Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  It was disappointing to Stacey and Beth to watch the number of defendants shrink from seventeen to eleven. Range and ten other defendants remained. They worried that this exodus didn’t bode well for their case and that momentum might falter even as Range weathered a local scandal that spring. A Range executive named Terry Bossert had been caught at a large meeting saying that Range avoided drilling near “big houses,” where wealthier people might be able to challenge their practices. Two environmental organizations were present, and they went directly to the state’s Office of Environmental Justice to demand an investigation. Bossert apologized and said he’d been making a joke.

  At the time, Range was facing its largest fine to date: $8.95 million for contaminating water with methane near Williamsport, Pennsylvania. But soon afterward, the case took an odd turn. John Quigley, the DEP secretary who’d levied the fine, was fired and escorted out of the Rachel Carson building after he’d sent an expletive-laden email out to environmental groups, berating them for their lack of support amid all the pressure he felt from industry. The next day, Quigley learned the state of Pennsylvania rescinded the impending fine against Range Resources, which he discovered by reading the newspaper. The governor’s office claimed that the reversal had been in the works for months and that Quigley had in fact been briefed about it. For Quigley, it was the final straw in a long and maddening fight against the power of the oil and gas industry. “When you finally see in its full flower how corrupt the world of the DEP actually is, it’s nauseating,” he told me.

  Yet these small skirmishes in Pennsylvania meant little on Wall Street, where Range was facing more significant challenges. Range’s stock price had plummeted from its high of ninety-three dollars a share in 2014 to a low of seventeen dollars. Most of that collapse was sector-wide: natural gas was under pressure from fracking’s own success. Thanks to technology and to warmer winters, there was a gas glut in the Northeast. Range had once been able to corner the Marcellus because their wells were so productive and their drilling costs low. But so many wells had come online so fast, there was now more gas than anyone knew what to do with, and that drove down profits.

  * * *

  Beth and Stacey didn’t think much about Wall Street. They thought about their case, and they wanted it to end. Since it kept dragging on with delayed trial dates and appeals stretching on indefinitely, Haney v. Range looked more and more likely to settle out of court. Harley had no idea what settling entailed.

  “Will the FBI and the EPA keep investigating if we settle?” Harley asked.

  “They will no matter what,” Stacey reassured him. Stacey didn’t tell him that the FBI and EPA seemed to have vanished. Harley still hoped the cavalry was coming, and Stacey saw no reason to dash that hope too. Instead, she reminded Harley and Paige of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court victory. Their family had helped make that possible, she said.

  “With Act 13, we know they will never be able to do what they did to us to anyone else.”

  * * *

  Over the loudspeaker, the fair announcer called Paige’s number, fifty-nine. Wearing her rhinestone belt and her holey pig socks, Paige led Cashew up to the show barn. Beth Voyles went to find John in the bleachers, where Chris, Linda, and Pappy waited for Paige to enter the ring with Cashew.

  Sitting on the cold steel bench, having eschewed the giveaway Range Resources seat cushions, Pappy was in a terrific mood. For the seventh time in the past eight years, his butternuts had won first place. He’d also recently received two small and unexpected windfalls. First, after decades of disturbing dreams and health concerns, he’d been awarded compensation from the U.S. government for his exposure to Agent Orange. And he was now making money off the gas boom: he’d recently signed a mineral lease. Between the two sources of income, the Hillberrys were doing better financially than they ever had. “It’s much more money than we had when we were working,” Linda said. “It’s more than we’ve had in our life.”

  Pappy had often groused about the loss of his family farm to the coal company, which had bought the property years ago. Now it turned out that although Pappy didn’t own the land, he still, without realizing it, owned a portion of his mineral rights. Toby Rice had leased his land for about ten thousand dollars, then swapped the lease, which was now held by Range. Although Pappy loathed Range, he focused on what he could do for others with the money. He could be generous with his grandkids in a way he’d never been able to be with Stacey and Shelly. He and Linda loaned Shelly’s son Judd money to buy his first truck. Judd needed to drive to his new job as a contractor installing natural gas pipelines in residential neighborhoods. They also loaned Harley twenty-five hundred dollars to buy a trailer to haul the mowers for Harley’s Lawn and Tree Service. Yard work looked like Harley’s most plausible future. It was an uncertain career path that Stacey didn’t love, but she didn’t know where else to steer him. Most days, Harley woke early, went to work, came home, and stayed in the basement.

  Linda and Pappy wished Harley’s life was turning out differently, and although they, like Shelly, didn’t doubt that he’d gotten sick on account of the gas wells, they too wanted Stacey to stop allowing the case to hijack her future, as well as that of the kids. Her family’s desire for Stacey to move on made her feel maligned, misunderstood as she’d been as a child. It brought up more of that same feeling that she was alone in a fight against everyone else in the world, beginning with her own family. These old wounds opened some nights during screaming phone calls between sisters.

  Yet, under the happier exterior of the fair, these raw places remained invisible. Despite Harley’s reluctance for the family to be there, 2016 was shaping up to be a good year for Paige. Her goat, Cashew, won second place, and her best friend’s dad bought her for four dollars a pound. Stacey noticed that neither Toby Rice nor Range Resources placed a bid. In the show barn, the announcer said fairgoers should thank anyone wearing a shirt with a Range logo. This year the company was doubling its donation to every child involved in 4-H from one hundred to two hundred dollars. Every year, the donation arrived by check following the fair. And every year, Stacey bought thank-you notes for the kids to send to Range. In 2016, as a simpering fuck-you, she chose cards ringed with purple violets that said, What a wonderful world this would be … if everyone was as nice as you.

  * * *

  After the fair, Chris decided that Stacey needed to get away. Still broke, they could afford only an hour’s drive east over the Pennsylvania border to Friendsville, Maryland. That weekend in September, the weather was terrible, the rain constant, and hiking proved impossible. As Chris drove them around the countryside, Stacey watched the rolling, deep jade hills, which reminded her of Amity and Prosperity. Through the rain-smeared window, she kept seeing signs that read DON’T FRACK MARYLAND and wondered what was afoot. When they stopped for breakfast, Stacey went searching the rack of pamphlets for something they could do on a rainy Saturday. She spied a brochure for a local winery called Deep Creek Cellars. She checked Google Maps. It was only seventeen minutes away. When Stacey called to make sure it was open, the owner, Nadine Grabania, glanced at the caller ID before answering. She saw the name STACEY HANEY but thought little of it. There must be lots of people with that name. She told Stacey that Deep Creek opened at eleven and asked if she was part of a group. No, Stacey said, just a couple.

  In the basement tasting room, paneled with blond wood, Nadine and her husband, Paul, had tried to keep the feel as humble and mom-and-pop as possible. Paul’s idea was to hang a shingle out front like small wine producers did in Italy. They were the only winery in the area, and their aim was to be friendly and unpretentious. As she wandered around the tasting room, Stacey spied information sheets on a table about Pennsylvania’s air and water quality and the effects of fracking.

  She told Grabania she was really glad to see them. She was from Pennsylvania, and she and her kids had gotten into a big mess with a drilling company. They’d lost their animals, their water. Their air was contaminat
ed and they’d had to leave their house about three years earlier.

  The vintner was quiet for a minute. Are you Stacey Haney? she asked. Stacey started to sob. I didn’t mean to upset you, Grabania said gently. She came out from behind the wooden counter and put her arms around Stacey. She said she knew everything about Stacey and her kids. Everyone in Friendsville did. For the past six years, Grabania had been reading everything she could about fracking. Back in 2010, a leasing boom had scared her and some of her neighbors into trying to get involved in the issue. “We became instant activists,” she told me later. Grabania was born in Washington County and grew up along Ten Mile Creek. After reading Stacey’s story five years earlier, she’d decided to help lead the effort to place a moratorium on drilling until the state could determine whether or not fracking posed “unacceptable risks.” Now the moratorium was about to expire, and the state faced a fight: whether to drill or ban fracking outright. Your story has helped us a lot here, Grabania said. She insisted on giving Stacey two bottles of wine, which made Stacey uncomfortable.

  Stacey didn’t want people giving her things; accepting charity wasn’t the way she was raised. Back in the truck, Chris could see she was embarrassed by the gift. He teased her, Why don’t we see if we can use your celebrity for more free wine? She laughed. From the truck, she called the kids to tell them what had happened. It was one more sign that what they’d lived through had some greater purpose. She felt that God had sent her there more for Nadine Grabania’s benefit than her own. “Maybe she needed to see that we’re real people,” she told me.

  EPILOGUE: WHITE HATS

  When Maryland banned fracking in 2017, Stacey celebrated quietly. It might be too late for Amity and even for Pennsylvania, but not for other states. In addition to New York and Maryland’s decisions not to frack, four out of Canada’s ten provinces had bans in place. France and Germany were also rejecting fracking out of concerns over large-scale industrial problems—the trucks, leaks, and spills at the surface—occurring next door to people’s homes and farms. The global pushback against fracking called into question the notion that natural gas must serve as a necessary “bridge fuel” between coal and renewables. Europe was proving it possible to jump over the bridge. The advance of technology was such that a growing number of countries were able to run their power grids for more and more hours of the day on wind and solar power. Even China was moving slowly on fracking. In the global energy market, much of the fastest growth was happening in renewables; even investors who cared nothing about the environment were betting on renewables, because that’s where the action was.

  Stacey felt relieved and also proud when news of fracking bans reached her. She imagined herself in the middle of a worldwide fight between good and evil. It was how she made sense of the world: to place herself at the center of things and believe that her story was helping to change things far away, since closer to home their future was bleak.

  Settlement talks had collapsed; the sides were too far apart to find a way forward. In the Washington County Court of Common Pleas, the case seemed to be going nowhere. After waiting for more than a year to argue in front of Judge Nalitz, the Smiths petitioned the court for a new judge, and the case was reassigned, to Katherine Emery, president judge of the Washington County Court of Common Pleas. Judge Emery wanted both sides to attempt mediation.

  The Smiths urged the Haneys and Voyles to move on with their lives as best they could while struggling to do so themselves. One Saturday morning in October 2017, after Kendra finished coaching an early soccer game, she and John sat at the granite-topped farm table in their kitchen taking stock of the enormous and unexpected costs this case had entailed. It was turning out to be more personal than they’d imagined. The Smiths had received threatening letters sent to their home. They pulled one out to show me. It was typed on a tiny piece of paper and read “I pronounce a curse on you, mouthpiece of satan, in the name of Lord Jesus Christ.” The Smiths had never told the kids about the letters.

  At one end of the table sat a fat white Haney binder full of test results, which Kendra had been reading late the night before. They were still working the case seven days a week. Outwardly, they were putting on a stoic face, but inwardly they were flagging. The need to support each other bound them together. Although their marriage had always been strong, it was now stronger than ever.

  “People ask me how I can work with my husband so closely,” Kendra said. “But the truth is, I don’t know how we’d do it any other way.” What other partner would understand why she could never put down a document and have a glass of wine or talk? She had to keep going. John Smith, usually unflappable, wasn’t sleeping, which he didn’t like to admit.

  “No one sees the toll,” Kendra said, referring delicately to John. He was still mirthful and fun, ever positive, but the glint in his eye was clouded by worry. He didn’t want to dwell on his insomnia, however, and was still quick to point out advantages. They’d learned more about new areas of the law than they could’ve imagined needing to use six years ago.

  “We’re better lawyers because of this,” he added. For Kendra, the hardest thing to accept continued to be Buzz’s lack of clean water. The only thing she could get Stacey, Beth, and the kids was money. And money would never make them “whole,” in legal parlance. She’d been at this for too many decades not to know that money was never the cure-all people imagined it to be. Water was something different. To Kendra, the right to clean water was about one of the most basic rights an American should have.

  “You hear about this in third-world countries, but when someone comes to you and says, ‘Here’s my basic necessity in life. Can you get it for me?’ I couldn’t help someone get something I take for granted every day. How is that even possible in the United States?”

  The Smiths had taken their challenge against the DEP all the way to the state supreme court, which ultimately refused to hear Buzz’s case. Tom Shepstone, the pro-fracking blogger who’d followed the case for Energy in Depth, wrote on his new blog, Natural Gas Now:

  Loren [Buzz] Kiskadden, the junkyard plaintiff from Southwestern Pennsylvania, the serial litigator used by some trial lawyers and the fractivist special interests as a poster child for their cause has finally lost for good … The Environmental Hearing Board, the Commonwealth Court, and now the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, all looked at the evidence and concluded Loren Kiskadden had no case. It’s over. Range Resources won and fractivism lost “bigly” as some New Yorkers say.

  Kendra also worried about the precedent their failure set. “Never again will a poor person like Buzz be able to challenge the DEP,” she said.

  Under state order, the waste pond had been closed, along with the drill cuttings pit. Yet, as Beth stayed put on Justa Breeze, her health problems continued. On May 17, 2017, Beth made a trip to the Washington Hospital emergency room, where she was diagnosed with chemical burns on her cheeks and in her nose and throat. Range denied that anything unusual was happening up at the site, but Beth had the blisters to prove exposure. The ER doctor at Washington Hospital had put her diagnosis in writing and instructed Beth that she couldn’t return home until the DEP checked that it was safe, so now she was occupying a park bench. “I’m fucked up the ass with no Vaseline and against my will and I’m not a happy camper right now,” Beth told me as she sat in Washington Park with nowhere to go. She’d just called John Smith and threatened to go up to the Washington County Courthouse and stand out in front yelling about what Range had done to her.

  “I don’t care if I go to jail,” she told me. “At least I’ll have clean air to breathe.”

  John Smith calmed her down, and she went to the Kopper Kettle instead. This time, however, Beth and her family weren’t the only ones to experience the fumes. A new neighbor, Rick Loar, had bought an old abandoned farm across McAdams Road from their home and just next to the Garretts’. A thirty-nine-year-old wireliner who mapped preexisting wells at fracking sites, he now lived there with his nine-year-old daughter. He�
�d paid only $10,000 for a property estimated to be worth $150,000. The old couple who’d owned the place had passed away. At first, he’d thought that the surviving family didn’t want to be bothered with cleaning out the house, but now he wondered if the gas wells had driven them off. On the day Beth ended up in the hospital, Loar smelled the chemicals and saw the trucks before the Voyles did. He came down with a horrible headache and burning eyes and throat. He thought he recognized what he was smelling; he’d worked at remediation sites cleaning up after this smell for more than a decade. To him, it smelled like pit gas, which could indicate there had been some kind of release at the site, where there were now three active wells. “It’s pretty nasty stuff. It’s basically all the carcinogens of oil and fluid all mixed in,” he told me. Beth had said the overwhelming smell was that of electric poles treated with creosote, a preservative that can be derived from either coal or shale. Loar had looked out his window and watched triaxle trucks, what Beth called “Dumpster trucks,” heading up the access road. From his window, he could see inside: they were carrying fresh gravel. Later, however, one triaxle headed back down McAdams. Covered with a tarp, it was leaking something oily that stained the road. “You only go to that kind of effort to cover a truck with a tarp that fully if there’s something inside,” he told me. Loar called Range. The company told him nothing had gone wrong; that truck was empty. When I inquired, Range also sent me the DEP inspector’s report that read “At no time did I notice any kind of odor in the air resembling that of creosote, any other industry associated odor or anything out of the ordinary.”

  * * *

  Six days later, Range Resources took me out to the Yeager site. At 9:00 a.m. I met two Range Resources employees, Mike Mackin and his colleague Mark Windle, in the lobby of their Southpointe Headquarters. Fox News was playing on a large flat-screen TV and the cafeteria, run by a local outfit, the Hopewell Diner, was serving barbecue chicken burritos for lunch. Two thousand seventeen marked Range’s ten-year anniversary in Southpointe, and the company celebrated by placing paid articles in The Observer-Reporter that chronicled Range employees sampling Lenten fare at local fish fries every Friday, among other community activities. Everyone was wearing jeans for a charity day. The friendly atmosphere reflected a softening in public messaging. Matt Pitzarella was gone, and Mike Mackin, a quiet father of two in his thirties who’d previously worked at the Heinz History Center, had taken his place. In addition to handling reporters, Mackin worked with communities on their local drilling ordinances. Since Act 13 could no longer be used to override zoning, Range had an incentive to keep each township as friendly to drilling as possible.