Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  The problem wasn’t natural gas. It was excessive regulation. Every time Clark had to give a pig an antibiotic shot, the law now required that he have a veterinarian write a prescription. That was fifty dollars per farm call, plus the cost of the medication. What really burned Clark up, however, wasn’t just the cost of the vet; it was the fact that if he wanted Oxy or any other opioid, he could just drive up the highway ten minutes to Washington, pop into the Med-Express, and say that his shoulder hurt him.

  Clark had watched so many friends get hooked on painkillers, and then, when their scripts ran out, or to save money, move on to heroin, which was cheaper than the pain pills that doctors overprescribed. His pigs were under more regulation than humans, he felt, and that seemed wrong. Yet when outsiders came to his community, they wagged their fingers over fracking. Really? Pennsylvania had the third highest death rate from opioids in America. An average of eight or nine people died every day. Along with the ready availability of pills, it was the injuries born of heavy labor in places such as coal mines and farms, combined with the economic stress of poverty, that helped to drive the epidemic in small towns like Amity and Prosperity.

  Still, Clark bristled at environmentalists and reporters who assumed they understood how corporations were taking advantage of rural Americans. The idea that people who lived on the front lines of Frackistan were somehow being duped by the shadowy forces of industry made him chuckle in anger. After Washington County had given away its coal, oil, and gas for nothing, fracking was finally a chance to get even. And the problem wasn’t just the coastal elite, it was urban people everywhere. “People who live in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia are bottom-feeders who don’t want to know where their meat or their energy comes from,” he told me. They could afford to leave people in Amity and Prosperity alone.

  9 | HANG ’EM HIGH

  From the flood in the swamp

  to frack of the mountain

  this land down here is one big fountain

  … And if you muddy my water, I will come after you

  —RISING APPALACHIA, “FILTHY DIRTY SOUTH”

  Not everyone wanted to be left alone. By the fall of 2010, a dozen Washington County farmers were gathering regularly with a handful of Pittsburgh activists and university professors. They met once a month in an empty bank building near the Meadows Racetrack. The meeting, called “Hang ’Em High,” was organized by the local branch of the Izaak Walton League, an American conservationist society named for the avid English fisherman and author of The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653.

  Its members saw themselves not as environmentalists—a term for political liberals advancing all kinds of agendas—but as conservationists who believed in the prudent use of resources. Many members were hunters and fishermen who, like Stacey’s father, were also Vietnam veterans and former steelworkers and coal miners. To people unfamiliar with their pasts, these men might seem unlikely candidates to lead the local pushback against fracking, but they weren’t.

  Stacey, who hated big, rowdy gatherings, was willing to attend only because she trusted these old Vietnam vets. Like her father, they’d come home bearing the scars of a war they fiercely believed they’d fought for their country, only to lose their jobs in the collapse of America’s steel and coal industries. Many still belonged to labor unions, and a history of distrusting corporations ran through their veins.

  Even still, Hang ’Em High made Stacey uncomfortable: she feared being seen there. For so long, she’d believed that if she stayed out of the spotlight and didn’t criticize the company publicly, Range would realize who she was: a concerned mother with kids sickened by exposure to industrial waste. She was a reasonable person, she thought. All she had to do was not embarrass the company, and eventually, Range would take responsibility. Yet weeks had passed since she’d delivered Harley’s test results to Range’s corporate offices, and although the company kept delivering water, she’d heard nothing. Her sense of personal disillusionment grew. So did her fear of collective harm. Run-down and racing between work, the farm animals, and doctors’ appointments, she was driven by outrage and a feeling of ownership.

  On one frigid night at the end of 2010, she climbed into the iron-cold Pontiac and drove thirty minutes north along Washington Road to the former Highmark bank building. She went to listen, not to speak. As nearly fifty people she didn’t know swapped information they’d pulled off the Internet, she wondered about the accuracy of their sources. People were scared and they knew next to nothing. At some of these meetings, there was a sense of hysteria: people flocking to get aboard a bandwagon against fracking, which Stacey understood but wanted no part of. She also worried there might be industry spies among the strangers, and she didn’t want anyone hearing her complain and then reporting back to Range.

  She slid into her seat at Hang ’Em High in the dark. Before her, there was a blown-up photograph of a waste pond projected on the wall. Her gaze drifted to the little farm next door to the pond’s void. She noticed a ranch house and a split-rail fence that encircled a horse paddock. Lower down the snaking road, there was a white farmhouse with a tin-roof lean-to.

  That was her farm, Stacey murmured to a fellow nurse sitting beside her in the dark. Here, on-screen, was the pond she’d seen on Google Earth. She could also see the surrounding canopy of trees more clearly. They were dark green as broccoli, except at the pond’s southwestern edge, where several had turned red and yellow out of season. They appeared to be dying. Now that the image was enlarged, she could see in the dark gray waste what looked to be white misters. So that’s what those white dots were on Google Earth: aerators.

  The aerators spooked her. It looked from the swirls of white like there was some kind of spray coming out of them. If the chemicals from the water were spraying into the air, then she and the kids had a problem more daunting than water. If they were breathing poisoned air, replacing water wouldn’t matter. She’d already suspected as much. There were the nosebleeds, and that winter, when the process of burning off gas, called flaring, began nearby, Stacey, Harley, and Paige felt like their headaches were worsening. Since testing the air was beyond the means of Stacey and her neighbors, she realized that she’d have to put the puzzle together by testing for what might be in their bodies.

  That night, at Hang ’Em High, she began to ask the questions she’d long avoided. She feared what she’d find: if their bodies showed evidence of exposure to airborne toxins, they’d have to leave the farm. She moved around the crowded room asking if someone might know how to figure out the testing required for inhalants.

  But that level of expertise was mostly absent at Hang ’Em High, which was often more of a generalized gripe session about the state of the world, and being left out of it. “We went to Vietnam to fight for the rights of people, and you come back and they’re taking people’s mineral rights,” Ken Gaman, a retired coal miner and Vietnam veteran, grumbled. This rang true to Stacey. It was her father’s kind of talk of fighting for a government that ended up selling you out. “We don’t want to stop the drilling. We want to do it the right, American way,” he added.

  Their complex, sometimes contradictory history was present in the name Hang ’Em High. Ken Gaman had chosen the name because he thought it meant grabbing corporate interests by the short and curlies. He hadn’t caught the obvious reference to lynching.

  In certain respects, the retirees were cut in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt: they tried to further his mission to protect public land not for pristine wilderness but for the benefit of future generations. The principle of conservation has a longer history in Pennsylvania than almost anywhere else in America. The nineteenth-century movement arose out of the devastated landscape left by the timber industry. Philanthropists like Gifford Pinchot, the grandson of a lumber baron, campaigned to replant millions of trees by hand. Pinchot became the first chief of the U.S. Forestry Service as well as the governor of Pennsylvania. He also coined the term “conservation ethic,” which balances the practical necess
ity of exploiting natural resources with the need to protect them.

  From its beginnings, however, the conservation ethic was sharply curtailed by the coal industry. In Pennsylvania, when coal reigned supreme, from the Civil War to World War II, the industry was untouchable. Coal was exempted from most federal regulation, including the 1972 Clean Water Act and the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act. (For the 2005 Energy Act, Vice President Dick Cheney successfully lobbied to exempt the fluids used in fracking from these same regulations. This was the “Halliburton loophole,” which gave the industry much of the immunity from which coal had long benefited.) As multinational coal companies drove up their private profits, they socialized their costs, passing them off to locals in the form of health issues and environmental problems, along with joblessness when the companies went bankrupt and pulled out of small towns. When coal and steel were at their peak, the rivers of the rust belt were so toxic they caught fire. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Monongahela River was once more acidic than lemon juice. It couldn’t support a single fish. In Western Pennsylvania, fishermen who were also conservationists were forced to give up the sport. The scale of the pollution alarmed them, although there was little they could do against the forces of industry.

  “Only suicides, uninformed children, and the mentally deficient voluntarily dive into the lower Monongahela, the lower Allegheny or the upper Ohio,” William Schulz Jr., a Pennsylvania conservationist, wrote in his 1953 Conservation Law.

  Rachel Carson, the legendary environmentalist, grew up against the backdrop of this devastation. From her childhood window in Springdale, a river town north of Pittsburgh, she watched horses climbing a ramp into a glue factory along the Allegheny’s bank. As an adult, Carson, who worked as a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, embodied the shift from an earlier generation of conservation ethics to the beginning of the modern-day environmental movement. Like any conservationist, Carson believed in the human use of natural resources. She saw people and the natural world as interrelated, a principle she laid out in her 1962 book, Silent Spring. In it, she defined the way pollutants travel the food chain for the first time for a popular audience: if a mayfly consumed a harmful chemical like DDT, then a fish ate the fly and a human ate the fish, then DDT could pose a risk to humans.

  This wasn’t a radical idea; it was a reasonable one. And it had far-reaching effects. President Kennedy asked his Science Advisory Committee to investigate the implications of “Ms. Carson’s book,” and eight years later, President Nixon founded the EPA around the idea that “the environment must be perceived as a single, interrelated system.” The chemical industry vehemently opposed Silent Spring, challenging its accuracy and Carson’s biases. Carson weathered the battle while suffering from breast cancer, which almost no one knew about. She died in 1964.

  Seven years later, Pennsylvania took the visionary step of adopting a constitutional amendment to its Bill of Rights, guaranteeing its citizens “the right to clean air and pure water.” The amendment had overwhelming bipartisan support. Despite its lofty language, however, the Environmental Rights Amendment remained little more than a gesture. During the seventies, the steel and coal industries of Western Pennsylvania were too powerful to have to pay much attention.

  As the mills closed in the 1980s, a nascent green movement in Pittsburgh mobilized around reviving the rivers for recreation as well as for environmental health. Eventually the rust belt’s rivers began to grow cleaner. Yet there were ongoing problems. Acid mine drainage polluted fifteen thousand miles of rivers and streams. And waste wasn’t solely an industrial issue. Despite a federal mandate to cut the amount of sewage flowing into the rivers by half by 2026, an estimated nine billion gallons of raw sewage ran into rivers each year. One telltale sign of human waste is corn. Hard for the body to digest, it often comes through the system whole. Pittsburgh’s streams were littered with yellow kernels.

  The pollution from fracking was harder to see and harder to clean up. What if some of the chemicals used in fracking—the antifreeze and fuels, the ancient radioactive materials, synthetics and astronomic levels of salt—combined to be more dangerous than people knew? From the beginning, two of the biggest issues related to fracking concerned water: where to get the millions of gallons required for a frack and what to do with the liquid waste.

  In Pennsylvania, the early efforts to dispose of this waste by hauling it to local sewage plants had proved disastrous. The local plants didn’t have the capacity to do anything but remove solids before dumping the water back into the river. Eventually, under pressure, the DEP banned the practice. Instead, liquid waste was often mixed with sawdust and spread on farm fields, a method that enjoyed legal protection under the label “beneficial use.” Or it was trucked to deep wells in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where it was injected into the earth. By 2014, this practice had been demonstrated to cause earthquakes.

  At Hang ’Em High, the retired miners and steelworkers of the Izaak Walton League were learning to test the water flowing out from old coal mines. The discharge coming from the abandoned mines wasn’t the ordinary mine drainage. It was high in a kind of salt called a bromide. When that salt mixed with the chlorine of treated drinking water, it formed a carcinogen.

  Either this or something else was killing fish along the anglers’ favorite rivers. The old-timers had taken to driving around tailing waste trucks as senior-citizen sleuths. There was one local waste hauler whose trucks they especially followed: Robert Allan Shipman. Shipman was Amity’s former fire chief and the heir to a porta-potty fortune. He was also dumping industrial waste at night. Around Amity and Prosperity, Shipman’s practices were no secret. Once, in the middle of the day, Beth Voyles spotted Shipman letting wastewater run into the creek down by her vet’s office.

  This enraged the men of Hang ’Em High, who traded intelligence about Shipman’s escapades. They’d even gone so far as to tip off local authorities and were hearing rumors that Shipman was about to be indicted for environmental crimes. Stacey knew Shipman. Most of the men in her family had served alongside him as Amity’s volunteer firemen. As she walked around Hang ’Em High, looking for someone to talk to about inhalants, she heard the old-timers grousing about Shipman and hoping he’d soon land in jail.

  10 | BLOOD AND URINE

  The medical tests that Stacey and the kids were to undergo at the beginning of 2011 required a lot of blood. Unlike most people in her position, Stacey, at least, had help figuring out what to test for. Stacey found Calvin Tillman through her growing contacts with a nationwide network of activists seeking more scientific facts regarding fracking. Tillman, the former mayor of Dish, Texas, taught Stacey about inhalants. Tillman’s fellow citizens were not predisposed to distrust industry: they’d adopted the name Dish in exchange for free satellite TV. Yet the corporate interests of oil and gas were another matter, and Tillman had recently gone up against those interests to try to prove their operations were sickening his kids and his town and lost. It was nearly impossible, Tillman found, to make a causal link between exposure and illness.

  Still, Tillman knew what to test for, so he sent Stacey a list that she gave to the head of the lab at Washington Hospital. He told her that assessing this kind of exposure required knowledge of the basics of toxicology, the branch of medicine that studied the harm that chemicals caused living organisms. Stacey, Harley, and Paige would be the organisms in question.

  Stacey was still working out the inhalant testing when she received a call from Range asking her to come into the office. The results of her water tests were in. To discuss them, Stacey was scheduled to meet with two women, Laura Rusmisel and her boss, Carla Suszkowski, a regulatory and environmental director. Together, they often assessed water complaints from homeowners like Stacey and Beth. That day, Beth received a similar call. Both families were to go into Range’s offices on January 14, 2011. For moral support and also to serve as one another’s witnesses, Beth and Stacey wanted to face Range together. But Carla Suszk
owski preferred to meet with each family alone. Beth and John Voyles would take the first meeting. On the phone, Beth was already angry enough to spit fire, but she tried to be polite. She also assumed that if Rusmisel wanted to meet face-to-face, then Range was ready to admit something was wrong. She asked if she could bring something home-cooked for the employees, maybe sloppy joes or ham barbecue.

  Stacey was hopeful too: If Range wasn’t going to take responsibility for Harley’s arsenic poisoning, why else would they call her in? Still, she didn’t want to go alone, so she brought along Shelly’s husband, Big Jim Pellen, a volunteer fireman who weighed more than three hundred pounds and was off work for an injury. Given his size, and a sullen brow that gave him an appearance of gruffness that vanished as soon as he spoke, Stacey and the kids called him Polar Bear. As long as he kept his mouth shut, his glower intimidated.

  On a frosty midwinter morning, she and Jim loaded Harley into her car to drive to Southpointe. Off of I-79, one industry billboard read “While the energy debate continues, we’ll keep powering America.” By 2011, the fight over whether or not fracking was safe was putting pressure on the industry to prove that drilling wasn’t harmful to water or to air. People like Stacey and Beth were threatening, in that their experiences challenged the industry’s claims. To fight back, the gas companies advertised the benefits of what industry would bring to the region: jobs. Along I-79, another billboard featured a photograph of a translucent baby against a black background, asking, “Engineer? Welder?”

  To Stacey, these signs were manipulative: people needed steady work. Some young people she knew were even taking jobs in oil and gas so that they could get health insurance. That was what the world had come to, she thought. People were so desperate for health insurance they were willing to take jobs that made others sick. She got off the highway and turned left at the exit, then pulled into the parking lot of a redbrick building with green glass windows. In the lobby, they met Bob Saflin, a senior land man at Range. He asked Harley how his guitar playing was going. Harley guessed Saflin heard he played guitar from his teacher, Rick Baker. Although Saflin was trying to be friendly, the question unnerved the boy. Harley took it as a threat: a means to let the fourteen-year-old know that he had been looked into, investigated.