The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  A week later, on September 22, DEP was still mulling its options on how to handle the infractions at the Heitsman well when a third spill occurred. Once again a hose failed, and while in most respects this spill was deemed less dangerous than the previous two—the water, which was being prepared for the seventh and final stage of the frack job, contained even less of the gelling agents, and about 480 gallons of it remained on the pad, with only about 10 percent of that breaching the berm—it was the last straw. DEP shut down Cabot’s operation in Dimock and gave it twenty-one days to come up with a plan to prevent a recurrence.

  The company did not take that long. By October 16, it had agreed to a comprehensive list of demands from the DEP that included changes in both the mechanical aspects of its operation and its management practices at the site. The company immediately resumed operations. But even then it was not out of the spotlight. Three weeks later, the DEP had finally completed its report on the earlier accidents, most notably the methane intrusion into the water wells of Norma Fiorentino and her neighbors. It read like an indictment. According to the report, Cabot had failed to adequately cement as many as half a dozen of its wells, had failed to properly dispose of drilling mud from at least two others, and had also been responsible for a few diesel spills. Cabot did not admit to all of the infractions, but all the same, the company signed a consent order that required it to re-cement the wells, agreeing that if it wasn’t done by March 2010, whatever wells remained on the company’s to-do list would have to be plugged. What’s more, the company agreed to permanently replace the water supplies to the homes that had been affected by the methane migration.

  There is no question that as the fall of 2009 drew to a close, Cabot was under immense pressure. The company had become the poster child for the potentially damaging excesses of the industry, and even fellow drillers were viewing its travails as a cautionary tale. As one executive from a rival company put it privately, “They’re a good company, but they’ve been dealing with this whole thing like it’s 1982 and they can do whatever they want.”

  What he meant was that there was a time in the not so distant past when a company like Cabot, or any of the drillers for that matter, could pretty much do as they pleased in a place like Dimock. In the days before a woman like Victoria Switzer and a guy like Ken Ely could log on to a computer and immediately educate themselves on a complex issue like energy exploration, the energy companies held all the cards, they had all the information, they had all the resources, and the money that they dangled in front of their landowners gave them all the power.

  But that paradigm had shifted, and it had shifted most dramatically in Dimock.

  Because of their constant efforts to keep the DEP’s attention focused on Cabot’s actions, from the methane leak right up through the frackwater spill, Victoria and Ken and the other neighbors who had banded together had fired a shot across the bows of both the DEP and the drillers, and both, it seemed, were taking heed.

  That’s what Victoria was talking about that October afternoon when she suggested to her husband that maybe some good could come from the nightmare they had all endured. “Because of what’s gone on in Dimock, things are going to go a lot better in the areas that haven’t been drilled yet,” she had said. “At least I hope they will.” She would not, of course, be content just to hope. Along with several of her neighbors, she was already planning a federal lawsuit against Cabot, which would be filed in November. She held out little hope that the lawsuit would end up forcing Cabot to end its operations in Dimock—courts in Pennsylvania have generally been reluctant to do such things. But if they could focus the scrutiny of the federal court on Cabot, even if only for a while, that was a win. And if other drillers decided that it was in their interest to take even more precautions in order to avoid the same kind of scrutiny, that would be even better.

  In April 2010, two weeks after the deadline the DEP had given Cabot had passed, the other shoe dropped. In a stinging rebuke to the company, the head of the DEP, Secretary John Hanger, declared that Cabot had failed to adequately address the methane leaks into the water wells at Norma Fiorentino’s house and at the houses of her neighbors, and he ordered Cabot to plug four of the vertical wells it had drilled nearby. As many as five other wells, Hanger announced, were also suspect, and Cabot had thirty days to fix those or shut them down. And then Hanger dropped his bombshell. He ordered Cabot to cease all drilling operations in Dimock and warned that no new permits would be issued for Cabot anywhere in the state until the company had corrected the problems it created. “Cabot had every opportunity to correct these violations, but failed to do so. Instead, it chose to ignore its responsibility to safeguard the citizens of this community and to protect the natural resources there,” Hanger said.

  Cabot continued to insist that it was not to blame for the contamination, or at least that there was no proof that it was responsible. But the company’s protestations were immediately swallowed up in the blessed silence that had finally come to Dimock, at least temporarily.

  KEN HAD SEEN NONE OF THAT. It was, the doctors decided, a massive coronary, and it had hit silently and in his sleep. He had been dimly aware of a pain in his left arm for a while, and it had started radiating across his back and chest, but, typically of Ken, he hadn’t thought much about it. By the morning of May 20, he was already gone.

  Maybe the stress that he had been dealing with had contributed to his heart attack. His friends and some of his family thought so. But Victoria had a different take on it. For all the trouble Ken faced as a result of the drilling, not to mention all the trouble he made, a big part of him enjoyed the battle. That was evident in the gleam he got in his eye when he told the story about barking the squirrel off the tree above the Cabot contractor’s head, and in the wry way he talked about offering to let the drillers go angling in the pond in front of his cottage. He had extended the invitation ostensibly as a peace offering after the showdown on Lazy Dog Hill. He didn’t make any mention to the drillers about any of his more recent conversations with his fish, even though the fish were still complaining that they weren’t feeling very well. “Go ahead, fish,” he told them, then quietly mused, “I wonder if I should tell them to make it catch and release or whether I should let ’em eat ’em.”

  His funeral, at the sprawling Baptist church set on a hill a hundred yards or so back from his old service station, was anything but a somber affair. It was a rollicking tribute to a man who had lived life hard and loved it. His grandchildren told funny stories about the cutthroat way he played Scrabble, and Emmagene told the congregation—there had to have been a hundred people crammed into the Springville Baptist Church—the story of how they had met and fallen in love, drifted apart, and ultimately found each other again. She broke only slightly when she told the mourners, “He was my beginning and he is my end.”

  But perhaps the most telling eulogy to Ken that day was the silence that greeted the mourners as they arrived at the church. Not fifty yards from the back of the church, in what used to be a cornfield, sat a massive rig. For the duration of the service, which lasted a little over an hour—for more than sixty of those $50 minutes, to use Cabot’s own calculations—the rig was silent.

  Victoria did not attend the funeral. She and Jim had come up with their own testimonial to the man she called her hero. It’s not clear whether it was Victoria or Jim who first came up with the idea. But they found a perfect way to honor Ken Ely and to keep a bit of him around. Not long before his death, Victoria had reluctantly forked over $125 for a pallet of Ken Ely’s blue stones.

  After his death, Victoria and Jim used Ken’s stone to build their patio. It was their sanctuary, and it was a place where, Victoria knew, she’d always have a little bit of Ken Ely nearby. In essence, Ken had become Victoria’s Chief Red Rock. He would have liked that.

  SEVENTEEN

  No Turning Back

  Peering out from behind what little cover a leafless raspberry bush could offer, his red hair glowing in the
midafternoon autumn sun, Liam, my now four-year-old boy, had been eyeing the three burly men with a mixture of caution and curiosity. Finally he found his courage and stepped forward.

  “I’m a superhero, you know,” he announced. Liam had long since given up being specific about such things. Some days he was Batman, some days Spiderman. Never Superman. Though he was only in preschool, Liam was still attracted primarily to the morally ambivalent characters, the ones who were always struggling to find some balance between their noble side and their darker impulses.

  “Well, that’s good,” the tallest of the three men said in a voice that dripped with the honeyed accent of the Texas hill country, “ ’cause we could use a hand from a superhero.” The men, an engineer, a site designer, and a landman for Chesapeake who had replaced the garrulous Marshall Casale, had been ignoring Liam and me as they studied their maps and measured out the paces, three hundred of them, from the back of my mother’s barn to this overgrown patch of scrawny saplings and brambles and berry bushes, but now, as they cast their eyes a hundred yards to the east, a hundred yards to the west, they seemed satisfied that this was the place they were looking for. And now they were looking for a place to drive in the single two-foot-tall pine stake with a fluorescent orange flag atop it.

  “Daddy, is this where they’re gonna put it?” Liam asked me. “I don’t know,” I told him. “I guess so.” It looked to me as if the site they were eyeing for the drill pad was a little too close to the house and barn, and I had my concerns about the impact that the constant vibration of the drilling, the steady rumble of the heavy equipment, might have in the long run on the stone foundations that Farmer Avery had laid almost two hundred years ago. It also struck me that this part of the property seemed fairly steep—it was surely more than the 3 percent grade that the state allows for a drilling pad. “You know, there’s a flatter spot about fifty yards up the hill,” I told the men. “It’d be a lot easier to get your equipment in, and you wouldn’t have to do nearly as much prep work.”

  “Yeah,” the tall man replied. “But we can’t go over that far. We can move it a bit northeast or southwest, but we can’t go west or east.” There was something unnerving about their precision. None of these guys had ever set foot on this property before, but through the magic of technology, their engineers and geologists had developed so clear a picture of the land that they knew within a matter of feet where the rock buried a mile or so deep was under the maximum amount of stress, the gas trapped within it under the maximum amount of pressure, so that they could get the best bang for the 3 million or so bucks it would cost them to drill this first well on Ellsworth Hill.

  The tall man kicked away a mat of ragged grass and found a spot where there was just enough dirt for the sharpened end of the stake to get some purchase in the ground. He lifted a four-pound sledge and was just about to take a swing when he stopped himself. “Hey, Superhero,” he said. “You wanna drive the stake in?”

  Liam looked at me. “Go ahead,” I said.

  IT HAD BEEN MORE THAN a year since my mother had signed her lease with Chesapeake, and in all that time we had heard virtually nothing from the company. They had certainly been active enough. Two counties to the west in Bradford, they had drilled more than a half dozen wells, and most had shown real promise. One of them would soon generate 10 million cubic feet of natural gas a day, a rate that it would keep up for months, yielding millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of the stuff. And Chesapeake was not alone. All over the state, drillers had spudded more than 800 wells into the Marcellus, and most had initial production rates that had been far above what drillers had been anticipating.

  There had been setbacks, of course. Cabot’s disastrous handling of its operations in Dimock had certainly cast an unwelcome spotlight on the whole industry, and the fact that Victoria Switzer and her neighbors had filed suit in federal court was sure to bring even more negative publicity. It wasn’t likely to matter much that the DEP was insisting that the problems that Cabot had been encountering seemed to be unique to the company, that while there had been isolated violations at other wells operated by other drillers, almost all of those, with a few minor exceptions, had been administrative violations, things like failing to file drilling logs in a timely manner. Several months down the road, there would be more—and more serious—accidents. Chesapeake and Range would be cited for spills. In Clearfield County, a well drilled by EOG—a company that for obvious reasons prefers to go by its initials rather than its original full name, Enron Oil and Gas—blew out and spewed gas for some sixteen hours before it was finally brought under control. But in those first few months of 2010, in the absence of any other real news from the Marcellus, the tales of woe in Dimock had been getting all the headlines.

  Almost all. Even as the Cabot saga continued to unfold, there was one more major milestone in the story of the Marcellus. It had begun in the early fall. For weeks, Terry Engelder, who had by now taken to thinking of himself as “the Godfather of the Marcellus,” had been compiling figures from those wells that Chesapeake had been reporting, along with some others that Range was operating, and a few from a handful of other companies, and in early September he had come out with yet another earth-shattering estimate of the potential wealth of the Marcellus. Figuring that there were some places in the Marcellus that were richer than others, and that there were others where, no matter how much gas was there, the land was too steep or too inaccessible, or conversely far too built up, to get a rig in to retrieve the gas, Engelder had developed a probability model that was again far more optimistic than any of his previous estimates. There weren’t 50 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Marcellus just waiting to be sucked out, and there weren’t 363 trillion cubic feet. According to Engelder, drillers could reasonably expect to hoover some 493 trillion cubic feet of natural gas out of the Marcellus during the thirty-to-fifty-year life of the play. That was the energy-producing equivalent of more than 8 billion barrels of oil, a resource nearly eight times richer than what was thought to lie beneath the controversial Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

  It had taken a while for these new numbers, which were first published in a dry and poorly circulated oil and gas journal out of Fort Worth, to have much of an impact. But once they did, the fallout was remarkable. Because gas and oil drilling companies are valued by Wall Street based in large part on their holdings, the amount of proven and probable reserves of petro-products that they control, Engelder’s new numbers had in essence conjured up tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of dollars in brand-new value for the companies. Their reserves were now more valuable, and as a result, so were the companies themselves. Though it was all theoretical—though the wealth that Engelder had conjured for them was as vaporous as the gas itself—they nonetheless felt a lot richer than they had a year earlier, and felt that they’d be richer still if they could sew up whatever leases remained to be had, to stake their wells as quickly as they could and add even more reserves to their tally sheets.

  And so it was that the landmen came back to Ellsworth Hill and the hollows beyond. Flush with the promise of those reserves, the landmen returned to their old ways, lavishing cash on anyone who would listen to them, and as usual, it was Chesapeake that took the lead. The company’s first order of business was to finally secure all that property—some 37,000 acres of land—that was controlled by the Wyoming County landowners’ association, which had been in limbo since the middle of 2008. That was the same group that included among its leadership the courthouse clerk that Casale had taunted a year and a half earlier, to the astonishment of his young trainee. Casale had left Chesapeake to pursue more lucrative opportunities elsewhere in the Marcellus, and now his replacement was pursuing the landowners’ association with a more lucrative offer than they had ever dreamed of. Not only would they get 18 percent royalties, but they would also be paid $5,750 an acre, twice what my mother had received when she signed at the height of the previous land rush.

  And the members of the Wyomi
ng County group were not the only ones. At the same time, George W. Clay, who had been representing Anne Stang and Roger Williams and several of my mother’s other neighbors, had been negotiating quietly with Carizzo, a smaller Texas firm, and he finally came up with a deal. Though they received only a fraction of the amount that Chesapeake’s new leaseholders had in up-front money—they got $2,500 an acre, the same amount my mother had gotten a year and a half earlier—Clay had assured them that the terms of the deal were good, that their interests would be protected, that the company had a solid environmental track record, and that in the end they’d see more than enough money to keep them comfortable.

  There was still some trepidation. As Anne Stang said not long after she signed her lease, “We’re losing something, and this may be the end of country.” At the same time, though, there was much to be gained, she thought. Maybe not right away, but eventually, the gas would bring new opportunities for her children and her grandchildren and their children. Things were going to change, that was certain. But change would have come anyway. If the gas had never been discovered, if the leases had never been signed, sooner or later this country would have been carved up for homes and businesses, and “country” would have been lost anyway, she figured. Yes, it would be scarred, it would be battered. But this way, at least, there was a chance that the farms could remain intact. And besides, she said, “It’s progress. You can’t stop it.”

  BY THE TIME LIAM and I made the long haul up Ellsworth Hill Road on that October afternoon to meet the boys from Chesapeake, progress was already parked in my mother’s driveway waiting for us. As we passed old man Ellsworth’s still struggling farm and the abandoned one-room schoolhouse and the charred bluestone remains of Marcy’s barn and the swampy pasture where deep below the muck the bones of an old milk cow were slowly changing into something else, we could already see how progress had staked its flags on its future territory. There were flags marking where the pipeline would go to carry the gas that would inevitably come churning up from the ground to the market on the coast. There were flags where the road cuts would go, where in a few months, battalions of trucks and armies of roughnecks would pour onto our land.