Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  And the water tests Range was performing didn’t reassure Stacey either. Although the company claimed to hire independent laboratories to ensure homeowners received objective results, Stacey worried that the results might not be so independent, since Range was paying for them. She found and hired her own hydrologist, Bob Fargo. Fargo had little experience with oil and gas contamination, but he taught Stacey how to perform rapid arsenic testing on her well. At different times of day, she lowered into the well a strip of paper, which turned color, like pH paper, in the presence of arsenic and other metals. Regularly, when she went down to the basement to test, the results showed low levels of arsenic but nothing too startling. That was part of the problem, as Fargo explained it. All of these samples could capture only a moment in time. They were the equivalent of taking a photograph. To learn how an aquifer worked, Stacey pulled one of Chris’s college textbooks off the shelf. She’d always assumed that groundwater sat still underground, like a lake. But she discovered that an aquifer was more of an underground river. Water was always on the move. What if a plume of arsenic had passed by and she’d missed the main event? What if her test methods were too rudimentary to capture what was really going on?

  Fargo also told Stacey that he wondered whether the arsenic wasn’t only in the water but also in the air. That might be why she and the kids weren’t feeling entirely better. Maybe, while showering, they were breathing in arsine gas.

  Stacey puzzled over these and other issues aloud among her fellow nurses at the hospital. For two years now, her colleagues had listened to stories of Harley’s sickness and seen it firsthand when he arrived at the ER ashen and doubled over. None of the other nurses or even the sympathetic doctors at the hospital knew where to point Stacey for answers. No one had any experience with these deep wells. The ordinary shallow gas wells, which some farms still had, were small affairs where people put in pumpjacks on the weekend. The scale of this industry itself was new, and Stacey didn’t know where else to turn besides Kelly Tush, her fellow nurse, and her sister, Shelly, who was in charge of surgical instruments at Advanced Surgical Hospital nearby.

  Kelly swapped shifts and spent hours talking to Stacey about Harley’s sicknesses. She looked up to Stacey. The two had been close ever since Kelly had nursed Stacey’s grandparents in the hospital’s geriatric unit. Then Kelly transferred to recovery and also became a stepmother to three rambunctious boys. Stacey coached her into the new job and into parenthood. Now the roles switched and Kelly became Stacey’s emotional mainstay. She sent Stacey supportive texts and e-cards. “Friendship isn’t about who you’ve known the longest,” one read. “It’s about who came and never left your side.”

  Shelly was already accustomed to helping her sister balance life and work. When Stacey was in nursing school, Shelly watched Harley alongside her two boys. Now, as Stacey shuttled urine samples to Dr. Fox’s office, Shelly drove the kids to 4-H and hauled water with Pappy for Stacey’s animals. Shelly wasn’t doing great herself: she too was working full-time at the orthopedic hospital, as well as suffering from diabetes and being in the throes of a crumbling marriage. Still, she showed up for Stacey because that’s what sisters did. Shelly kept asking the doctors she worked with if they knew of anyone who could help her sister’s son, until finally an orthopedic surgeon told her about a Washington County man named Ron Gulla.

  Gulla lived about an hour’s drive from Amity in Mount Pleasant Township, the epicenter of Range’s leasing and drilling activity. It was here, in 2004, that Range drilled and fracked its first well in Washington County. The gas wells on Gulla’s farm were among the first to be fracked, and things hadn’t gone as he’d expected. He was in the midst of a legal battle with Range Resources over everything from fish dying in his pond to workers defecating in his woods. Gulla, who’d become the local lightning rod in the unfolding debate around fracking, was obsessed with the issue, and when Stacey called, she found it was nearly impossible to get off the phone with him. He began to ring her with updates and requests from the flock of reporters descending on southwestern Pennsylvania, their arrival a symptom of the boom. Stacey declined. She wanted no part of the spotlight in a greater fight against fracking. She didn’t trust strangers who had their own agendas.

  Also, where she came from, no one liked a complainer. Stacey was well aware that Amity’s most respected citizens held some of the most lucrative leases. But her greatest concern was that if she spoke out against Range Resources, the company would take her water buffalo away. Without it, she and the kids would have to move, and they had nowhere to go and no way to afford the $1,200 mortgage and again as much rent for another home.

  Gulla introduced Stacey to a Mount Pleasant family much like her own. Stephanie and Chris Hallowich had built their dream house on ten acres of farmland, which they said had become a toxic waste site. Their children, Allie, six, and Nate, nine, were suffering from symptoms a lot like Harley’s and Paige’s headaches and nosebleeds. The Hallowiches believed these problems resulted from exposure to a waste pond like the one by Stacey and a compressor station on their farm. For two years, they’d been trying to move, but no one wanted to buy their land.

  The family was stuck, Stephanie Hallowich told Stacey. Through a series of late-night phone calls, the two became friends. In addition to suffering illnesses, the Hallowiches were ostracized for opposing an industry that was bringing so much money into the community. But that hadn’t stopped the family from suing Range Resources, and they were now in the middle of a contentious lawsuit. Eventually, in order to move away, the Hallowiches sold their home to Range and settled with the company for $750,000. In exchange, the family signed a gag order that initially seemed to prohibit the parents as well as their two children from commenting on Marcellus shale or on fracking, reportedly for the rest of their lives. Although the settlement was sealed, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette fought in court to make it public, and won. When the agreement was unsealed, it kicked off a nationwide controversy over the First Amendment rights of children, and eventually a new attorney for Range backed away from a previous claim that the gag order extended to the kids.

  No one in Amity would dare say Stacey and her kids were interlopers looking for money and a way out of town. They weren’t going anywhere. They would outlast the drilling, as people in Amity and Prosperity had always done with extractive industry. Let the company supply water, and they’d sit tight on the family farm until Range was gone. For now, she’d stay put to keep fighting, gathering proof of harm as quickly as she could.

  * * *

  Up at Justa Breeze, the Voyles were contending with their own problems. Beth and John lived 800 feet down the hill from the waste pond. (The Haneys, at 1,530 feet, were nearly double that.) The Voyles’ drinking water also came from the underground springs flowing off the Yeager site. They relied on that spring water for themselves and for their horses and dogs. When Range had started digging the waste pond earlier that year, the Voyles’ spring water flow had dropped off to a trickle—“a sprinkering,” Beth called it. She’d phoned Range, and the company paid Dean’s to deliver water. Range had also paid for Beth and John to drill a new well. But Beth didn’t trust that water either, as tests they conducted on their own came back saying it was full of E. coli. The buffalo couldn’t supply enough water for the Voyles’ twenty-one horses. So Beth parked herself in the basement, its walls hung with John’s horseshoe art, a cross reading FAITH, and Ashley’s trophies, to call buyers and auctions until she’d found homes for fifteen of them.

  Beth’s boxers Smoke and Presley each gave birth to a litter of puppies that fall. One, black and white, was born with a cleft palate. The puppy had trouble drinking milk, which kept getting into his lungs, and he died. In her seven years as a breeder, she’d never seen this kind of defect. She wrapped the puppy in a plastic baggie and placed him in the basement deep freeze. She hoped to test the corpse for clues about his deformity—perhaps a genetic mutuation linked to exposure. But she’d already learned when Cummins
died that such tests were inconclusive. They could also cost two thousand dollars. Now, with Jodi and the puppy dead in addition to Cummins, she called Range to tell them about her animals and her fears that they were being poisoned with ethylene glycol. Laura Rusmisel, a Range employee, then phoned Beth’s vet. She informed him that Range didn’t use ethylene glycol in fracking, which he recorded in his notes. When Beth found out that Range had called the vet without her consent, she threw a fit. It seemed to Beth a backhanded attempt to undermine her claims. And, in fact, Rusmisel turned out to be wrong.

  The incident left Beth deeply suspicious. Feeling that she had nowhere else to turn, Beth kept calling the Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency that investigated all such complaints. Since its creation in 1995, the DEP’s main role was to enforce Pennsylvania’s environmental laws. For a decade the agency had been understaffed and underfunded. Yet since 2008, things had gotten substantially worse, and the agency’s shortcomings were a symptom of a larger problem of public poverty. As fallout from the Great Recession, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania faced a budget shortfall of $1.6 billion. Governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, sliced the DEP’s budget of $217,515,000 by 27 percent, one of the biggest cuts in its history. The governor also shaved 19 percent from the $113,369,000 budget of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the agency tasked with maintaining state parks and forests. To plug the hole in the budget, he also started leasing oil and gas rights on public land. In three separate sales, the state made $413 million by leasing 138,866 acres. This marked the beginning of one of the largest public sell-offs in Pennsylvania’s recent history.

  The DEP also had a dismal record of responding to homeowners’ complaints. Poor communication, missed deadlines, giving homeowners confusing and incomplete test results—the DEP had failed at its most basic duties in protecting the public, a 2014 report by the inspector general found: “Undoubtedly, these shortcomings have eroded the public’s trust.” And due to the current rush, the agency was flooded with operators applying for permits. The DEP almost never said no. Of the 7,019 drilling applications received since 2005, the state had rejected only 31.

  Despite Beth’s urging, Stacey didn’t call the DEP very often. At work, on the rare days that she had even thirty minutes for lunch, she spent them on the phone trying to return doctors’ calls. She didn’t want to waste time trying to reach a human being at the DEP. Even when she did, no one had any answers. To be fair, health issues were beyond their mandate, so she was left on her own, giving the kids specimen cups to pee in first thing in the morning and performing inconclusive water tests in her pajamas. She told her new friend Stephanie Hallowich that she needed more help. Hallowich suggested that Stacey alert the federal government. If the DEP wasn’t going to do its job, then maybe the Environmental Protection Agency would step in. Their mandate was larger and ostensibly more powerful. When President Nixon and Congress founded the EPA in 1970, its purpose was to wage a “coordinated attack” on pollution that crossed state lines. Since then, the EPA had been tasked with everything from laying out ground rules for large-scale cleanups to investigating serious environmental crimes.

  Stacey wasn’t sure that she wanted or needed the feds traipsing through her home. She believed she stood a better chance of working with the company to make things right if she didn’t call in the cavalry yet, so she waited. At least they had clean water now. Although she and the kids were drinking from the buffalo outside the dining room, they needed more water for the animals, so Pappy kept hauling water. It was hard to keep up with the demand and sometimes the animals drank tainted water.

  At the end of November, Boots went into labor and Stacey prepared to deliver the kids up in the lean-to. The goat was having contractions but struggling to push, so Stacey had to reach in and pull the babies out. The first emerged in three pieces; the second intact. On Christmas Eve, Boots started having seizures. On Christmas Day, after opening presents, she and the kids checked on Boots. The goat was still seizing, so Stacey wrapped her in a blanket and carried her down to the house. Stacey called the vet, who prescribed steroids, pain medication, and antibiotics. Nothing worked. The day after Christmas, the vet came to put Boots down.

  Upsetting loss for our whole family. $76.60, Stacey wrote in her notebook. She was beginning to keep a running ledger of every expense, emotional and financial, that she could attribute to the ordeal. Boots’s death also marked a turning point: she was now willing to work with the feds. The next day, Stephanie Hallowich brought an EPA criminal investigator named Martin Schwartz to Stacey’s house. Bald and ex-military, Schwartz had served as a police officer for twenty-five years. He worked much as police detectives do, he explained, gathering evidence through tips, interviews, search warrants, and subpoenas. Unlike the state’s environmental inspectors, Schwartz carried a gun, which Stacey took as a sign of the EPA’s seriousness. As he sat in her kitchen, Schwartz found Stacey credible. “As a cop, you develop a feel for people,” he said later. “She wasn’t some quack or tree-hugger.” And she was also a nurse. Yet whether or not she was telling the truth wasn’t the question. Schwartz wasn’t sure what he’d be able to prove. Take the animals, he told her. With sick animals, there were usually too many environmental factors to make any real link between toxic exposure and sickness.

  That morning of December 27, Stacey wrapped Boots in a sheet and placed her in the Pontiac’s back seat for the three-hour trip to Penn State. Although Stacey knew the tests were rarely conclusive, she wanted to do them anyway. And the university would pay. The results showed an extreme number of parasites in the goat’s blood, which could mean anything. Animals can contract parasites in many ways, but Stacey learned that the condition can be common in animals affected by metal poisoning: metals replace calcium in an animal’s bones, and the immune system can no longer fight infection.

  When Boots’s test results came back, Stacey placed them in her thickening binder as evidence for the federal government. Since the Hallowiches could no longer speak publicly about their experience, Stacey feared it was going to be her job to expose what was happening in Amity. Maybe she could do so quietly; attention brought nothing but trouble. That she could see from the lives of the Hallowiches. She dreaded the idea of going public, of waging a fight. For now, in private, she’d write down every vet bill and co-pay in the corner of her polka-dotted journal.

  6 | HOOPIES

  Growing up Amity, as Stacey called it, meant growing up poor. Stacey was in the third grade when her father’s steel mill closed. She and Shelly were raised as children of the Bust. They grew and pickled as much of their own food as they could from a large garden, chopped firewood for fuel, and fetched drinking water. Although southwestern Pennsylvania is one of the most water-rich regions in the world, due to its rivers and the frequent rain that falls in the shadow of the Allegheny Mountains, many people who live there have no access to the municipal supply they call city water.

  In lower Amity, where Stacey had lived with her parents, whether a house had water or not was largely a matter of luck. Some people dug successful wells in their backyards. For others the wells cost too much to dig or the aquifer proved too deep to reach. Stacey’s family relied on storm water to do laundry or bathe or to fill the large concrete cistern that sat outside the brown house with a black and white POW/MIA flag where her parents still lived.

  Sometimes, since Pappy was a volunteer fireman, he could use the Amity fire truck to pump creek water into their tank for bathing and washing. For drinking water, the girls took turns crossing the driveway to a neighbor’s outdoor pump with eight empty plastic milk jugs balanced in their arms. They lugged them home two at a time, running so the jugs wouldn’t have time to slip from their hands. The chore fell to girls the world over. In many places, it could be perilous: requiring venturing alone far from home. Shelly and Stacey were only crossing a driveway; still, the memory lodged within them. Shelly remembered with delight when she was eleven and could manage four j
ugs at once. She’d always been less of a primper than her older sister, and still described herself as “a dirty tomboy.” The hardest part for her about their childhood dearth of water was that they’d never had water balloons, or water guns, or a sprinkler.

  “Water was too precious for play,” she said. Now thirty-eight, Shelly favored John Lennon glasses, a bandana, and a T-shirt that said MY KID SHOT A DEER WHILE YOUR HONOR STUDENT WAS AT SCHOOL. She made moonshine and tended a hive of feral bees in a hollow log behind the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse she’d bought for $25,000. In the middle of the unfinished living room, she kept a whirlpool tub she’d found at a rummage sale. The tub served as a kind of hopeful joke that they might one day have water. It was also loaded with laundry, which she and her boys washed when it rained.

  “We’re not fresh sheet washers,” she said. She called the oversized tub “a time capsule”; her son’s football uniform from three years back was still in there somewhere.

  Stacey, in contrast, liked keeping her hair clean and her legs shaven, which was hard as a teenager, when taking a shower longer than ninety seconds was verboten. “By the time the pump switched on, you’d better be out,” Stacey said. Back then, the water wasn’t the problem. Water was cheap: fifty gallons cost twenty-five cents, so filling a five-hundred-gallon buffalo cost only $2.50. But filling the gas tank and finding the time for the half-hour drives back and forth to Ruff Creek placed a strain on her family.

  Since 1970, the Dean family had made a business of hauling water. They also owned the Amity Laundromat, a hardware store, and eventually a gas station and convenience store, but before fracking arrived—and with it an insatiable demand for water—the Deans weren’t rich. They lived in a tin-sided trailer behind the Laundromat, and their son, Richard, like every other boy in town, had had a crush on Stacey. When they were teenagers, to be nice, Stacey went with him once as his date to the fair.