. Her fifteen minutes of fame went into overtime a few days later when Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, also reported Victoria’s phone experience. For a few breathless days, the retired teacher waited for the almost certain retribution that she was sure would come. It eventually dawned on her that few of her neighbors had the time or the opportunity to read The Washington Post or The New York Times, and that fewer still would ever have the inclination to do so.
Victoria was relieved. And she had no intention of tempting fate a second time. Fortunately, Ken had stepped up, becoming her ally and her friend.
Yet as she stood there that night, leaning against the counter in the kitchen of her mobile home, listening to the wind roar outside, the feeling of distant dread began to return. It had to mean something. From the moment the drilling had begun up there, it had been constant, around the clock. It was a costly business and the drillers could not afford to stop, even for a moment, unless something had gone wrong. It would be days before she would learn what had happened that night. All she knew then was that an old friend had dropped by to warn her.
ELEVEN
Big Enough to Make Its Own Weather
When I look back, the most remarkable thing about those long summer days after my mother signed away the drilling rights to our family’s land is that there was nothing remarkable about them at all. The early strawberries still grew wild in the untended field behind the barn where we used to mow hay, and they gave way in time to the wild blackberries that clung to the fenceline, just as they had every year.
Someday, of course, that would change—the bulldozers would show up, followed by the drill rigs and the frack trucks—and even if it didn’t happen on my mother’s farm but instead on one of her neighbors’ places, we’d hear it and see it and smell it. The changes would come. Still, my mother, my sister, and I weren’t terribly worried. After all, unlike our unfortunate friends in Dimock, we had taken precautions with our lease, and we were certain that any disruption to our land would be limited.
We hadn’t seen any money yet, of course. The contract still had to be registered and recorded in the local courthouse and shipped off to Chesapeake’s Appalachian headquarters, where the bean counters would review it. A check wouldn�
�t be in the mail for months, we had been told. When it came, my mother had generously promised, she would give my sister and me $10,000 each. Neither she nor my sister was terribly anxious about the money. I tried not to look as anxious as I was.
I wasn’t dead broke. But I was close. The free-falling economy had killed Radar magazine, and the magazine had died before it had published my story on the Marcellus, meaning that I got only a kill fee—a quarter of the money I had been counting on—and had lost my cover for probing the developments. On the plus side, I had managed to put together a book proposal on the Marcellus, and had even managed to sell it, for more money than I had ever earned for anything. Or at least that’s what I thought, until I realized that book advances are paid in tiny increments over long periods of time. And so the money my mother had promised was, as far as I was concerned, a godsend.
Maybe it’s the Irish in us, but no one in my family, not my mother, my sister, or I, can allow good fortune to sit too long untarnished, and just when everything looked as if it was going to work out, my sister phoned. She was using that officious banker’s tone again as she explained, patiently but a little patronizingly, how the United States Congress had, a few years back, in their ardor to look as if they were encouraging the American Dream, raised the threshold of the estate tax—the level at which the inheritor of a business or farm or any other asset had to pay taxes on that inheritance—from $1 million to $3 million. The adjustment was due to sunset at the end of 2009, after which there would effectively be no taxes for a year, and then in 2010 the threshold would be reset at $1 million if Congress didn’t do anything to change it. Congress, being Congress, didn’t.
The End of Country Page 20