Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  On the way into the conference room, Stacey, Harley, and Jim ran into Beth and John Voyles on their way out. By the wildness in Beth’s eyes and the set of her jaw, Stacey could see that Beth was livid. They’re taking our water, she whispered at Stacey before they moved on down the hall. Stacey and her family were ushered into the conference room, where Laura Rusmisel and Carla Suszkowski waited. Stacey noticed that Rusmisel was pregnant and that Suszkowski had dyed her pixie haircut fire-engine red.

  Together they told Stacey that in two sets of tests, on November 10 and 19 of 2010, the independent water testing company hired by Range had determined that her family’s water wasn’t affected by their operations. Rusmisel handed Stacey test results to confirm that her water was perfectly fine.

  But Stacey believed that she had proof otherwise from the rapid arsenic tests she’d been performing on her own well. According to her results, the levels were low but there was arsenic in their water. Harley asked about his arsenic poisoning. Wasn’t his illness evidence enough of contamination? The arsenic could’ve come from anywhere, the Range employees told him. Maybe he got it from woodshop.

  Woodshop was only one semester, he replied. And he’d been out of school sick. Across the room, Harley studied one employee who had his boots up on the conference table. The man kept checking his phone. Harley saw this as a marker of privilege and disrespect. To him, the act signaled how little he mattered.

  Stacey scanned the results. She’d asked Range specifically to test for ethylene glycol, the antifreeze she and Beth had been concerned about for months. Based on her late-night reading online, she knew the chemical was in frack fluid. She’d read on the Centers for Disease Control website that glycols leach into groundwater. They target the eyes, skin, liver, kidneys, and respiratory system, as well as the central nervous system. In her research, she’d learned that other animals are more sensitive to glycols than humans. A few drops might kill a goat but not a person. On the tests in front of her, glycols were missing. When she asked the women about glycols, they told her they hadn’t found them, so they weren’t on the test results.

  Since their results indicated no contamination, the company had no obligation to provide water. Range Resources was going to remove the water buffalo. Laura Rusmisel had just handed Beth a letter saying much the same thing.

  Stacey begged the two women to let her family keep the water buffalo, and, by the meeting’s end, although the women didn’t say yes, they didn’t say no either. Two weeks later, on January 21, 2011, Dean’s showed up next door to remove the water buffalo from Justa Breeze. The Haneys’ water buffalo stayed put.

  Stacey noted that in her dealings with the company, she should try to remain reasonable and keep her mouth shut in public. She assumed that she’d kept her water because she’d behaved better than Beth did in their meetings at Range’s Southpointe headquarters. In private, however, she kept testing her water and asked Bob Fargo, the hydrologist she’d hired, to come back out for another round of testing in early February. She wanted him to test for glycols.

  On February 23, 2011, Fargo called Stacey to tell her he’d found both diethylene glycol and triethylene glycol in her water. She grabbed a sheet of loose-leaf paper from her journal and took down what he said: Extremely toxic causes severe abdominal pain. Maybe arsenic was only part of the problem. Maybe antifreeze too had something to do with the toxic burden on Harley’s body. Concerned, Bob Fargo alerted the DEP to the fact that he’d found glycols. The DEP, in turn, alerted Range. In the internal emails that ensued, Rusmisel prepared a list of chemicals used in the frack for the DEP and asked her boss, Suszkowski, if there were others. Suszkowski expressed concern about handing over such information to the state agency: “Is Vince asking for those data sheets? I am not sure I am comfortable with the ask. We can look at them. But we need to make darned sure that there is no arsenic or ethylene glycol shown in any of those chemicals because that is most likely what they are looking for.”

  * * *

  During that difficult winter of 2011, Stacey knew only that Fargo’s test results and Range’s didn’t match. She hoped that the inhalant panels, which would show if they’d been exposed to airborne carcinogens, would help shed light on what was happening to them.

  On February 2, 2011, the day of the tests, she noted, 5 tubes of blood for all 3 of us … Hard to watch. The twenty-four-hour urines were trickier: they required peeing from morning to night into an orange plastic jug. The half-lives of some of the contaminants were so brief, she’d have to pee almost immediately after exposure or the poison wouldn’t show up in the tests.

  Stacey was buoyed by the belief that she and the kids would soon be vindicated. By now a parade of special agents and various investigators from the Environmental Protection Agency was visiting her house regularly. Both civil and criminal investigators spent hours interviewing Stacey and the kids. Soon afterward, a public health inspector arrived from Philadelphia.

  Lora Werner assessed chemical exposure risks for the Centers for Disease Control, and she’d heard about Stacey and Beth through fellow government employees. Werner worked at the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), which, since the eighties, had been evaluating not just individuals like Stacey and Beth but entire communities. The agency was hobbled in its efforts to assess the oil and gas industry, however. Decades before the Halliburton loophole exempted fracking waste from most federal regulation, the fossil fuel industry was freed from the superfund legislation under which ATSDR functioned. Werner and her colleagues could investigate health risks related to drill sites only in very narrow terms. Werner was regional director; she was also from Philadelphia, which made her a stranger. But Werner, who came to this work from a background in environmental science, struck Stacey as especially committed and down-to-earth. Maybe because she was a woman, and also a fellow mom, her concern seemed deeper, more genuine, than that of some of the others traipsing through Stacey’s house. Like Stacey, Werner wore little makeup and loved the outdoors, taking her two kids camping in national parks. A member of Werner’s small team had also grown up in Washington County, which made Stacey comfortable with their sitting at her antique kitchen table for hours at a time.

  Through Stacey’s involvement with the EPA, a scientist named Richard Wilkin found her. Wilkin also worked for the EPA, in the scientific wing of the Office of Research and Development. As an environmental geochemist, he’d investigated everything from coal mining to fireworks, and now he was tasked with heading a two-year nationwide study to investigate fracking’s impact on drinking water, he told Stacey on the phone. Mandated by Congress in 2010, this study, called “Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources,” was going to be the largest of its kind, and Wilkin asked Stacey if she and her neighbors were willing to participate as one of only five test sites across the United States.

  For Stacey, being chosen for the study bolstered her hopes. Maybe all that they’d been through wouldn’t be for nothing. She and the kids just had to endure the mess up the hill a little while longer. She didn’t know, however, that the EPA had already tangled with Range Resources in Texas over water contamination—and lost. In 2010, the EPA found fuel had leached in two water wells near Fort Worth, where Range was operating. In response, the federal government employed its rarely invoked “emergency powers” for the first and only time against a gas company, ordering Range to cease operations that put human health at risk. (The EPA would later invoke “emergency powers” in Flint, Michigan.)

  Range challenged the legality of the EPA’s actions and argued that the contaminants were naturally occurring. According to an internal email from an EPA attorney, Pennsylvania’s former governor Ed Rendell intervened in the case by meeting with Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the EPA, to discuss a possible settlement. Rendell’s former deputy chief of staff, Scott Roy, a registered lobbyist, had been hired as vice president of Government Relations.
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br />   The EPA dropped its charges, saying that the agency wanted to avoid a costly legal battle. In exchange, Range agreed to participate in the agency’s two-year drinking water study. This participation never materialized.

  * * *

  One morning in February 2011, a month after Stacey’s and Beth’s meetings in the Range offices, a tanker truck filled with liquid waste flipped over on the ice and slid down the hill toward the trailer guarding the Yeager site. Inside the trailer, two security guards were changing shifts. Carl Warco, wiry and pushing fifty, had just finished working graveyard, from midnight to 8:00 a.m. One of the only women on-site, Breanne Buttermore, had just arrived to take over the day shift. Warco glanced out of the trailer window and saw the forty-ton tanker sliding toward them. He grabbed Breanne and dove out of the trailer as the truck slid past, missing them by feet.

  The truck belonged to Highland Environmental Solutions, LLC. As the hazmat team arrived to clean up its diesel and frack fluid spill, Breanne ran down the hill and banged on Beth’s door. She told Beth that Warco had saved her.

  Warco knew Beth’s daughter, Ashley; they rode Harley-Davidsons together in a large group on the weekends. On mornings when he was leaving work, he often waited at the base of the access road for her. He knew that Ashley’d drive by on her way to her job at the Meadows Racetrack, where she was drug testing racehorses, taking blood and urine samples. Now that Jodi was dead, she wasn’t barrel racing very often. She was struggling to keep a steady job. She kept shifting from drug testing to grooming at Burke’s, a stable in Washington, then back again. She wasn’t much of a talker. But sometimes she’d stop to chat with Warco when she saw him on the road.

  He tried to keep the conversations casual as he told her repeatedly not to let her family or the animals drink their water. He didn’t tell her why. In the early hours after dawn, he’d walked the perimeter of the waste pond when no one was around and seen liquid seeping from its side. Whatever it was gave off a chemical vapor, which he could see rising from the ground. The Voyles’ and Haneys’ farms lay directly down the hill. Warco didn’t know the Haneys, but he worried about the water that the Voyles and their animals were drinking. He also didn’t want to lose his job, so he kept his head down and his admonitions vague.

  A few weeks after the accident, Beth was rounding the bend as she drove home when she saw another Highland truck coming down the gravel road. A valve in the back was gushing liquid. Beth stopped to flag the driver. You got something open back there, buddy, she recalled saying. It was just a little bit of wastewater, he replied. “A little bit my ass,” Beth said later. She drove home to call the authorities. The spill was never cleaned up, and later, tests would reveal the presence of the fuels, benzene, toluene, and acetone in the Yeagers’ field. Beth had begun watching that hill with a hawk eye.

  * * *

  On Valentine’s Day, Harley came down with some kind of flu, so Stacey drove him to Dr. Fox’s office in downtown Washington and picked up the test results for the inhalant panels. Dr. Fox didn’t know how to read them. Stacey didn’t either. When she got home, she called the head of the lab at Washington Hospital to ask for help assessing the levels of two acids in particular, phenol and hippuric acid.

  It wasn’t so unusual to find them in people’s bodies, but mostly among truck drivers or city-dwellers, not among farmers or those who lived out in the country. Phenol indicated exposure to benzene, a chemical compound found in cigarette smoke, crude oil, and gasoline. Long-term, she learned, it can cause blood-borne cancers, including leukemia. The hippuric acid in their bodies indicated that they’d been exposed to toluene, another compound related to gasoline that causes cancer. Benzene and toluene are volatile organic compounds predisposed to moving out of water and into air. Some, heavier than air, will travel downwind and downhill.

  Stacey worried how these exposures would affect their future. Some had the potential to alter genes, and most created more acute problems in children due to their stature, the size of their lungs in relation to the rest of their bodies, and the fact that their nervous systems were still developing. She wandered around the house sniffing as Chris made his signature lasagna for Valentine’s Day dinner. To save money, they stayed home and gave each other cards. Stacey loved hers. The outside was covered with white hearts. Inside, the printed card read If I had my life to live over again, next time I’d find you sooner so I could love you longer. Below, Chris scrawled, You have made me so happy again and I hope it never stops. It was easier for Chris to put down his feelings on paper than to speak them aloud.

  That night Stacey was distracted. They haven’t just ruined our water, she thought, they’ve poisoned our air. Unlike the water, which had been replaced by the water buffalo sitting in front of her house, there was no way to replace the air. They were going to have to leave. She wondered where they could go. Her parents had one extra room; Chris had another in the bungalow in Eighty Four. The town of Eighty Four shared its name with the lumber company, but no one knew where the name came from—maybe a mile marker on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, maybe a post office that opened in 1884.

  No one had enough room for a donkey, a horse, two goats, two cats, a dog, and six rabbits. The thought of dividing the kids from each other and from their animals was too much to bear. It was still winter, anyway. Maybe they’d be okay when the wind was blowing the chemicals away from their home. She’d keep the kids inside and the windows shut. She wrote, Feel we are trapped btw the flare and the impoundment; can’t even open the windows in our house.

  When she poked her head into a Hang ’Em High meeting one Saturday night in mid-March, a retired miner who belonged to the Izaak Walton League approached to ask if she’d be willing to tell her story publicly. In the coming weeks there was going to be a large meeting at the airport in Morgantown, West Virginia, where people were coming to learn about what it was like to live near fracking. Stacey said she’d think about it, by which she meant no. In addition to her fearing Range’s retribution, public speaking made her uncomfortable. She hadn’t been raised to call attention to herself, and hadn’t spoken in front of a crowd since she’d played Betsy Ross in the third grade. She was also terrified that if she told her story in public, she might start crying and not be able to stop. The retired coal miner reassured her that the people in the audience would be like-minded locals, not industry folk. But, again, she was concerned that a spy from Range Resources could be in the audience, and it didn’t seem worth the risk.

  That evening, however, at Hang ’Em High, she learned more about the possible health impacts of the antifreeze in her water. Like DDT and other pesticides, glycols were endocrine disruptors: they had the capacity to harm fertility and hormonal development, especially in children. These problems, or others, might await Harley and Paige. What if her children couldn’t have their own? What if they got cancer twenty years from now? Who would be around to pay for the health costs in two decades?

  She decided that night that she had no other choice than to speak out. If Range were to punish her by removing the water buffalo, then that was a price she’d have to pay for warning others about the potential harm to their children.

  On Sunday, March 13, 2011, still reeling from what she’d learned about glycols the night before, she was bent on making it to church with Paige and Harley in tow. With the divorce, Harley’s illness, and the mowing, deworming, and chopping wood for the dragon, Stacey hadn’t been supplying the church water, or attending at all, since Harley got sick. She knew that when she and her sister weren’t there, the congregation often prayed for them. Pappy and Linda were always in their pew. After the 10:00 a.m. service, Stacey followed her parents home about half a mile down Amity Ridge Road. Pappy built bird feeders outside the house, which he sometimes electrified. Pappy didn’t like starlings. They ate all his feed and scared away prettier songbirds, so he rigged up a current that ran through the bird feeder’s perch, and a remote detonator, which he could press to blow the unwanted starlings sky-high. Av
ian IEDs. Inside the house, Pappy had built the stone hearth and screened porch, and paneled most rooms with salvaged wood. Linda had made the kitchen cabinet doors out of tin, into which she punched heart patterns. She made breakfast. Once Harley and Paige had eaten, Stacey sent them outside to play.

  She had something to tell her parents, and it wasn’t good. Bob Fargo, the hydrologist she’d hired, had found glycols in their drinking water. Antifreeze, basically. It could mess with the kids’ genes, and make it hard for them to have children.

  Standing at the stove, her mother stayed quiet and thought about Pappy. Since Vietnam, she’d always suspected that his exposure to Agent Orange might be playing a role in his ongoing health issues, and maybe also in his erratic behavior. And in fact, Larry Hillberry would soon be awarded $3,300 a month from the Department of Veterans Affairs in compensation. Yet exposure to Agent Orange was just one of the ways that Vietnam had altered Pappy. In sleep he raved about hovering black helicopters, and his daughters had been instructed never to wake him. He could be dangerous, and Stacey had grown up afraid of him. But that wasn’t who Pappy was now. He’d do anything for his two daughters and their children. He growled that he wanted to barricade the gates up at the waste pond. Stacey knew he wasn’t capable of anything like that, but she was touched by his desire to defend her, which in her childhood had felt so lacking to her. She wrote in her journal, Crazy Ole Vietnam Vet.