The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  FOURTEEN

  The Explosion

  It was a little before noon on New Year’s Day 2009, and Norma Fiorentino was in a hurry to get ready for a little family get-together and dinner at her daughter’s house over in Rush that afternoon. One of her sons was going to pick her up at any moment. She still needed to choke back the handful of pills that she took every day to manage a battery of ailments. But when she turned on the tap in her kitchen, all she got was a now familiar rattle and hiss from her bone-dry pipes. She tried the bathroom sink. That didn’t work, either.

  “The pipes are frozen again,” she thought. This had been happening on and off for weeks. Norma couldn’t understand it. It hadn’t been that cold, certainly not cold enough to freeze the pipes that ran from the water well just a few yards outside her front door. But she couldn’t think of any other explanation. The pump that drew the water from the well was practically brand-new; her husband had installed it a year earlier, just before he died, and her two sons had climbed down into that well, one after the other, to check it repeatedly. As a matter of fact, just a few days earlier, one of them had even resoldered a pipe that looked as if it might have been leaking, just to be sure.

  The strange thing was that every time they came back to look at it, the well cover—an eight-inch-thick concrete disk—was off. That had sparked more than a couple of rows between the boys, each of them blaming the other for not putting it back in place. “It sure didn’t move itself,” they would sneer at each other.

  Well, she didn’t have time to worry about it now, she thought. One of the boys could take a look at it when they got back from Rush. She could take her pills at her daughter’s house.

  Actually, she wouldn’t mind that. Though it might have been her imagination, she could have sworn that she had been picking up a faint taste of diesel fuel in her water ever since the drilling had begun nearby. It wasn’t the kind of thing she was going to complain about to anyone. Why bother? The way she figured it, no one would listen to her anyway. Though she had some friends among the neighbors—Ron and Jean Carter, the older couple down the road, leaped to mind—most of them had always held Norma and her family at arm’s length, seeming to see whatever misfortune she faced as either her own fault or some kind of divine judgment. They would have smiled sweetly and nodded and said “Poor thing” to her face, and behind her back they would have sneered at her and said she was just jealous that her neighbors were getting ready to reap the benefits of all the drilling in the neighborhood and that she and her 2.2 acres of scree set on a rock outcropping were getting a meager income, usually a few hundred a month, sometimes as little as $97. They would have suspected that Norma or her sons were playing some kind of angle to gouge a little more money out of Cabot.

  And they probably would have found some way to tie the whole thing to the boys’ history of drug abuse. That was a long time ago, the boys were now men, and they weren’t doing drugs anymore. And besides, it wasn’t as if they were the only kids in the neighborhood experimenting back then with pot and crank and whatever else they could come up with to add a little more kick to their nights out, washed down with cases of Genesee Cream Ale. For some reason, though, that reputation had stuck to them—maybe just another example of the way that a hurtful word, spoken carelessly, can echo in these hills for generations.

  But Norma bore the neighbors’ disdain with as much grace as she bore her infirmities. And by and large, she bore them both silently.

  Ever since the drilling had begun, Norma had been trying to keep her concerns and her opinions to herself. She pretended to ignore the near-constant roar of the rigs that echoed in the hollow near her mobile home, and like her neighbors, she had even started to get used to the nerve-jangling banging that periodically rattled her windows and her bones. Back in the old days, before Cabot had cranked up its drilling operation, sounds like that were rare—her windows only rattled when one of the quarrymen like Ken Ely decided that he needed to blast out some more bluestone. But now they heard it all the time. It had become as common as the bellowing of dairy cows used to be.

  Some of her neighbors, such as Ron and Jean Carter, may have been more tolerant of it because for them it was the sound of opportunity knocking. Some were just stoic, Norma figured. And then there were others, she had heard, such as Victoria Switzer and her group, who had taken to complaining, and loudly, about some aspects of Cabot’s operation, earning themselves a reputation as radicals in the process. In a way, Norma sympathized with Victoria and her cohorts. She even admired them, from a distance. But the way Norma figured it, she had her hands full with the reputation her family already had. She was too old and too sick to give her neighbors a whole new reason to talk about her behind her back.

  She shook some dry food into a bowl for the dogs and was scooping her array of medicines into her purse when her son appeared at the door.

  “Water out again?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “I’ll look at it when we come back.”

  It was no more than two hours later when the water well blew up.

  No one but the dogs was home at Norma’s trailer at the time. Nor did any of the neighbors say they heard anything out of the ordinary, though to be honest, the ordinary sounds in the neighborhood now included a deafening cacophony of clangs and bangs and thunders loud enough to drown out the afterburner of a fighter jet.

  But at about 2 P.M. on New Year’s Day, a thick cloud of methane—natural gas—that had been accumulating for weeks in the depths of Norma Fiorentino’s water well reached critical mass. To this day, no one is sure what set it off. A spark—probably from the electric pump her husband had installed before his death, in right about the same spot where her son had been wielding his soldering torch a few days earlier—may have been the culprit. Whatever triggered it, Norma Fiorentino’s water well exploded with enough fury that it sent the concrete cover—further weighted down by several cinder blocks placed there by Norma’s frustrated sons—flying several yards across her snow-covered lawn.

  YOU MIGHT IMAGINE THAT the dramatic New Year’s Day explosion of a water well would send immediate shock waves pulsing through the community. After all, people like Barbara Arrindell had been warning for months that the drilling would threaten the local aquifers, and she had cited examples from as far away as Wyoming and Colorado to bolster her claim. And you didn’t have to go that far afield to find examples of the dangers, she had noted. A year earlier in Cleveland, a house blew up after methane, apparently leaching from a poorly cemented gas well nearby, had collected inside. Nineteen nearby homes were evacuated as a result.

  But there was no hue and cry, at least not immediately.

  In fact, when Norma called the local authorities on New Year’s Day to report the incident, she was greeted with skepticism. And that initial mistrust wasn’t just coming from the local authorities, who hinted that she or her sons may have exaggerated the incident, perhaps out of jealousy over their neighbors’ good fortune, or worse, in an attempt to extract some money or other perquisite from the drillers. Even before the smoke cleared, Norma would later learn, the talk had already started among some of the neighbors that her sons might have returned to their old ways and that the blast might have had less to do with methane than with methamphetamines.

  “People said we had a meth lab up here,” she told a visitor as she sat on the ragged couch in the cluttered living room of her ramshackle home, her feet planted on the remains of a decade-old carpet. “Look at this place. If we were dealing drugs, would we live like this? We’d have money.” Even in my mother’s house, our initial reaction to news of the blast was less than charitable. Looking back, it’s clear that my mother, my sister, and I were all rattled by the reports of the explosion; it touched all those unspoken fears we had about all the things that could go wrong. But rather than reveal that to one another, we, too, speculated that maybe this was some sort of elaborate scam.

  That suspicion was widespread, and it even infected a
n inspector, dispatched from the DEP’s Bureau of Oil and Gas all the way out in Meadville, who turned up waving an air monitoring wand in one hand. Maybe he was just in a bad mood because he had been forced to travel halfway across the state on New Year’s Day. Maybe he was just naturally surly. Or maybe, Norma suspected, when the local authorities summoned him, they also took the time to brief him on the family’s reputation among some of the locals. Whatever the reason, when the DEP’s oil and gas expert showed up, he sneered, “Oh, you’re just putting this all on. This didn’t happen to you.”

  But the wand in his hand told a different story. Yes, methane had been building up, and it was continuing to seep into the well, a finding that was confirmed when the men from Cabot showed up and took their own tests. There was a lot of equivocating from the men from DEP and Cabot. No one was willing to venture a guess as to where the gas might have come from—even though in the decades she had lived there, nothing like this had ever happened before, and even though Cabot had ringed her neighborhood with drilling rigs. “It could come from a lot of places,” the Cabot man told her. It would take extensive tests, and many of them, to determine how the gas had gotten into her well. For the time being, her well was shut down, and it would remain shut until authorities could determine what had caused the methane buildup and identify the best way to correct it. In the meantime, Norma figured, she was on her own.

  NORMA WAS NOT THE only one in the neighborhood feeling isolated and somewhat threatened that holiday season. Victoria was feeling it, too. For months, she and Ken Ely had been the driving force behind the group that was monitoring the Cabot operations, and as so often happens in such grassroots groups, it seemed as if the two of them were doing most of the work. Ken didn’t seem to mind; he actually seemed to enjoy the role he was playing. The time he spent on research and strategizing was a welcome relief from the fact that his lawsuit against Cabot was effectively dead in the water, bogged down by a thousand legal what-ifs that in Ken’s mind missed the whole point.

  For Victoria, it was another matter. For her, the work was becoming an obsession. She woke every morning and immediately dashed to her computer to collect the latest stories about drilling mishaps or the perfidy of some gas company in Texas or Wyoming or elsewhere, and at night, long after Jim had gone to bed, she was still at it. In fact, Victoria knew, Jim was starting to become concerned about her. It wasn’t that he didn’t share her fears about the damage the drilling might do to the neighborhood, or to their once-bucolic dream home. He did. And like her, he also felt that they had been taken for a ride when Cabot had first turned up with its $25-an-acre offer to take millions of dollars’ worth of gas off their hands. But as angry as he might have been about that, his background as a West Virginian, a guy who had grown up in a state where energy companies’ word is generally taken at face value, meant he was a little more sanguine about it. The truth was, he was much more worried about Victoria than he was about Cabot. Jim wanted Victoria to take a break, to pass off the leadership and the responsibilities of the group to someone else. And he gently but firmly let her know what he was thinking.

  Victoria knew he was right. She, too, feared that her work with the group was becoming an addiction, and as with any addiction, whatever pleasure or satisfaction she had once gotten from it had long since vanished.

  “I’ll go cold turkey,” she told him.

  “When?” he asked

  “Soon. April, maybe.”

  BUT FOR NOW, VICTORIA WAS going to have to put off her open-ended plan to retire from the group. The explosion at Norma’s well had seen to that.

  She and Ken were among the first in the neighborhood to embrace the widow and to offer their support. But they weren’t by any means the last. Within days, other neighbors, some of them the same people who had at first dismissed Norma’s claims as sour grapes, all reported problems with their water. At as many as eleven houses—some along Carter Road, a dirt track located a stone’s throw from Fiorentino’s trailer that runs past four of Cabot’s gas wells, others farther afield—high levels of methane were detected. The number would eventually grow to fifteen. It had hit Ron and Jean Carter’s place; their well water turned rancid, the result of fecal coliform bacteria, a vestige perhaps of the two-hundred-year-old practice of spreading manure on the fields in that area that might have been jarred free by the drilling not a hundred yards from their front door, an analyst had told them. At first, they had been willing to choke back their revulsion and keep quiet about it. After all, they were soon to receive their first check from Cabot for their part of a well on an adjoining piece of property that was sucking gas from their 75 acres. But no sooner had they spent $5,000 to install a filtration system to address the bacteria problem than methane started to turn up in their water.

  That was a problem not just for them but for their daughter and her baby, who also lived on that land and who drew their drinking water from the same well. The methane had spread to Pat Faranelli’s place, and it migrated over to Richard Seymour’s land. That was a particularly troubling development for a guy who had decided to try his hand at organic farming and now was facing the possibility of being put out of business, not, as the other farmers around there had been, because there weren’t enough affordable petroleum products, but because there was too much of the stuff.

  It was becoming clear that the problem was bigger than anyone had imagined, certainly bigger than Cabot or the DEP was at first willing to admit, and there didn’t seem to be anyone but Victoria and Ken and their group who could or would speak for the farmers and landowners.

  It was Ken Ely who first came up with a working theory of what had happened. “This isn’t a geology problem or an engineering problem,” he told Victoria and the group. “This is a plumbing problem.”

  The way Ken figured it, the whole series of events that led to the contamination of the water wells began months earlier on that singularly windy night when the drilling had stopped and no one then had known why. They later learned that Cabot had gotten one of its precious drill bits stuck in the glacial scree 1,500 feet deep. But rather than move to another site, they had simply drilled another well right alongside the first while they struggled to retrieve their bit. The company finished drilling and cemented the well. State regulations called for the drillers to cement the pipe at the bottom of the well, and then to lay another layer of cement thousands of feet higher, in essence encasing the steel pipe and theoretically protecting the water supplies closer to the surface, and that was precisely what Cabot did. But the vast majority of that pipe, several thousand feet of it, was not encased in cement. The state did not require that.

  What had happened, Ken theorized, was that gas from that higher deposit had been dislodged by the drilling and by the frantic efforts to retrieve the stuck drill bit, and the cement, unable to attach to the glacial scree, did not create a sufficient barrier. And if it had happened there, he suspected, perhaps something similar had happened at other wells in the village.

  The question was, what could do they do about it?

  SOME FOUR HUNDRED MILES away from Dimock, Ken Komorowski was already getting his marching orders from Cabot. A generally good-natured man, a solid Republican and the kind of guy you would want at your elbow during a real estate closing, though with a lawyer’s habit of parsing his words so finely that they slipped through the gaps in his teeth when he spoke, Komorowski had been hired by Cabot, as well as by Range, to do some legal work for them. But unlike Range Resources, which had spent nearly as much of its time in the Marcellus working on public relations projects as it spent on drilling, Cabot had a different philosophy. Its primary objective, as articulated to and by Komorowski, was to exact the maximum benefit to its shareholders. Period. And the way the company saw it, those shareholders’ benefits were being jeopardized by the problems developing in Dimock.

  Cabot at first tried to downplay the significance of the problem. It was too early, the company’s spokesman intoned to the first few reporters who con
tacted him, to say for certain whether the methane that was now rushing into the groundwater at what was turning out to be an alarming rate had actually been released by the drilling. There were, he noted, a number of other ways that gas could have gotten there, and only a complex series of tests to study the isotopes in the gas could determine whether it was thermogenic—gas trapped in the ancient rocks—and which layer of rock it had come from, or whether it was more recently created “swamp gas” that often occurs naturally either at or very close to the surface. There was, the company argued, no proof yet that its drilling had unleashed the gas. What’s more, Komorowski insisted—and the DEP agreed—that methane in and of itself was not particularly dangerous. As long as the water wells were properly vented, the gas, which poses no serious health threat, would dissipate over time. As long as gas didn’t build up in a basement or some confined space, there was little risk of the kind of explosion that had ripped apart that house in Cleveland the year before.

  All the same, in what the company spokesman tried to depict as a consummate act of social responsibility, Cabot agreed to provide bottled water for the affected residents—temporarily—and also pledged to work with the DEP to find the source of the contamination and, if it turned out to be their fault, to correct it.

  But back in Dimock, there was a growing sense that Cabot and the DEP did not fully appreciate how significant this first incident of contamination from the gas in the Marcellus really was, that perhaps the driller and the state did not completely understand the risks that were involved, and there was even a sense that maybe the locals hadn’t understood, either.