Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  Beth told Stacey she thought they were dealing with “crooks.” She’d anticipated receiving a signing bonus of nearly fifteen thousand dollars for their acreage, but it arrived in installments. “They told me some blame excuse,” as Beth put it. She often misused words—mistakenly substituting one that fit even better. Meanwhile, Stacey’s dream barn would have to wait. Her eight-thousand-dollar signing bonus was also divided. After taxes, each payment dwindled to about half; then she had to split that with her ex-husband, Larry. And there always seemed to be more pressing needs for that last few hundred dollars than putting it aside for the barn.

  * * *

  By the spring of 2009, a few months after signing the lease, Stacey’s initial suspicions gave way to open frustration. Next door at Justa Breeze, John Voyles had taken to counting the number of trucks that rattled by in a day. He told Stacey that he’d counted 250 trucks passing her farmhouse, which sat 30 feet from the narrow dirt track of McAdams. It was like living next to a highway. Stacey couldn’t believe how much dust the trucks kicked up. The dirt, grimy with diesel oil, settled on the glass hummingbird feeder on the wraparound porch that Stacey kept filled with sugar water. It coated the wooden railings until, by week’s end, it was half an inch thick. The dust gathered on the relics of childhood in the front yard: a tire swing, a trampoline, and an abandoned red tricycle. Stacey had passed her love of little children on to Harley and Paige, so they kept toys on hand for young visitors even after Harley and Paige had outgrown them.

  The grime caught in their throats. The goats Harley and Paige raised for the fair began to cough so much that Stacey feared they might not make weight. Harley, Paige, and Stacey coughed too. Their noses ran and their eyes watered. Although Stacey was annoyed, she figured this was the temporary price one paid for progress. They had no choice but to tough it out, as inside, the judder of trucks shook the house, tilting the Sears baby pictures of Harley and Paige, fat-legged and grinning, hanging on the living room wall and rolling Stacey’s antique sock darner off of the shelf and onto the rag rug.

  The foundation of Stacey’s house cracked. Vibrations rutted the road with industrial-strength potholes that punctured nine tires on her gold Pontiac G6 and cracked a rim. In her deepening ire, she wasn’t alone; in Amity, and all over the drilling epicenter of Western Pennsylvania, the weight and number of trucks destroyed bridges and roads, imperiling some small farms and dairies that struggled to get their milk to market. And according to state records, nearly half of the industry’s trucks were in such poor condition they had to be removed from use. It wasn’t all a disaster. The companies also paved back roads, which pleased inhabitants, issuing bonds to finance the repairs. But the bonds covered only 10 to 20 percent of the cost, so companies ended up passing most of the bill on to the county and state, which paid between $8.5 million and $39 million for repairs in 2011 alone. This was one of the hidden ways in which the industry transferred its costs to the public.

  And small towns were powerless to stop the traffic. “These water trucks would come through town in a caravan and one would run a red light, so they all would,” Blair Zimmerman, a former mayor in the neighboring county of Greene, told me. “They’d go up on sidewalks, they’d drive through residential areas. At three a.m., one traveled at seventy miles an hour right through town.” Incensed, Zimmerman called for a meeting with the gas companies. “I want money to fix my sidewalks, my streets,” he recalled telling them. “I want to hire more police officers for arresting your butts for being where you shouldn’t be.” The corporate representatives paid little attention, he said. “Environmentally, who’s going to clean this up when they leave?” he asked. “Some of these farmers become millionaires, but the majority of the costs are going to be passed on to other people.”

  As one of these people, Stacey was dealing with the damage to her car from ruined roads. To register her complaints, Stacey called Range Resources and the company sent out Tony Berardi, an affable land man whose job it was to negotiate between the company and landowners like Stacey—“to put out fires,” he told me. Berardi prided himself in being straight with people: “My motto is, I’m going to show you the ugly, the bad, and the good in that order.” At first, Stacey appreciated his honesty and he appreciated Stacey. He figured that as a single mom she worked hard to keep things together. And Berardi believed he was helping people like Stacey who lived “on the front lines” of the gas rush. That was the term for such places, “frontline communities,” as if they were at war with extractive industries. “Aside from what the common people think, that these companies are out to screw them, they’re not,” he told me. Stacey and her neighbors up and down McAdams took to calling men like Berardi “yes men.” Their eagerness to please was often little more than hot air, they thought. Yet Berardi did manage to get Stacey some money from Range: $1,500 for dust cleanup and car repairs, and $650 for doors in the house that wouldn’t shut anymore.

  Range didn’t pay to repair the farmhouse foundation; Stacey couldn’t prove the trucks had caused the damage and she couldn’t afford to do anything about it. It was a matter of hanging on, and that required muscles she was accustomed to using.

  3 | THE MESS NEXT DOOR

  The trucks were only the first sign of trouble. After they passed Stacey’s house, then Beth and John’s, they made a sharp right and lumbered up a steep hill belonging to their neighbor, a cattle farmer named Ron Yeager. Sallow, with a face as wrinkled as a dried tobacco leaf, Yeager could often be spotted slouched over the black wheel of his green John Deere, riding up and down his hilly alfalfa fields, a trucker hat pulled low over his eyes.

  Ron Yeager was as shrewd a businessman as anyone in Washington County. After retiring from Verizon, he’d taken to working hard on his farm, leaving home early in the morning with a packed lunch, returning in the late afternoon. He was constantly repairing his high-tensile wire fence, which shined on his hills. Before fracking arrived, and plunged his hillside into controversy, he’d clear-cut old-growth trees on his farm—trees “as old as America,” one of the farm’s former owners lamented. The land had belonged to her family since at least 1804, and its woods had been full of cherry, oak, and walnut.

  Yeager’s farm sat atop the Ten Mile Creek watershed, the source of sixteen underground springs that flowed downhill into a network of streams. These streams eventually ran into the Ohio River basin, which supplies drinking water to 8 percent of Americans. The Yeagers drank water from these springs. So did the Angus they raised for human consumption.

  Ron Yeager was considered to be among the wealthier and larger landowners who’d signed leases. Neither Stacey nor Beth knew what he’d been paid. Neighbors didn’t tend to discuss the size of their sudden windfalls, since people often felt they were competing with one another to wangle the highest price they could from the handful of companies staking mineral leases. This newfound secrecy strained ties that stretched back generations.

  The leasing money could be decent, but the real money lay in industrial infrastructure, in allowing companies to drill wells and store waste on one’s land. With the promise of abundant shale gas deep below, the Yeagers’ land was highly desirable, and Range wanted to drill at least three wells, in addition to digging a waste pit and pond on their farm. As a result, those alfalfa fields took on a new identity. The property came to be known as “the Yeager site”—a subject of debate over which Ron and Sharon Yeager had little control. This was the case despite the Yeagers’ fervent desire to have their private lives remain out of the public limelight. When I asked to speak to them over the course of seven years of reporting, driving past their farm and stopping on occasion, or running into them at local events, they responded with a polite but adamant no.

  Unfortunately for the Yeagers, a litany of troubles small and large, unavoidably affecting the lives of their neighbors, arrived along with the industrial site. Even if the Yeagers never sought or expected any of the controversy, and were not directly responsible for the many adverse impact
s, their name was inevitably linked to the local fracking debate. It was the Yeager site—though not the Yeagers—that became a subject of great and ongoing public concern.

  Beginning in 2009, workers sheared off the top of the Yeagers’ hill to build a sandy three-acre lot where they could park trucks and drill the gas wells. It was common practice to remove the top of a hill: this was the easiest way to make a flat space for a well pad. Then Range and its subcontractors began to dig two waste pits deep into the ground. The first was much smaller, slightly larger than an Olympic-size swimming pool. This pit was designed to hold the rocks and mud that came off the drill bit, like pencil shavings, as it bore down more than a mile. Called a drill cuttings pit, it was insulated with a single plastic liner, which looked like an oversized garbage bag. The larger, at a little more than four acres, was really a pond. It could hold thirty Olympic pools’ worth of flowback, the potentially toxic sludge that returned to the surface after the frack. The pond, called a centralized impoundment, had much more traffic than most, since the fluid within it was trucked in and out to other sites to frack elsewhere. When viewed from above, the waste pond was half as large as Stacey’s farm, which sat a quarter of a mile below.

  On September 11, 2009, a seventy-five-foot air rig began to drill the vertical leg of the first well. Range was going to conduct what a petroleum engineer called “major science projects”—running diagnostics on an unexplored layer of shale. This layer, the Upper Devonian, sat three to five hundred feet above the much better known Marcellus. Since it was younger and closer to the surface, its ocean of gas could prove cheaper and easier to reach.

  As the vertical rig worked its way down, lengths of pipe were inserted into the earth and cemented into place. Yet some of the cement intended to secure the casing was lost in the earth. Then, a second, bigger rig 175 feet high drilled the horizontals. These kicked out sideways and ran for another mile. Three months later, the frack began. Range’s subcontractors pumped a total of 3,343,986 gallons of water and chemicals into the perforated pipe. Some of the chemicals were as harmless as soap; others carried greater risks. These included ethylene glycol, a neurotoxin, and elements of BTEX, the shorthand for benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene. Employing pressure approaching a shotgun blast, they drove this fluid, along with a total of 4,014,729 pounds of clay pellets, downhole to crack the shale.

  Once the pressure and fluid splintered the rock, the clay pellets propped open the new fissures so that gas could flow up to the surface. But gas wasn’t the only thing that rose: 10 to 40 percent of the water and chemicals used in the frack returned too, as did radioactive materials, both natural and synthetic, and bacteria that hadn’t seen daylight since the giant dragonflies roamed the earth. The larger waste pond wasn’t yet finished. So the operators pumped this flowback into the smaller pit, which contained only that single liner. Within months, there were indications of trouble in the smaller pit. The Yeagers’ grass was dying.

  One day in March 2010, three months after the frack, Ron Yeager caught a worker known as a mud man standing next to sludge seeping out of the hillside. He asked what the mud man was doing as he watched him pump the seep back into the pit.

  * * *

  Down the hill, during that month of March 2010, Harley was ill. For much of his seventh-grade year, he’d been waking up sick to his stomach, stricken with diarrhea. Because of his stomach pains and the canker sores that kept appearing in his mouth, he didn’t want to eat. To coax him, Stacey cooked his favorite foods, chicken and stuffed shells, grilled cheese. Still, he only picked at meals. Finally, he’d missed so much of seventh grade that she enrolled him in a homebound program. Once a week a teacher came to the house with his homework. Stacey’d tried everything she’d learned over twenty-three years of nursing to figure out what was wrong. They’d made trips to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh and the ER at Washington Hospital, where she worked. Harley was tested for appendicitis, Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, cat scratch fever (after one of the Haneys’ three cats, Cheyenne, scratched his lip), Rocky Mountain spotted fever, mononucleosis, swine flu. All came back negative.

  Then one March night, he woke calling for his mom. Stacey struggled awake and felt by the bed for her crutches. She was recovering from routine surgery for a cut on the bottom of her foot. (She’d jumped off of Harley’s top bunk and sliced a tendon on a glass jar.) Hobbling to the bathroom, she found him crumpled on the floor. Sweat had darkened his chestnut hair, and in the quarter-light near dawn, his pupils were so large his eyes looked black. She crouched on the floor and tried to comfort him, then called Chris for help. She didn’t need to tell him what had happened—Harley’d been sick so many times. Within twenty minutes, Chris had arrived, and he scooped Harley into his arms and slid him into the Pontiac’s back seat.

  Stacey, in pajamas, climbed into the driver’s seat and hauled down the hollow toward Washington Hospital. In the ER waiting room, Harley couldn’t lift his head out of her lap. Admitted for severely sensitive bowels, he was confused and disoriented, his lymph nodes extremely swollen. He spent six days in the hospital, so gravely ill that his dad paid an unusual visit. Larry looked down at his son, gray and drawn, with concern. He lived only a few miles away, in the town of Washington, but he and Stacey weren’t on speaking terms, so he vanished as quickly as he appeared. Harley was too sick to notice. The doctors found that his liver enzymes were elevated and kidney function was off. His liver didn’t look inflamed on ultrasound, however. Maybe it was celiac. Stacey started buying gluten-free.

  Meanwhile, her foot refused to heal. Since her nursing job required twelve-hour shifts on her feet, she had to stay home, parked on a couch. Slumped next to Harley, she felt like she was coming down with a milder version of whatever he had. She abandoned the daily battle against the dust from the ongoing truck traffic. Even in winter, with the windows closed, grime crept in the house. Some days she could feel its grit in her teeth.

  One late-winter day, Beth called. Bob the amorous donkey had broken through the fence and was up at Justa Breeze again. Bob’s escapades were a rare point of contention between Stacey and Beth. In his perennial efforts to mount Doll, Bob risked impregnating the valuable quarter horse.

  Stacey apologized and said she’d be right up. Still on crutches, she hobbled up the ridge through the snow, cursing Bob. His antics were more than she could handle. Bob mounted everything, even a friend’s goat once, which frightened Paige. She asked her mother if Bob was “a sex offender.”

  Finally, Stacey decided she had to geld Bob. Since she wasn’t working, she didn’t have the hundred dollars to pay for a vet to do it, so she found a farmer who would castrate Bob for twenty-five. The procedure didn’t go as she hoped. There was so much blood that Stacey raced home towing Bob in the horse trailer as fast as she could, hoping her speed and the cold air might stanch the bleeding. In the end, however, Bob healed so well that he still snuck up to Justa Breeze. He didn’t seem to realize what he’d lost.

  Over the rest of that winter and early spring of 2010, the trucks kept coming. Stacey finally got off the couch and made it back to work, but Harley stayed parked in the recliner as the school year drew to a close. By June 2010, the dust on the porch was so thick Stacey thought she’d have to cancel the kids’ joint eleventh and fourteenth birthday parties. Born nearly three years apart, Harley and Paige shared a party every year. Stacey invited as many children as she knew, hosting horse rides on the thirty-five-year-old Duchess and filling water balloons, which were a rare luxury thanks to their abundant well. She even fashioned a homemade contraption she called a redneck Slip ’N Slide, rigged from a tarp, dish soap, and a hose.

  But she couldn’t host the party in the midst of the dust bowl, so she called Tony Berardi to ask if the company might water the dirt road, maybe even cut down on the traffic for a week or so before the party. The trucks thinned. The dust settled. The party was a success, and Harley, now fourteen, was thrilled with his 154-piece Craftsman tool set
, and even more so with his new guitar. Watching him fiddle with the strings, Stacey thought maybe he was ready to start up lessons with Baker again. On that June day, with the farm’s air clear like it used to be, a return to life before drilling seemed possible.

  But a few weeks later, in July, a stench began wafting over Beth’s and Stacey’s farms. They weren’t sure if the sewage odor was rising from their pipes or descending the hill from behind the high fence. Sometimes it seemed to be coming through the plumbing. The stink mortified Stacey. After she or the kids took a shower, she sprayed the entire house with Febreze, especially on weekends when Chris was around.

  One afternoon in August, Stacey was out by the goats’ kiddie pool when she caught a whiff of the rank stink drifting down the hill. Her eyes began to water and her nose burned. It was the kind of fugitive scent that made Stacey feel paranoid and alone. Later, they learned that one Range employee was calling it “shitty beef jerky.” She went inside to phone Beth and ask if she smelled it.

  Beth also smelled it, and knew what it was. For months, Beth had been phoning the state Department of Environmental Protection to register complaints about the Yeager site. Finally, in August, she’d received a call from Vince Yantko, a water quality supervisor at the DEP. He explained that the larger waste pond on the hilltop, now filled with the sludge used in fracking, had gone septic, like an infected wound. A bacterial outbreak was off-gassing hydrogen sulfide, a colorless gas. Open-air waste ponds were already of mounting concern to landowners, to responsible drillers, and to the DEP.

  This was a problem.

  Beth and Stacey didn’t know that some companies avoided using the shoddy ponds, nor did they know the potential health effects of hydrogen sulfide gas. According to Beth, the DEP told her only that hydrogen sulfide was naturally occurring. But “naturally occurring” didn’t mean harmless, as she and Stacey would soon learn. Low levels of exposure to hydrogen sulfide inflamed the eyes and could cause depression; high levels could be lethal, especially in children. She and Beth weren’t the only ones to complain about smells. Later a neighbor over the valley on Headley Road called to say that her young child was throwing up from one.