Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  11 | AIRPORT

  On the evening of March 22, 2011, the night before Stacey was scheduled to speak at Morgantown Airport, Paige started vomiting. Stacey thought she might have to cancel and went to bed hoping that Paige would be well enough to get on the school bus in the morning. Paige woke still nauseous, so Stacey bundled her in plaid pajamas and drove south with her toward the Ruff Creek General Store. Newly stocked for gas well workers and coal miners, the once-somnolent shop now made take-out pizzas and burritos. Every tired worker wanted a warm meal. From Ruff Creek to Prosperity, general stores were doing better than they had since the mills and mines shut down. Stacey and Paige waited outside in the Ruff Creek parking lot for an Izaak Walton League member who was going to escort her the last thirty miles to make sure that she didn’t get lost.

  Following the old-timer’s car, Stacey and Paige headed south along I-79 until they crossed into West Virginia. They hurtled past a mountain missing its peak. The snowy hillside flatlined. This was mountaintop removal.

  * * *

  When Stacey and Paige arrived at Morgantown Airport, the arrivals and departures lounge was already filled with farmers, politicians, and local conservationists—mostly gray-haired with bristle cuts. Stacey recognized some of them from the Izaak Walton League meetings, but she was too nervous to say hello. She and her daughter slid into two empty seats toward the front of the room. Paige, who was still wearing her pajamas under an oversized sweatshirt, laid her head on her mother’s shoulder.

  “I’m hungry,” she murmured. Stacey shushed her. She’d tried to get Paige to eat something before they left, but the eleven-year-old had said she felt too sick. Stacey scanned down the agenda and stopped at the third item:

  “Effects of Living Near Marcellus Pit Using Evaporative (Misting) Technology in Washington County, PA.” Stacey Haney, Nurse.

  There was her name. She was going to have to go through with the talk.

  Already bored, Paige took the agenda from her mom’s lap and doodled pictures of animals in the margins: Chuck the Chicken, Bob the Donkey, a pig named Pork.

  When the spokesman called Stacey’s name, she walked to the front of the lounge and gripped the lectern.

  “I brought Kleenex and hopefully I won’t cry,” she began. “We live in the middle of five well sites. Right above us is a four-acre chemical impoundment fifteen hundred feet from our house.

  “Since September 2009 my son has been sick but we didn’t know what it was. He has had severe mouth ulcers, severe abdominal pain, lymph node swelling, nausea, and been not able to hardly move.

  “In August, September, October of 2010, our animals started dying. My son’s Grand Champion goat aborted two babies. Our neighbors lost a horse and puppies and we started putting two and two together and there might be a problem with our water. We called our family doctor and were tested for metals. I contacted the DEP. They came out and sampled for several constituents in frack water, but not diethylene and triethylene glycol, which are not supposed to be there. Both are on our test results. Range Resources has been providing us with water but they’re not assuming responsibility.

  “The whole time my son was sick I never thought in a million years this could be causing it. Never in a million years did we think this could be the problem. No one checked him for arsenic poisoning or toxic chemicals. Doctors have never seen this. I could kick myself for not figuring it out, but neither did the doctors.

  “My neighbors and I signed leases three years ago. We didn’t know this is what we would be dealing with. If I would’ve known what I know now I would’ve done all I could have done to get my neighbors to not sign leases too. They come, show you all these pretty pictures of beautiful land and little well caps. We asked good questions, but they lie, and now here we are.

  “Did the chemicals get into the springs around our house? Have they seeped into the aquifer? Is there a leak in the pond at the top of the hill? We don’t know. It’s a puzzle and we’re trying slowly to put pieces together.

  “Last month, we discovered the benzene and toluene in us. It took us two months to figure out what inhalants we needed to be tested for. It’s expensive but so far insurance covers it. Benzene and toluene, constituents of gasoline, are known to be carcinogenic and to cause birth defects. We get a bad odor from this impoundment. They came out and put something in it. Now the weather’s nice and my kids are very much outside kids, do we go about our business? We’re getting nosebleeds and headaches and last night, after working outside all day to tear down our old barn, my throat and eyes were burning.

  “Basically, they’ve ruined our lives. They’ve ruined my home. We can’t use our water. My home is worthless in terms of value. People wonder why we just don’t leave. It’s not that easy. I can’t afford to rent a place to take both the animals and the kids. We’re kind of in a financial bind. We’re lucky they provide water, but we were there first. I don’t want to give up our house.”

  “You did good, Mom. You only cried twice,” Paige told Stacey when she sat down.

  The purpose of the Morgantown meeting was really to discuss the fate of Dunkard Creek, the stream that formed the southern boundary of Washington County. Dunkard was a major fishing hole, and its abundance of fish was testimony to how local streams had rebounded from decades of coal mining. But in 2009, something had poisoned the water, killing everything that lived within it: an estimated 43,000 fish, 15,000 freshwater mussels, and 6,500 salamanders. At first, no one had known why the bloated bodies of muskies and mudpuppies rose from the creek as if stricken by plague. It turned out that the creek was suffering from an overgrowth of golden algae, a saltwater algae rarely found in fresh water. The golden algae killed fish by releasing a toxin that causes fish to bleed from the gills until they suffocate. But where the salt was coming from—that no one knew for sure. The men of the Izaak Walton League thought they had an answer: Amity’s former fire chief Robert Allan Shipman’s midnight dumping runs. He’d finally been indicted five days earlier on ninety-eight counts of environmental crimes. For several years, Shipman had been hauling waste for Consol Energy, and dumping that waste into abandoned coal mines also owned by the company, many of which flowed into Dunkard Creek. The state attorney general agreed. “You can’t say he killed X number of fish,” her spokesman said. “But did he play a role in compromising the quality of Dunkard Creek and other waterways in the area? No doubt about it.”

  At the meeting that day, the EPA was going to announce the deal it had struck with Consol Energy as reparation for the death of Dunkard Creek. When Jessica Greathouse, the EPA spokeswoman, took the podium after Stacey, she announced that Consol had agreed to pay a $5.5 million fine for violating the Clean Water Act. Consol also agreed to build a $200 million wastewater plant in West Virginia. But the company wasn’t going to admit any role in killing Dunkard Creek, and Greathouse didn’t mention Robert Allan Shipman or his recent indictment.

  There were cries of outrage from the men in bib overalls standing in the back of the lounge. They knew what had happened at Dunkard. They’d lived it. A $5.5 million fine was little compared with the $7 million a year Shipman Sanitary made dumping, according to state estimates. And Consol wasn’t even going to admit responsibility? The EPA spokeswoman hustled to sit down as the barrage of angry comments flew at her. (She has since left the federal government to work in the oil and gas industry.) But the outbursts kept coming. This was one more instance in which the federal government was colluding with companies to sell out Appalachia, one gray-haired Izaak Walton League member said.

  “We’re one of the most mineral-rich places in the country, but all of the money is going somewhere else!” he said.

  * * *

  As the meeting broke up in frustration, I introduced myself to Stacey and Paige and asked if I might come visit their home. The next day, I drove an hour southwest of Pittsburgh to Amity for the first time. Wending through narrow valleys, I watched the blanched patchwork of stubbled hilltops drop into brighter g
reen valley bottoms. Higher up the hillsides, where the paler hues indicated less water, I noticed what looked like giant rolls of toilet paper.

  These were water buffaloes, Stacey told me when I arrived at her farmhouse. Farmers here were accustomed to using them at homes that didn’t have access to public water, or when coal mining undermined land, damaging springs. We climbed into her Pontiac and, within a mile, passed the five well sites and two compressor stations. We rode through Amity and on toward Prosperity. Along the seven miles of back roads, in addition to the well sites she pointed out, the earth was churned raw by ditches awaiting pipeline. From earth movers to gas rigs to water trucks, industry was everywhere. It wasn’t just isolated sites that were at issue; industry required an overwhelming amount of infrastructure connecting them.

  “They show you a pretty picture and they lie,” Stacey said. When we returned to the farmhouse, she took me inside to meet Harley, who raised a hand in greeting from the recliner. He was skeletal and gray. He didn’t dream of becoming a veterinarian anymore; seeing sick animals had proven more painful than he had imagined. He wanted to be an architect: to build the golden bathrooms he saw on MTV Cribs.

  PART 2

  BURDEN OF PROOF

  Underneath us, Marcellus could heat the U.S. for the next thirty years. Our nation has a thirst for energy and that will continue, but how do we protect our resources, namely water. That’s what a man needs for life.

  —WERNER LOEHLEIN, A.K.A. KING NEPTUNE, WATER MANAGEMENT SECTION CHIEF, U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS, PITTSBURGH DISTRICT

  What we’ve done is make a deal with the devil. Which is what it is.

  —KATHRYN TEIGEN DEMASTER AND STEPHANIE A. MALIN, “A DEVIL’S BARGAIN: RURAL ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICES AND HYDRAULIC FRACTURING ON PENNSYLVANIA’S FARMS” (JOURNAL OF RURAL STUDIES, 2015)

  12 | “MR. AND MRS. ATTICUS FINCH”

  A successful Washington County attorney in his early forties, John Smith was a relentlessly friendly local son who’d already made good. He loved the law and its history, and was fashioning himself into the modern equivalent of an old country lawyer known for being fair. He could also be, on occasion, a fast-talking smart aleck. Raised in the middle-class suburbs of Pittsburgh as one of four children, Smith had spent the first ten years of his career as a corporate litigator in white-shoe firms in Pittsburgh, where he rose to partner. Now he lived and worked in Cecil Township, an affluent suburb of eleven thousand people halfway between Amity and Pittsburgh. Cecil was the corporate hub of the oil and gas boom, and Smith was the township’s attorney. With the return of the fossil fuel industry, he and his law practice, Smith Butz, stood to do even better. The small firm was profiting tidily from negotiating leases for up to ten new clients a day.

  Smith Butz was situated a mile from the Range Resources headquarters in Southpointe, the industrial park built, in part, on the grounds of a former mental institution. Southpointe bustled with a golf course, gyms, Hog Fathers BBQ, and Chinese and Mexican takeout joints, as well as Smoke, a cigar shop and lounge that served itinerant oil and gas executives coming from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Smith Butz sat just off of Technology Drive, on the second floor of the Bailey Center. Named for a nearby coal mine, the brick building was leased largely to companies involved in extracting carbon: Corsa Coal Corp.; FlexSteel Pipeline Technologies, Inc.; ROC Service Company; and Gateway Engineers, Inc.

  For a time John Smith had been number one in his class at Thomas M. Cooley, the law school in Lansing, Michigan, where he met his wife, Kendra. She’d recently joined the firm as the second Smith to be a named partner. Thomas Cooley may not have enjoyed a high rank among law schools, but no one challenged Smith’s nimble mind or his diligence in poring over legal arcana relating to property rights or zoning for the small towns of Washington County he represented.

  Smith also founded the Cecil Township Historical Society. He cherished Washington County’s history, especially the early exploits of George Washington, who’d first traveled to southwestern Pennsylvania in 1753 on a mission for the British to protest French designs on the land and its rivers. At twenty-two, Washington was looking to make his fortune, but, as he wrote in his journal, his western exploits ended in humiliation when he was defeated by the French and Native Americans in 1754 and surrendered at Fort Necessity, fifty-eight miles east of what’s now the city of Washington. As payment for his military service, George Washington was given a plot of land near the Smiths’ home in Cecil. When Washington tried to lay claim to the land, however, squatters refused to leave. Washington was faced with a quandary: forcibly remove the frontiersmen, or take them before the newly formed Washington Court of Common Pleas.

  “Here’s a guy who’s the biggest hero ever and these guys tell him to beat it,” Smith said. “And what’s more, he doesn’t take arms against them. He follows the rule of law in Washington County and files suit against them.” There were other versions of the story, in which Washington set fire to the settlement and drove out families, but Smith favored the one in which Washington hired a lawyer named Thomas Smith.

  “He could’ve hired Jefferson,” John Smith said, “but no, he went with the local guy.” John liked to imagine that he and Thomas might be related, but his three children often reminded him they weren’t. Smith was descended instead from German and Italian immigrants who’d arrived on the cusp of the twentieth century. Most of his family had worked in steel mills, and Smith was one of the first to go into white-collar work.

  He was better versed than most local lawyers in the basics of natural gas drilling. He and Kendra had learned about conventional drilling over the years from a gruff-talking, hard-drinking client out of West Virginia who owned several dozen shallow wells.

  Unlike oil, which is what operators call a “Eureka!” business, natural gas is a widget business, meaning profit doesn’t come from a sudden geyser. Profit comes instead from slow and steady work at the margins, and involves keeping costs as low as possible. This can make it tempting to cut corners by choosing less expensive safety measures, or bidding out work to the cheapest subcontractors. Since the Smiths understood the basics of the business, they were ready in 2001 when land men with phone books in the back seats of their cars began lining up at the Washington County Courthouse to sign up plot after plot.

  As Cecil’s solicitor, Smith had a front-row seat to the local fights between the townships and the industry. Overwhelmed, local township supervisors were struggling to get a handle on the traffic, noise, dust, and cracked roads that came along with industry’s arrival. No one was talking about drilling here in Cecil yet. Still, the township and two of its neighbors, Robinson and South Fayette, were already drafting ordinances to gain some control over trucks and noise before they arrived.

  Smith looked to Fort Worth, Texas, as a model for how cities and towns could coexist with drillers. He believed that fracking could be a good thing, and wanted controls rather than an out-and-out ban on the practice, which the city of Pittsburgh had recently enacted. In 2010, the city had placed a moratorium on fracking, effectively ending it before it began. The effort was led by a Democratic city councilman and former steelworker named Doug Shields, a man not afraid to don a fedora, and his wife, Bridget, a sharp and committed fractivist, as opponents to drilling were coming to be known. They were aided by public outcry after it came to light that the Catholic Church, one of the city’s largest landholders, had signed gas leases in fifteen cemeteries. It was Doug Shields who first called John and Kendra Smith “Mr. and Mrs. Atticus Finch” when they started to risk going up against the oil and gas industry.

  In the spring of 2011, however, John Smith still thought that industry could benefit Washington County, where people had suffered since coal and steel vanished. Smith also believed that the rule of law could protect Pennsylvania; that agencies like the Department of Environmental Protection could adequately police drillers and that regulation could also protect local communities if townships drafted their rules effectively. Yet whi
le negotiating leases on behalf of landowners, he’d also seen what was lacking in people’s ability to protect their rights on the surface. Operators wanted the minimum possible distance between industrial infrastructure and people’s homes and streams in order to maximize their ability to drill. Washington County’s citizens, who’d been signing mineral leases for a century, were well versed in the exigencies of setbacks and rights-of-way. “As much as landowners wanted to maximize their profit from gas, they wanted to protect their property above all,” Smith said. Putting to use his experience with advising landowners on negotiating their leases, Smith helped draft the first local ordinances to limit the broad latitude sought by drillers.

  For the companies, these local ordinances ranged from irritating to troubling. In Pennsylvania, which is made up of more than 2,500 municipalities, local government was remarkably influential. Townships had the power to make things difficult for drillers. Small-town boards used their right to establish residential, commercial, and industrial zones to determine where drillers could work. They put in place rules about noise and truck traffic that attempted to control how industry behaved in their towns. This was a problem for the drilling companies. Not only did these local ordinances curb operations but they also introduced risk into their business model. Range Resources and its competitors had gone to great lengths and expense signing leases, only to face the prospect of not being able to drill freely due to little towns pushing back. In Washington County alone, there were sixty-six municipalities, each with its own government.

  The epicenter of these local battles was Mount Pleasant, the town where Stacey’s new friends the Hallowiches lived and where Range Resources had succeeded in leasing 95 percent of the land. By the spring of 2011, the fight between the town and the company had turned ugly, and Smith was right in the middle. Mount Pleasant hired him as special counsel to help the township draft its ordinance and push back against industry’s efforts to limit local regulation. The company tried to appeal to those who stood to make money with an unusual letter-writing campaign. One mass mailing was addressed to a fictitious “Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmo at 10 Cash-Strapped Lane.” It urged residents to bring pressure on their local officials to allow companies wide latitude to drill where they needed to, or there’d be no gas, and “no gas means no royalties.”