Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  In the trucking manifests, Kendra could see that the sludge that was supposed to be trucked to a landfill in Ohio was cocktailed with other waste up at Yeager instead. She could see on the receipts for each load that the site in Ohio was crossed out and instead someone had scrawled Yeager, by way of destination. Yeager was also so busy because of thousands of gallons of fracking fluids and mud being trucked in from other sites, and as far as she could see there was no permit allowing this.

  Binder by binder, throughout 2011, the Smiths’ timeline of mishaps grew so long it took over the windowless copy room at the firm, which John christened the Haney Library. Early that fall, Kendra was still awaiting the missing pages of the water tests from the DEP when a complete set arrived from Microbac. She found the missing pages damning. They included the test results from the leak detection zone under the manhole cover. Once Kendra inserted them into a larger picture of what was happening on the hillside, she believed she could prove the link between the site and her clients’ water by tracing how the chemicals flowed downhill.

  One of her advantages in parsing results was that Kendra could read raw data, not just the summary reports given to her clients. The difference between the two was that the raw data contained everything found in the water. It couldn’t be manipulated like test reports could. The list was a dizzying array of compounds, many of which Kendra could have grouped loosely and moved on. But she was after precision, and precision demanded a careful breakdown. Studying the raw data, she found that Beth’s and Stacey’s water test results revealed small amounts of chloroform, propynol, methanol, ethylene glycol, and propylene glycol, as well as oil and grease. In addition, Stacey’s also had the phenols that had showed up on her inhalant panel. All of these constituents were found in low levels, below the reporting limits, but clearly, Kendra saw, they were there in the water and they shouldn’t have been.

  In her stacks, Kendra found something even more troubling: multiple copies of the same test results printed differently. Some copies contained glycols; others didn’t. On the test results given to Stacey and to the DEP, there was no evidence of glycols. Kendra suspected that someone had doctored these results.

  In response to her discovery requests, Kendra also received Range’s test results for the water Ron Yeager and his cattle drank. She could see that his water contained levels of salt high enough to indicate contamination back in 2010, but there was no evidence to suggest that Range had ever told him so. As far as she could tell, both he and his cows were still drinking it. Once again, she found multiple copies of tests from the same sample that listed different results. In one version, Kendra saw that the lab listed ethylene glycol at a level of 10.2 mg/L in the Yeagers’ spring water. But then in the next version, the glycols disappeared. She examined the test methods to see what had happened. She discovered that the lab had doubled the reporting limit from 10 mg/L to 20 mg/L. Since the amount now fell beneath the new reporting limit, it wasn’t listed. What a clever trick this seemed to be. To Kendra, it implied that the lab could be at fault too in changing protocols to hide contamination in the water.

  Laura Rusmisel at Range Resources had sent these results to Ron Yeager, along with a letter explaining that the high level of salt in his water could be caused by the township’s salting the road against ice, “since calcium chloride is a common road treatment salt and the spring sources which were sampled today are located near a roadway.” So Kendra and John wrote to the supervisors of Amwell Township, which included Amity, asking about road salts. Amwell Township doesn’t use road salt, the supervisors wrote back. They use cinders, which don’t contain high levels of salt. Intentionally or not, Laura Rusmisel had created an imaginary source of contamination.

  Kendra remembered driving past the Yeagers’ farm, with the blue and yellow sign on the barn that read PENNSYLVANIA BEEF QUALITY ASSURANCE PROGRAM CERTIFIED PRODUCER. The program was designed to boost consumer confidence by ensuring that the state’s beef and dairy cattle were maintained in a manner that was “safe and wholesome for consumers.” Yet the program didn’t monitor cattle for potential exposure to the new oil and gas operations. She worried that without knowing it, Yeager may have been giving his beef cattle contaminated water for six months, at least, before selling them for human consumption. And there was no way to begin to track where they had entered the food chain.

  16 | RAINBOW WATER

  Late that summer of 2011, Stacey heard from a friendly inspector at the EPA that Range was going to close down the giant waste pond, at least for a time. To Stacey, that meant she and the kids might soon be able to go home. One July night, Stacey decided to celebrate by hosting a venison roast, inviting her sister and some friends over to the farm. Around an open fire, they roasted a deer that Chris had killed the previous winter. After dinner, the kids set the burn pile alight until the flames rose fifty feet into the night sky. The fire was so high that Shelly’s husband, Jim, a member of the Amity Fire Department, called around to reassure neighbors all was okay. Shelly sat in the yard telling stories about how she quit smoking by drinking half a gallon of cotton-candy-flavored vodka and finishing two packs of cigarettes before passing out in her chair. Now she claimed she’d never smoke again.

  Next door at Justa Breeze, Ashley was having trouble sleeping. She dreamed of dead horses. After Jodi’s death, she’d never wanted to grow so close to an animal again. But barrel racing was her profession, so she started training a new horse, Oakie. A registered quarter horse with an impeccable bloodline, Oakie was doing well with Ashley on the barrel racing circuit, and they’d started placing in races, earning a paycheck. At night when she couldn’t sleep, she went out to the barn to be with Oakie and Dude, her big paint gelding, combing them and talking to them about Jodi. When they whickered back at her, she was certain they could understand.

  One evening that July, Ashley took Dude out for his daily ride, leading the large horse across McAdams and past their neighbors the Garretts. The waste pond sat at the corner of the Garretts’ land, but they weren’t reporting any problems with their water. Mr. Garrett told Beth that if their water went bad, he’d just drink beer. Ashley pressed Dude’s flank with her heels to guide him up the sharp slope and around the outside of the fence that ringed the waste pond.

  Dude was a source of solace to Ashley. Patient and steady, he took good care of her, and she did the same for him. That day, when Dude lowered his head to drink from a stream, he suddenly reared up. Ashley tried to force him to cross the stream, but he wouldn’t. He was still being trained, and had to learn to follow her direction. But he wouldn’t budge. She got off to take a closer look and heard bubbling. She could see a spectrum in the water. She got back up on Dude, and they ran home full stride. Something oily was running through the grass. “Rainbow water,” Ashley told her mom as soon as she got home. Beth, as usual, called Stacey.

  That night, Stacey headed to Justa Breeze and climbed on the Voyles’ four-wheeler. She and Beth drove up the ridge to where Ashley had spotted the stream’s oily runoff. Beth shot pictures with her phone of the bubbling water, which was thick with an oily substance and foam that looked like soap. Stacey noticed that there wasn’t just one trickle of runoff; there were dozens of little seeps coming up out of the ground. Someone had put hay bales in the stream to block the flow.

  The next morning, Beth called the Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the DEP to report the rainbow water seeping out of the side of the hill. The DEP sent a water inspector over to test. When his results came back, they showed the presence of oil, grease, and MBAS, a soap used in the drilling process.

  The DEP inspector also observed something unusual. Dean’s Water trucks were idling by the side of the drill cuttings pit. Wondering what they could be doing, he took photographs. When Yantko saw the pictures, he knew what he was looking at, and he wasn’t pleased. Not long before, Carla Suszkowski had called Yantko. The contaminated springs at Yeager weren’t repairing themselves, so she wanted to flush the leaky waste pit with
thirty thousand gallons of water. Flushing the pit might help clean the springs before the EPA arrived in two weeks to test the Yeagers’ water as part of their national drinking water study. In response, Yantko told her that pouring water into the contaminated pit would just drive the pollutants deeper into the ground. He told her she’d have to ask for permission in writing.

  Without doing so, Suszkowski ordered the flush. When Yantko saw the pictures of Dean’s Water trucks pumping water into the leaky drill cuttings pit, he learned that Carla had disobeyed him. “This action was both intentional and reckless and may have actually resulted in additional contaminants entering the water—the Yeager spring water supply,” he wrote to his supervisor. The flush violated the Clean Streams Law, a 1937 mandate that protected the waters of the commonwealth, along with four other laws. The waters of the commonwealth belonged to the commons: the state held them in trust on behalf of all Pennsylvania citizens.

  When Rick Wilkin and his EPA team arrived as scheduled two weeks later, neither he nor his inspectors knew that Range had tried to flush the leaky pit and contaminated springs. In windbreakers and chinos, Wilkin’s team paced around the Garretts’ hillside. From a distance, they looked like a forensic team searching for something unpleasant in the dead grass. Performing the necessary testing for the nationwide drinking water study had proven difficult for the EPA. The government struggled to convince oil and gas companies to participate. And without the companies’ permission, the EPA wasn’t allowed onto their sites. The EPA had tried to visit the Yeager site a month earlier, but Carla Suszkowski had denied them entry. In an email to a fellow Range employee, she wrote, “Hugh, is there some reason that the guard is allowing the EPA person on site? They have no regulatory authority by which to enter our site. And we should not be allowing them on site.”

  Now, a month later, the investigators were still barred from entering. Reporting there that day, I watched them fan out over the surrounding hillside as John Voyles drove me up the muddy bank below the waste pond on the back of a four-wheeler to see what was happening with the rainbow water. The ground was sodden, and dozens of tiny rivulets sprang from the mud. A thick vapor rose like smoke from the water, and the air was choked with the odor of bleach.

  Four months later, in November, Suszkowski updated her bosses. “We have flushed the reserve pit with approximately 30,000 gallons of water, but I fear this is nowhere near enough, based on the amount of time that the reserve pit may have been leaking,” she wrote. She suggested that Range offer to dig the Yeagers a new well. “I think this would avoid the DEP issuing an order for us to replace the water supply.” If the DEP did issue such an order, that would make the contamination public. Even if the DEP didn’t make it public, she had concerns that replacing the water would have ramifications: “I suspect when we agree to replace the water supply others in the area will get wind of it and more legal action will ensue.” Still, she thought the order was worth it to keep “an otherwise supportive landowner happy,” she wrote. Her boss, Ray Walker, replied, “I agree. We should replace it … and pray for lots of rain!”

  * * *

  Buzz and his grandkids weren’t feeling well, so Stacey decided to pay them a visit late that summer. One morning, she drove down to the Bottoms to see if she could help. Stacey, like others in Amity and Prosperity, had stayed away from the junkyard over the years. Buzz’s car chase with the state troopers and other such stories were ready fodder in the small community.

  She parked near the rusted-out bakery truck and a charred outbuilding, and mounted the concrete block that served as a porch to knock on the aluminum door. Buzz was sitting on the couch. When Stacey asked how he was doing, he told her that he and the kids were having trouble breathing and their stomachs were sour. The trailer reeked of cigarette smoke; an army of amber prescription bottles sat on a TV table. An oxygen tank leaned against the couch. In this room alone, there was evidence of many factors that could be sickening Buzz and his family. Stacey knew that, but she also knew what she and the kids had been through, and she was beyond being skeptical. And there was the water: gray and filled with sediment like hers. But Buzz had to keep cooking and washing with it when he wasn’t staying in his mother’s basement.

  His physician, Dr. Christiansen, who worked at the orthopedic hospital along with Shelly, had been treating Buzz for an injured shoulder. When Buzz’s tests came back as part of his presurgical workup, the results alarmed the physician. “His blood work came back really off the scale—arsenic, benzene, a lot of chemicals we’d never seen in anyone’s blood and I had to look them up,” he told me later. Knowing that Buzz couldn’t afford water, Dr. Christiansen tried to get Range Resources to supply the family a water buffalo, but to no avail. Eventually, he prescribed Buzz a gym membership, which Range lawyers would bring up later during a deposition as evidence that Buzz couldn’t be so sick if he could make it to the gym. Dr. Christiansen corrected them. He wanted Buzz to be able to shower with clean water. “I’ve prescribed gym memberships before,” he told me, “but never with the hope of getting someone out of the house.”

  For the rest of the summer and into the early fall, Buzz used his water sparingly as he awaited test results. Finally, in September, a letter arrived from the DEP. His water was high in inorganic salts and also in methane, two elements that can be associated with drilling, but not necessarily so. “We strongly recommend that you maintain a vent on your water well,” the DEP wrote to Kiskadden. Although there were problems with Buzz’s water, the letter went on, these problems were “not the result of Range’s actions at the Yeager site, or any other gas well related activities.” The contaminants might be leaching from the old buses, boats, and cars heaped in his junkyard.

  According to this letter, Range owed him nothing and neither did the DEP. (A state inspector told him to pour a half gallon of bleach into his well at least once a month to manage the rotten-egg smell.) Buzz Kiskadden understood that he wasn’t going to get a water buffalo. Despite the poor quality of his water, he’d have to keep buying his own at Walmart, or go without. There was more to the letter that he didn’t understand, so he called the Smiths, who were now representing him.

  Studying the DEP’s letter, Kendra could see that in addition to the methane and salts, there were other problems with Buzz’s water. It contained several known constituents of frack fluid. The DEP admitted as much in the letter—“Very low concentrations of several organic compounds were reported in the DEP sampling: butyl alcohol, chloroform, and acetone.” But the DEP decided, inexplicably to Kendra, that these three were actually absent and the results were lab error. To Kendra, this was too convenient an explanation. From reading the raw data, she couldn’t understand how they’d write off the chemicals as lab error. (When she later deposed the head of the DEP’s lab, Kendra found she was right: there was no lab error.) And she could find no scientific basis for the DEP’s claim that the junkyard was poisoning the well.

  Kendra told John that she was prepared to challenge the DEP’s determination, which meant filing suit against the state once again. As with the suit they’d brought on Beth’s behalf against the DEP for neglecting its job, the Smiths would have to pay the costs out of pocket, and if they did win, they wouldn’t make any money. Yet theirs would be the first case in Pennsylvania history to contest that the DEP’s findings were wrong and that oil and gas had contaminated someone’s water. Bringing such a case against the DEP, let alone winning it, was going to kick off a shitstorm, she told John.

  17 | “DEAR MR. PRESIDENT”

  Stacey wasn’t going to move home with the kids until she was certain the noxious pond was empty, so that summer of 2011, while she waited for word from the EPA, she kept Harley at Chris’s in Eighty Four. She and Paige stayed with Mam and Pappy in Amity. Although Harley’s arsenic levels dropped as he stayed away from the farm, hers remained elevated. She kept returning to feed and water the animals. Together, they white-knuckled through the new normal. Paige was fighting with her grand
mother after too much time in close proximity and the stress over water was mounting at her parents’ house. With Stacey, Mam, and Pappy showering once a day, as well as twelve-year-old Paige, the family had to make the trip to the Ruff Creek water station three or four times a week to fill the cistern. Stacey was rarely there, and Paige spent most summer days sulking in the cot, which the family called her nest.

  It was impossible to tell where Harley’s physical ailments ended and his psychological struggles began. Those in Amity who didn’t know the Haneys well and doubted they were suffering from chemical exposure credited Stacey’s divorce as the root of the trouble. Those who’d seen Harley suffering up close were convinced that his illnesses were related to exposure. They were also friends, neighbors, and family. Harley spent the June night of his fifteenth birthday in tears. He missed his home, his animals, Mam and Pappy, and Amity, and he wanted to have a birthday party at the farm. But given the risk of exposure, Stacey said no. She didn’t want other kids on the farm until she was sure it was safe.

  Instead, for the kids’ joint twelfth and fifteenth birthday party that year, they ended up at the town park. Stacey called in a pizza order, but she missed most of the party. At seven o’clock that morning, she’d gotten a call from a Pittsburgh fractivist asking Stacey to write a personal letter to President Obama. Josh Fox, the director of the film Gasland, was supposed to meet the president and hand him Stacey’s letter. She still harbored the belief that if she could speak to Obama directly as a mom, and in plain language, she could convince him to protect her kids, as well as the other families living at the country’s rural margins and paying the price for this boom.

  “Dear Mr. President,” she began. She laid out their story and ended with where they were now: “As of 35 days ago, the amt of chemicals we were inhaling from the impoundment got [to] the point where it was unbearable. Under medical advice, we were instructed to leave our home … I understand the financial benefits of the process and our need for having our own natural resources but making people sick in the process is criminal!… A farmer [can’t] even drive his tractor across a stream in PA, but hundreds of thousands of cancer-causing chemicals can be dumped right beside my home for my children to breathe every day … I feel like we are stuck in a bad dream. Please, please help us.”