Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  After they left Beth’s farm, Kelly asked Stacey what the terrible stink was, but Stacey smelled nothing. Troy Jordan, an EPA investigator, had explained to Stacey that one of the signs of worsening exposure to some substances, including hydrogen sulfide, was an inability to detect their presence anymore. The body’s ability to smell the hydrogen sulfide was its first line of defense. When the body could no longer perform that function, people slipped into olfactory fatigue. In itself, this phenomenon wasn’t a concern. But in the case of toxic inhalants, the fatigue rendered exposure all the more dangerous, since Stacey and the kids could no longer tell when they needed to leave. Back at Stacey’s, Harley was still asleep. Kelly wanted to take Stacey and the kids home to her house, but Stacey didn’t want to disturb Harley. Instead, she spent the night, as she often did, awake and trying to figure out where they could go as a family.

  The next morning, after Harley had been sleeping for fifteen and a half hours, Stacey shook him awake to get ready for school. He was in no shape to learn anything, but she had to get him away from the heavy chemical haze that had settled over their farm. At the hospital, she approached Dr. Koliner, a pulmonologist who’d been helping Stacey interpret the elements of exposure in her family’s lab results. When patients came into the ER with similar symptoms, the hospital staff now gave them a questionnaire asking about their proximity to oil and gas wells. Stacey told Dr. Koliner about Kelly’s visit. The pulmonologist knew and trusted both women. Kelly had smelled something overpowering that Stacey and the kids couldn’t even detect in the air, she said. When she’d gotten home that night she had a terrible headache. Stacey feared it was hydrogen sulfide, that bacterial rot she and Beth had learned about.

  Get out of the house, he told her. The fact that she couldn’t smell the hydrogen sulfide indicated the olfactory fatigue that the EPA had warned her about, he explained. You need to get the kids and you need to get out of there now.

  That night, she took the kids to her parents’ to spend a few days there while she figured out what to do. With Harley sleeping under the eaves in Shelly’s old room, and Paige in a narrow cot, Stacey climbed in to her childhood bed. It was depressing to be back at forty-one in a bed she’d intended to flee for good at seventeen. The next day, on May 12, she called the Smiths and officially retained them. In her notebook, she jotted down their fee: 33% CONTINGENCY, 40% IF GOES TO TRIAL.

  Up at the site, the stench remained overpowering. On May 13, Range employees exchanged emails trying to determine the source of the trouble. Since the large pond up at the Yeagers’ was a centralized impoundment, frack fluids from other sites in Washington County were trucked and stored there. The workers suspected that noxious liquid from one of those sites was causing the problem.

  “The nastiness is definitely coming from the Carrol Baker,” one worker wrote, calling the liquid “demon water.” Unsure of what to do, he suggested they go ahead and frack with it.

  On May 16, after four nights at Mam and Pappy’s, Harley still wasn’t feeling better. That morning Stacey took him to see Dr. Fox. For the third time in six weeks, Harley tested positive for strep. The pediatrician told Stacey that Harley could no longer take the risk of exposure. Keep him away from the house for thirty days, he told Stacey. Don’t even let him ride past the impoundment and stay outside a ten-mile radius of the site. Amity was too close.

  Stacey took Harley to stay with Chris in Eighty Four, while she and Paige kept sleeping at her parents’ house in Amity. As she began to shuttle the kids between her boyfriend’s, her parents’, the doctors, school, and the animals, Stacey was essentially living out of her car and driving an extra four hours a day. She was spending, on average, two hundred dollars a month on gas. Most nights, Stacey dropped Harley at Chris’s in Eighty Four, then drove back to her parents’ in Amity to sleep alongside Paige. They felt like refugees. I’m running myself ragged, she scrawled in her journal, but if it helps my kids regain their health then it’s well worth it. Harley, however, still wasn’t getting better.

  “Our house has become a two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand-dollar cat mansion,” she told me. She went to the farm only to feed the animals and to do laundry so that she could avoid using her parents’ meager water supply. She developed a system. She zipped up the driveway to park, grabbed the plastic laundry basket from the back seat, and hustled up the porch stairs, into the back door, and through the kitchen to the laundry room, where she piled a load into the washer, fended off and fed the three hungry house cats, poured bottled water into their dishes, and pulled on her rubber boots. Then she ran up to the barn, turned on the garden hose attached to the water buffalo to fill the baby pool that functioned as a goat trough, scooped feed into their feed buckets, continued up to the rabbit hutch to do the same, then the horse paddock, and last of all, she attended to Bob the Donkey before racing back down to the house, transferring the wet clothes to the dryer, and running back to the car. During her long drives, she called friends and the few experts she knew to puzzle out the latest symptoms and to try to manage the logistics for each day.

  “People ask me why I don’t just move out, but where would I go?” she asked me one night on the phone while she drove. This was the decisive question that people who didn’t live in Amity would pose, often more affluent people who didn’t understand what it meant not to be able to carry extra rent, or didn’t feel the same ties to their land. “I can’t afford another mortgage, and if I default on this place, we will lose it,” she said.

  Stacey knew they couldn’t live in limbo forever, but for now, she was out of ideas. One day, she came straight from work to load up a few months’ worth of belongings as quickly as possible and head back to her parents’.

  Amity had received terrible news: Robert Allan Shipman, the former fire chief who’d committed all those environmental crimes, had suffered a stunning loss. His seventeen-year-old stepdaughter, Savannah Hennen, had killed herself several days earlier. Savannah Hennen was a popular blonde junior at West Greene High School, just over the border from Washington County. A devout teenager, she’d worked with her local chapter of Children’s Bible Ministries. A year later, when Shipman would finally come before the court, Judge Farley Toothman would let him off with probation and a fine. The DEP had never enforced such laws before. His stepdaughter’s suicide was punishment enough.

  How could a girl like that shoot herself? Stacey wondered as she packed up the car. Yet these days around Amity, suicide was increasingly familiar. Along with the drilling boom, the plague of opioids was hitting Washington County ever harder. Some people said the out-of-town gas workers were bringing in drugs, and while that may have been true, Stacey knew the scourge of prescription painkillers had been worsening before the gas well workers had arrived. She worried for the future of Amity’s kids. Growing up in the shadow of the steel bust had been difficult, but this new era seemed even worse. At least with the bust, they’d all been in it together. The boom, however, threatened to divide them, with kids like Savannah suddenly hitting it rich while a handful like Harley suffered.

  Although she hoped they wouldn’t be gone for long, Stacey took what she could, leaving everything soft—couches, pillows, Harley’s recliner, anything she couldn’t wash—out of fear that the foam and fabric could hold on to fumes. She’d finally admitted to herself that Febreze did nothing. It didn’t really mask the stench; they just couldn’t smell it anymore.

  13 | MUTUAL DISTRUST

  The days of offering visitors sloppy joes were over. When a new water inspector from the DEP pulled into Beth Voyles’s driveway on a May day in 2011, Beth, clad in a T-shirt and culottes, stormed out of the house. She skipped the niceties and demanded to know what was going on with the stench drifting over her farm. Although Stacey had left a few days earlier, Beth wasn’t going anywhere. There was simply too much to do for the horses and dogs, and they couldn’t afford a move for all the two- and four-leggers. Her only recourse, as she saw it, was to pester the DEP until someone took action
.

  At the DEP, John Carson had been evaluating water for only several months, but he’d spent sixteen years monitoring air quality in eastern Pennsylvania. Carson welcomed this new job as a chance to come home. He’d grown up near Amity and graduated from Washington’s Trinity High School as a member of the class of 1976. He’d gone to Penn State to earn a degree in plant science in 1981, then on to work at Radio Shack for a couple of years before buying a lawn care company. When that didn’t work out, he went to work for the DEP in 1994.

  Carson called himself “the eyes and ears of the Department”; he took his job of protecting people seriously. But fracking was new to him. Standing before Beth in person, he said little in response to her angry inquiry about what the hell was going on. He didn’t tell her he’d been to the site the day before and smelled something “oily and salty.” Instead, he stood in the driveway sniffing. Irate, Beth assumed that Carson wasn’t doing his job. (On another occasion, when she’d complained, he’d showed up but refused to get out of his car. As he’d rolled down the window, she’d stood there fuming. He’d told Beth that he couldn’t take a complaint without three different complainants.)

  A few days later, on May 26, 2011, John Carson found a bigger problem: the frack pond seemed to be leaking. Walking along the man-made hillside between the waste pond and the gravel access road, he “caught,” in his words, a Range Resources employee testing water in a manhole Carson had never seen before. Its rubber cover lay off to one side. The manhole, the Range employee explained to Carson, functioned as a leak detection system. In the hole, there was a length of perforated pipe. If the holes in the pipe were dripping liquid, the pond was probably leaking.

  There seemed to be a flaw in the design. Although the pond had two liners to guard against a leak, the employee thought that this detection unit was placed into the ground beneath both. By the time anyone found a leak it would have already come in contact with the ground, and possibly groundwater. As Carson peered into the cloudy water leaking from the pipe, he suspected he’d stumbled onto trouble.

  Think: he wrote in his notes, leak detection under both liners. Carson snapped pictures and took a GPS reading—north 40 degrees, 5 minutes, 24.4 seconds; west 80 degrees, 13 minutes, 41.7 seconds. He tested the water over the next months, and his results revealed high levels of contamination: the inorganic salts from the ancient seafloor that are often used as a marker of water contamination related to fracking were fifty times drinking water standards.

  * * *

  Frustrated by her escalating clashes with Carson, Beth called her new lawyers for the first time. She got John Smith on the phone and recounted how Carson had once told her he couldn’t take a complaint without three different complainants. The Smiths knew that there was no such regulation. To them, it seemed like the DEP wasn’t doing its job.

  If that was the case, what legal recourse did they have? Kendra asked John. As an attorney for municipalities, he was better equipped than she in interrogating the mechanisms of government law. He thought their best bet was to file a writ of mandamus, a request that a court order a government agency to do its job. By filing the writ, Beth Voyles would be suing the DEP.

  The Smiths filed the suit on May 23, 2011. A lawsuit like this would require time, and they stood to make nothing from it. In legal parlance, Voyles v. DEP wasn’t recoverable. If the agency was found to be in the wrong, the state wouldn’t pay the Voyles anything. But maybe the DEP would do a better job by them, as they were still living there. It didn’t take long for the DEP to respond. Within days, Range Resources also asked to join the defense. On June 1, 2011, all parties would meet at the Commonwealth Court in the state capital of Harrisburg.

  To build a case against the DEP and prove how the agency had failed to do its job, Kendra needed to piece together what had happened at the well site. Once she had such a timeline, she could evaluate whether or not she thought Stacey and Beth had enough of a case to go forward as plaintiffs. For a civil suit like this, the Smiths’ burden of proof would be lower than for a criminal one. They wouldn’t have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Range’s actions had poisoned the water and sickened their clients. They’d have to prove only a preponderance of evidence—that their evidence was more convincing than the other side’s.

  To gather the necessary evidence, her first task was to ask Range for a list of every chemical used at the site. Range Resources was the first company to claim that it openly disclosed all of the chemicals used in the fracking process. “It’s the right thing to do morally and ethically,” John Pinkerton, Range’s then-CEO, had said a year earlier in 2010, “but it’s also right for our shareholders.” The disclosure, Kendra thought at first, would make it easier to learn what chemicals Range was using. And since, by law, Range had to supply the DEP with maps of the site, the Smiths requested every single document the DEP had in its files for the Yeager site—permits, correspondence, plans, and schematics.

  Kendra was accustomed to snowing herself in under stacks of paper, then digging out with meticulous rigor. She’d always been a numbers person, and her specialized cases involved nearly unheard-of disorders and conditions, from berylliosis caused by exposure to beryllium, an element used in aerospace engineering, to different types of histoplasmosis, a disease related to bird droppings.

  It was a useful background for a plaintiff lawyer. While representing railroads, she learned from industrial hygienists and physicians to read charts and graphs of air, water, blood, urine, and other lab tests critical to her job. She’d learned how to read CT scans from one of the foremost experts in brain cancer, and studied with one of the toxicologists credited with establishing the causal link between benzene exposure and acute myeloginous leukemia. From these experts, she’d learned to follow a three-sentence mantra: “Don’t jump to conclusions. Get every fact you can. Never assume.”

  From the start, John and Kendra presumed they would have to demonstrate that a leak, or a similar problem up at the site, had contaminated their clients’ water. As they understood it, the definitive evidence lay in the simple fact that the very same chemicals in the industrial waste were now in their clients’ wells and springs. Both the DEP and Range would counter that this definitive test was too simple. There were other contradictory factors for the court to consider: the way water moved underground, and the differing ratios of chemicals at each location.

  The first schematics to arrive from the DEP were construction plans that Range and its subcontractors had submitted in order to obtain permits. Kendra studied a sketch of the waste pond. She wanted to know what happened if it leaked. She saw no kind of leak detection system on the drawing, which she knew was required by law. Finally, when she received more documents related to construction, she saw that Carla Suszkowski had signed off on a system for detecting leaks that seemed deeply flawed. Independently, she began to have the same misgivings as John Carson about its construction. The pond had two plastic liners. If the first layer failed, the second was supposed to catch the potentially toxic fluid before it reached groundwater. The leak detector would alert employees that there was a hole in the liner. The trouble was that the leak detector was installed beneath both liners. And since the pond was dug fifteen feet into the ground, any contamination could leach into the soil and reach groundwater before anyone knew that there was a problem.

  Once word got out that the Smiths were taking the case, the firm was inundated with all kinds of anonymous fracking-related tips. Often, these involved rants and conspiracy theories from pissed-off farmers. On rare occasions, however, they proved useful. Kendra opened her email one day to discover that a photographer had sent her aerial images of the site. To the north sat the rectangular well pad, and to the southwest, there was the enormous, red-tinted frack pond, which dwarfed the roof of Beth’s ranch house next door. But now she could see a smaller drill cuttings pit also, which she hadn’t known existed. When she saw the pit, she grew even more concerned. Under regulations, drill cuttings pits didn’t have
to have any leak detection system at all.

  She began to comb through the Department of Environmental Protection website for notices of violation. If the pond had leaked, there was likely a record of trouble at the site. Although the DEP’s online resource, eFACTS, was laden with information, the system was impossible to navigate. Reading through violations listed by numerical statute, Kendra thought the system might be designed to be deliberately obfuscating, but she knew its failures were a matter of the DEP’s being broke. Before this case, Kendra had taken for granted that the government systems put in place to protect people’s health were functional. Trying to track down public facts for Stacey and Beth’s case was showing her otherwise, beginning with the dysfunction of eFACTS. When the inspector general’s evaluation of the DEP’s problems came out in 2014, he would single out the system as a particular failure.

  Hunched before her computer, Kendra clicked and scrolled through the largely inscrutable DEP database until she found a notice of a violation at the Yeager site dated to March 25, 2010. What it was, she couldn’t tell, so she sent an associate into the Pittsburgh office of the DEP to photocopy every piece of paper in the public file. Among them, she found an inspection report revealing that the drill cuttings pit, filled with flowback, had leaked “from a tear in the liner.”