Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  If I can’t make a conviction in this case, I will hand over my gun and my badge to you, he’d told Kendra. That didn’t mean it would be easy or even safe. Taking on a powerful industry could be dangerous. He asked the Smiths if they owned a handgun and had a remote starter in their car.

  Stacey left the Smith Butz office unconvinced. The next day, Burgess called to ask if he could come out to Amity. Standing in her kitchen, Burgess told her a personal story. Growing up in New Jersey and around Philadelphia, he knew what it was to live next door to environmental catastrophe. He went sledding and played baseball as a child in a toxic waste dump that sat three houses away from his home.

  One day guys came in hazmat suits and put up a chain-link fence and air monitors. Ten-year-old Burgess asked the men in white suits what they were doing. As long as you stay on your side of the fence, you’ll be okay, they told him. Even at ten, he realized their claims about his safety made no sense: it was the same air on both sides of the fence. Since then, he’d wanted to do this kind of work, he told Stacey. When other kids played Cops and Robbers, Burgess played Cops and Polluters.

  While Stacey listened, she thought that even if Burgess had good intentions, and he probably did, she’d lost faith. It wasn’t so long ago that the friendly federal agent Troy Jordan had come to her home making promises about justice. She’d believed him too. Then Jordan left the EPA for a better-paying job at Chesapeake Energy. She told Burgess that she had an idea for the people who’d poisoned her water. “If I had my choice, I wouldn’t send them to jail,” Stacey told him. “I’d send them to my house to live.” Burgess seemed to understand. His earnestness that afternoon eroded her reluctance, and by the time he left she’d decided that she’d participate in this new investigation, despite her misgivings.

  * * *

  “I don’t trust the government,” Stacey told me. Her disappointment reached all the way up to President Obama, in whom she’d developed a personal mistrust. She felt he’d let her down on so many counts. First, he’d never responded to the plea for help in her letter. “I never heard a thing,” she said. Second, he’d ended up selling her family out by supporting fracking.

  His administration hadn’t begun that way. When President Obama first took office, he’d talked a lot about protecting the environment against fracking. He’d promised to toughen Bush-era regulations and to put forward new ones that required drillers to disclose the chemicals they used. Then, with the success of the shale boom, that messaging changed. By 2013, he was touting the positive power of fracking, saying in his State of the Union address, “We are finally poised to control our own energy future … We produce more natural gas than ever before—and nearly everyone’s energy bill is lower because of it … The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence. We need to encourage that.”

  Energy, for the Obama administration, was fractious and complicated. It wasn’t as simple as phasing out fossil fuels in favor of wind and solar power. Obama, like many others, saw natural gas as a “bridge fuel”: a necessary step in the transition from coal to renewables. In his administration’s efforts to stave off climate change, some fossil fuels seemed better than others. Replacing coal-fired power plants with those fueled by natural gas would reduce America’s carbon emissions by half.

  Fracking wasn’t only a domestic energy solution. Exporting the technology became part of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton launched a new directive at the State Department, the Bureau of Energy Resources. In a 2009 cable later released by WikiLeaks, the State Department requested that its officers abroad provide “any information they could obtain about the potential for unconventional gas development in their host country.” During Clinton’s tenure, the U.S. government hosted conferences on fracking in Botswana and Thailand, and later, under John Kerry, they expanded to about thirty more countries, including Cambodia and Papua New Guinea. The State Department office boosted the technique around the world, even in countries that didn’t want it, like Romania and Bulgaria. (Such countries may not have simply opposed fracking on environmental grounds; there were also persistent rumors that Russia paid them.)

  At home, any honest assessment of the natural gas boom had to concede its benefits: enough natural gas lay beneath American soil to meet the nation’s electricity needs for decades. Meanwhile, the use of new extraction techniques in the oil industry, mainly in the Midwest and Southwest, promised the end of reliance on foreign oil within less than twenty years. Before fracking technology broke through, the United States imported almost two-thirds of its oil. A decade later, that figure would drop to one-fifth. The development of domestic energy resources also played a role in bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States, to the very same rust belt communities hardest hit by their disappearance.

  Obama used his 2014 State of the Union address to call for a $100 billion investment in factories that used natural gas. At the same time, the administration sought to close coal-fired power plants and end the coal industry’s leases to mine coal on public lands. Living in coal country, Stacey watched those STOP THE WAR ON COAL, FIRE OBAMA signs start to line Amity Ridge Road.

  For the administration, the economic and climate benefits of fracking outweighed the possible environmental hazards. But in Stacey’s eyes, Obama was sacrificing her family in favor of some fucked-up version of the utilitarian principle. The greatest good for the greatest number of people made Harley a justifiable casualty in the struggle against melting ice caps and rising sea levels wrought by climate change; against faraway despots bolstered by energy supplies; against a slump in American industry that left millions out of work, including her father. Looked at this way, human to human, it was Stacey against the Bangladeshi woman who was losing her farm to a rising sea. It was Stacey against factory workers eager for a manufacturing revival. It was Stacey against most of the world, and Stacey was losing.

  For Stacey and others, energy wasn’t an abstraction. Policy made in Washington, D.C., affected people’s jobs, and their health. A sense of alienation grafted onto a feeling of being sacrificed to the extractive industry. And it didn’t really matter what party was in power. Stacey used to tune her father out when he ranted about the federal government. Now she agreed. Her father had been hurled into the jaws of Vietnam only to return and be let down by, of all people, Ronald Reagan. When the steel mills closed, Pappy didn’t think about global shifts in trade and technology. Like others, he held Reagan responsible. He’d caught me by surprise one day with his anti-Reagan diatribe: “We got one president in there said we didn’t need no more power plants. Nineteen eighty-four. Reagan. When they shut them down, they shut us down. I was in the mills for forty-five years. I lost eight hundred and fifty dollars a month in pension. I get a hundred and fifteen a month. What happened to all that money?”

  As Pappy saw it, he’d given his life twice to larger American interests, first in Vietnam and then in the mills. And now his daughter and her kids were guinea pigs for American industry.

  One afternoon, as Stacey ranted about these and other ills, she drove over from Amity to check on the abandoned farmhouse. She found a pink postcard in the broken door. Range was planning to come back to frack two more wells on the Yeagers’ farm.

  Stacey and Beth wanted the Smiths to try to stop the wells. To block the frack, John first had to convince a judge to grant a temporary injunction. If the judge agreed, Stacey and Beth would have to put up a bond of several hundred thousand dollars while a trial went forward. If they lost, they’d lose the money too. They couldn’t afford to post a bond like that, so they told the Smiths to drop the idea. When the fracking began again, Stacey wrote in her journal, They have the drilling rig set up at Yeager’s with the sky lit up. We get to drive down 19 [Amity Ridge Road] and look at that every night.

  26 | FULL METAL JACKET

  “Come one and all to meet God here,” Pastor Dick Berardinelli preached on a Sunday in 2013 at Lower Ten
Mile Presbyterian Church. Its pews were painted the color of buttermilk and covered with red cushions. The walls were unadorned but for a plain wooden cross. Ordained only in his late fifties, Berardinelli was a practical pastor who moved around the countryside ministering to a couple of congregations, due to a shortage of rural clergy. He lived eighteen miles away in an old coal patch town called Cokeburg, and he’d grown up helping his family run the general store in a part of town called Blackbottom. (“It’s got nothing to do with your keester,” he told me later. Smoke from the coke ovens blackened the houses.) He knew that Harley had been awfully sick and that Stacey was fighting with a natural gas company. “Our future is in wind and solar and our job is not to damage what we have left,” he said. “I guess I’m what you’d call a liberal.” But the pastor kept his views to himself, in part because they were fairly unusual in Amity. Mostly, however, he believed that church was no place for politics.

  “Let all who are suffering find hope in this place,” he went on. He prayed aloud for Shelly, who was home sick. She and Jim were also divorcing after twenty-five years of marriage, and Jim was moving back to West Virginia. It was sad, but it was probably for the best. Shelly couldn’t have him on the couch anymore. She had too much life in her to sit still beside him. Pastor Berardinelli invited the children in church to come forward from half-empty pews to play a game of “Stump the Preacher.” A boy named Alex handed him a Q-tip.

  “Stacey, can you clean your ears with this?” he called. “It’s for cleaning sin from your heart.”

  Stacey, who’d managed to haul herself there with Paige that morning, smiled and fanned herself with a leaflet. Across its cover, it read Ut sementem feceris, ita metes in a bold twenty-two-point font and with no translation for the Latin. Beneath, in a tiny eight-point font, the pastor had typed, “Live it.” This was the no-nonsense liturgical style of the Lower Ten Mile Presbyterian Church, which had quieted considerably since the days of Thaddeus Dod’s tirades about damnation. The quote originated not in the Bible but with Cicero: As you sow, so shall you reap.

  To Stacey, the maxim didn’t seem to apply. Her whole life she’d worked on sowing good things, and what she was reaping was, frankly, shit. It made her think of the story of Job. To test Job’s devotion to God, Satan takes the man’s children and covers him with boils “from the sole of his foot unto his crown.” The sores in the story reminded her of the weird rashes she and the kids had suffered from. “That kinda freaks me out,” she said. Although she’d never doubted God’s existence, she often wondered what she’d done to incur this much wrath. At least Job lived the good life until the devil arrived. “Unlike Job, I’ve never had an easy life,” she said, only half joking.

  Her new home on Mankey Lane, redolent of apples and bacon, was a few minutes’ drive from the church, and following the service she went home to grab her Taurus and respirator before heading over to the farmhouse. Even though the animals were gone, checking on the farm had become a ritual. “Pappy wants me to carry it in case of snakes,” she said, referring to the pistol. “Or creeps like the guys who stole the copper.”

  The FBI and EPA criminal investigation seemed to be going forward, and it worried Chris. “You get involved in all this EPA shit, people think they’re going to jail and you’ve got to be careful,” he told her. He wanted her to get a concealed carry permit. She agreed. She carried her pistol everywhere now. It wasn’t just about the case. Around Washington County, the drug problem was getting worse. At the hospital, it was making her tough job even harder. “Thanks to the drugs, the scumbags are starting to outnumber us,” she repeated that afternoon as we drove over to the abandoned house. It was something a fellow nurse who owned the Prosperity general store liked to say. “When I started there twenty years ago, it was one drug addict every two weeks. Now it’s four a day.” All of them begged and finagled opioids. She and her colleagues were doing their best not to go the easy route and just say yes. “Patients complain when they have to wait for things, but they don’t understand there’s only so many of us, and we work as fast as we can.”

  When we reached the nearby farmhouse, Stacey found two cigarette butts and kept them for the state police to test for DNA. Maybe it was the scrap metal thieves. Someone had even stolen the tire from the tire swing. Its frayed rope swung above the yard overgrown with Queen Anne’s lace.

  * * *

  As fall arrived, she didn’t think she could face the old families at Amity’s 2013 community Thanksgiving. She dreaded wandering around the fire hall, making polite conversation with people wearing their Range Resources hats and T-shirts, family members making thousands of dollars off of tainting the land and her kids’ health. The idea was too much to bear. Linda wanted Stacey to appear with the kids, as she always had. She feared that Stacey risked causing rifts that could last generations. Shelly defended her sister. If Stacey didn’t want to face “the gas-well-loving, church-going hypocrites,” then she didn’t have to.

  In Amity, the divisions continued to deepen with every article published in the Washington County paper, The Observer-Reporter, in which Beth spoke out about Range Resources, and every time the Smiths were quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Stacey’s neighbors doubted her story even more. Everybody looks at us like we’re the troublemakers, she wrote in her journal. For Stacey, although she didn’t like to admit it, the subtle ostracism became a struggle of its own. “This whole situation has changed every aspect of my life,” she told me. She looked at Amity differently now, not simply as a wholesome town where people worked together to share everything, including hardship. She felt betrayed by families who didn’t believe her because the truth she told went against their pocketbooks.

  “Sometimes I can’t even go into public because of it. I just can’t deal with the greed that has come over this whole area,” she said. She kept her head down, worked three jobs, and when she and Beth had a win in their case, they muted their cheers.

  Occasionally there was some good news. On November 5, the Smiths scored a rare victory in Haney v. Range, unfolding in the Washington Court of Common Pleas. For years now, Kendra and John had been attempting to procure a full list of the chemicals used at the site, to little avail. Now Judge Debbie O’Dell Seneca ordered Range Resources to reveal all of the chemicals used there. She gave the contractors and subcontractors thirty days to make good on Range’s public claim that it knew—and disclosed—every chemical they’d employed. Matt Pitzarella of Range Resources told The Observer-Reporter, “They’re asking for and we’re supplying every and any chemical used on the location.”

  Beth was having breathing problems. Although the Voyles spent three weeks of every month traveling to horse shows and barrel races, they had to come home sometime. On December 2, 2013, a week after the community Thanksgiving, which Stacey didn’t attend, Beth’s round face swelled up until her skin shined. The next morning, after a long night, John rushed her to the emergency room at Washington Hospital. Stacey didn’t know that Beth had been admitted until noon the next day. After settling a post-op patient into the recovery unit, Stacey went to the bathroom at 1:00 p.m. to check her text messages. There was one waiting from Beth. Hay [sic] was at hospital all morning yesterday, it began. My whole left side of face swelled up.

  So been on couch all nite and morning and just got up to take a shower. Heard this big pop. Bullet come all the way through house right above my head where I was laying. Got the bullet. Called state police and waiting for them to come out and game commission now.

  Stacey called Beth from the ladies’ room to hear the story.

  Two hours earlier, just after 11:00 a.m., Beth had peeled herself off the beige couch with the boxer pillows for the first time in more than a dozen hours. She’d been diagnosed with a bacterial infection in an old root canal, she explained. She was pretty out of it on Clindamycin and Percocet. She thought she’d take a shower, then decided on a bubble bath. She’d started the tub water running when she swore she heard a hollow bang like a gunshot in
the living room. The sound was implausible, and, since she’d taken the Percocet, she headed into the living room in a slight haze. The mark wasn’t hard to find.

  Against the wall, three feet from where she’d been sitting, there was a bullet hole the size of a nickel. She called for John, who searched the carpet for the slug. When he found it and held it in his palm, he realized the bullet came from a nine-millimeter, and that it was a kind of cheap ammunition, with a soft leaden core encased in a harder metal, usually cupronickel. The bargain bullet, called a full metal jacket, was often used for target practice. But this was deer season. Tradition held that, out of common courtesy, no one shot at targets during the season, so as not to startle any hunter’s prey. Beth wandered outside to find where the bullet had entered. On the side of her house facing the road, there was a hole the size of a bullet. The shot seemed to have come from the direction of her neighbor Jim Garrett, on the hill just below the waste pond. Mr. Garrett had been suffering from brain cancer. Part of the pond sat on his land, and he was the one who’d told Beth that he’d just drink beer if something went wrong with his water. According to EPA test results, which Kendra procured through a Right to Know Request, Garrett’s water tests indicated contamination with ethylene glycol. After he died, Range bought the Garrett property for about $380,000, Garrett’s son, John, told me. Range allowed John to live there rent-free. As John Voyles put it, “Range bought their own headache.”