Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  Although Smith supported drilling in principle and his firm stood to profit from brokering landowners’ leases, the aggressive moves by Range Resources and others disturbed him. This kind of strong-arming struck Smith as, if not illegal, antidemocratic—it went against that frontier spirit still on display marching down Main Street in Washington each year.

  * * *

  One morning in the spring of 2011, not long after Stacey spoke out at Morgantown Airport, her colleague Deb Wilkerson, a fellow nurse in the recovery unit, came into Smith Butz for a consultation about a lease. Wilkerson wanted to sign one, but she’d seen what had happened to Harley firsthand and she wanted to protect her kids. Not signing also posed a risk: if all of her neighbors went along with the drilling, then her land could be orphaned, but she could still be forced to deal with the noise and health repercussions without any payment or protections. It was Stacey who suggested that Wilkerson find a lawyer; through word of mouth, she found Smith Butz.

  On the day of her visit, Wilkerson waited for an associate on a tufted leather couch hung with Pittsburgh Penguins rally towels. The lobby was always decorated according to the sports season, with Penguins, Pirates, or Steelers gear, and on game days, Smith Butz staff members often wore team jerseys, as was the local practice.

  After Wilkerson reviewed her lease with an associate, she asked him if he could help Stacey, explaining that Stacey was a fellow nurse at the hospital. Her kids were sick and their animals were dying, Wilkerson said. The young associate asked her to wait and left the conference room. She watched through the glass windows as he disappeared down the hall. A few minutes later, he returned and led Wilkerson into John Smith’s office, its windowsill lined with a decade’s worth of his kids’ soccer photos; on the slate-blue wall was one of his mother-in-law’s watercolors, which read No guts no glory. From behind his desk, Smith listened as Wilkerson recounted the mysterious animal deaths on the two farms near Amity, a teenager’s arsenic poisoning, and the recent discovery of benzene and toluene in the family’s bodies.

  The story was terrible, if true, but this wasn’t the kind of case that he or his firm usually took on. He hadn’t pursued a personal injury lawsuit since he’d been in practice, and he wasn’t eager to begin. Such cases were expensive. They could take years to prosecute. Small firms like theirs survived on billable hours paid regularly by their clients. In personal injury cases, lawyers typically got paid only if they won and if the defendant paid the judgment or settled. Although eventually they’d stand to make as much as 40 percent of any judgment in Stacey’s favor and 25 percent of a judgment for her kids, they’d have to be able to hang on for years while laying out large sums for scientific testing, and being paid nothing, even for expenses. This could bleed the firm dry. Still, Smith knew what it was to have a sick child. His daughter Ainsley, the youngest of his three, had also suffered a mysterious illness. At three years old, Ainsley couldn’t keep down food. After surviving a dangerous misdiagnosis, she ended up having an emergency surgery for a twisted intestine. She almost didn’t make it. Those had been the worst days of Smith’s life, and he wanted to show good faith to whoever this woman Stacey Haney was. So he gave the nurse a business card for her friend.

  * * *

  The next day at the hospital, Stacey scrutinized the card. In the weeks following her talk at the airport, she’d started calling attorneys. They also called her. Since she’d gone public, her phone had begun to ring with reporters, plaintiff attorneys, and fractivists from New York and Texas. She stood at her burgundy kitchen counter taking down copious notes, but she shared only the parts of her story that she could document. She preferred to keep her circle small, venting only to her high school friend Jamie, along with Kelly, Shelly, and Chris, and to a lesser extent her mother, who often irritated Stacey more than she comforted her, saying the wrong things, as mothers tend to do.

  Stacey considered the firm of Erin Brockovich, the famed jobless single mother turned environmental advocate. Brockovich had taken on Pacific Gas and Electric after their use of hexavalent chromium in a natural gas compressor station proved toxic to those living nearby. Brockovich wasn’t an attorney, but she had her own advocacy firm in California. Stacey eventually decided she wanted to find help closer to home, with an attorney who’d drive out to the farm and see Harley sick and the drilling and the pipeline everywhere. She and Beth Voyles also made a pact to sign with the same attorney no matter what.

  In the midst of worry for Harley, who wasn’t getting better, Stacey considered next steps. When she called John Smith’s office two weeks later, Smith took the call. He put her on speakerphone with another senior partner as she recounted Boots’s aborting two babies and Harley’s missing a year and a half of school.

  Whether or not there was scientific merit or enough evidence to prove her case, John believed she was telling the truth. He asked if he could come out and meet her. Stacey agreed. Then he hung up the phone and went next door to see his wife, Kendra, whose office walls were decorated with a decade’s worth of valentines. He reported what he’d heard and asked Kendra what she thought of Stacey’s story: the sick child, the black water, the test results that showed there was benzene and toluene in their bodies.

  Kendra asked John how far the family lived from the industrial site.

  John wasn’t sure, but Stacey’d told him about fifteen hundred feet.

  That was too far for exposure, Kendra told him.

  Kendra Smith wasn’t from the area. A former finalist in the Miss New Jersey competition, she grew up about twenty minutes from Princeton. At forty-one years old, she was just over five feet tall and one hundred pounds. She lived on Coke and snack packs of Veggie Stix, and although she’d been a star soccer player in high school and college, she often couldn’t be bothered to remember that her brain was housed inside a physical body. Despite her bid for Miss New Jersey, which was an attempt to win a scholarship, Smith paid no attention to her looks. Her mind was apparently the product of both of her parents: her father was an engineer, and her mother an artist who held a master’s in mathematics from Columbia University. Kendra’s mother raised her to “never be financially dependent on a man.” Until she became a lawyer, her goal had been to become a prison warden.

  For the first few years of her law career, before she moved west to marry John Smith, she did criminal defense work in New Jersey for people with alleged ties to organized crime. Now she defended Fortune 500 corporations against workers’ claims of chemical exposure. Her job was to destroy plaintiffs’ cases.

  “I take people apart for a living, and it’s not always pretty,” she said. She’d come to work at her husband’s firm only after she was offered partner at another Pittsburgh-based firm, and the terms turned out to be disappointing. Like her husband, Kendra wasn’t interested in pursuing a personal injury suit. She wasn’t afraid to lose, but she knew how brutal her tribe of corporate defense attorneys could be, and she didn’t think that with her and John working full-time and shuttling between church, school, and soccer practice, her family of five needed any more complications. But she too thought of how powerless she’d felt when Ainsley was sick, and was willing to help investigate.

  The following week, on the day that their meeting with Stacey was to take place, John was stuck with other business, so after lunch, Kendra drove out to Amity. This was unusual. John, the charming almost-local, was most often the one to meet with potential clients. Kendra, with her hard-nosed mien, was the one to stay up into the early morning gathering the evidence to win suits. The two had also never worked together on a case before.

  She decided to take a young male associate, Chris Rogers, along with her for the drive. She knew that the area around Amity and Prosperity was rural and poor. Given that this was the borderland where Appalachia began, she’d wasn’t sure what to expect.

  Driving south on I-79 in her white Cadillac Escalade, she instructed Rogers in what to look for on a site visit. She was accustomed to visiting railroads, since she�
�d litigated many cases for the industry involving workers who claimed they’d been injured on the job. On a work site, violations could be as simple as an open flame. At someone’s home, it might be harder to see the problems. She exited the highway at Lone Pine and passed a truck stop where young rig hands were smoking cigarettes and eating Subway sandwiches on new picnic tables in the parking lot. She drove up the steep hill of McAdams Road past signs that read RIG TRAFFIC 15 MILES PER HOUR. When she spotted the small white sign with black lettering on the left side, Smith was surprised. This was a pretty farmhouse with a tire swing and a trampoline below the porch where Stacey stood waiting for them.

  Kendra Smith and the young associate walked past the tricycle and climbed the porch stairs trellised with trumpet vine to the kitchen door. On her way in, Kendra made careful note of physical detail, as was her practice. With skin the color of fish flesh and deep circles under her eyes, Stacey Haney looked tired. To Kendra, also a working mother, this wasn’t out of the ordinary.

  Stacey led them past the laundry room and into the kitchen, where the table sat piled with her papers. She offered them water, from bottles she’d bought at Walmart. Through the large open doorway, Kendra noticed a wan teenage boy slumped on the couch in his pajamas. She felt rude wandering into someone’s TV room, so she greeted him from the table and watched as he lifted himself off the couch gingerly, one limb at a time like an eighty-year-old man. Without his mother’s prompting, he shuffled into the kitchen to shake her hand.

  He’s been raised right, she thought. She hoped her eldest, Dakota, who was a year younger than Harley, would do the same. Up close, Harley looked wizened: his eyes were sunken, and his face was gray like his mother’s. She wondered what could be wrong with the boy; it couldn’t just be living near a well site. She hadn’t yet seen the high green fence across the road, but from what she knew of its proximity, it still seemed too far away to sicken anyone here in the farmhouse.

  Stacey opened a green three-ring binder and led Kendra through a timeline of Harley’s illness over the past eighteen months, the elevated arsenic level in his urine, the results of the inhalant panels she’d spent two months working out with the head of the lab at the hospital. She pointed out what she’d learned to read on her own: the phenols and hippuric acid levels, which indicated exposure to benzene and toluene in all three of them.

  Kendra was surprised by Stacey’s acumen. The nurse had taught herself a lot. But even though it seemed like something was wrong with Harley, Kendra still doubted the problem was related to the site next door. She flipped through the pages of water tests and noticed elevated levels of manganese, but little else. Some of the tests’ standard aspects were missing. Kendra, who was fluent in such materials, wondered if the company had supplied only these partial results.

  Kendra asked Stacey if there were more pages of the test results somewhere. No. Should there be? Stacey asked. Kendra inhaled deeply to see if she could detect the rotten-egg smell about which Stacey had spoken to her husband on the phone—along with headaches, lethargy, trouble remembering things, nausea, nosebleeds, diarrhea, and an odd metal taste in her mouth. Kendra told Stacey the frank truth: she couldn’t smell a thing.

  Her job, she explained, was to come at exposure cases like this from the other side. If she didn’t find any evidence to suggest a problem, she was going to tell Stacey that right out. Stacey valued this forthrightness. She liked this diminutive, direct woman who wasn’t perturbed by anything Stacey said or showed her.

  Beth Voyles arrived, huffing through the kitchen door. Stacey’d wanted to meet the attorneys on her own first. She knew that Beth could be a lot to take, and she feared her velocity and her talk about poisoning and “arsenip” might undermine the credibility of their case.

  Beth breathed heavily and was so flushed that Kendra wondered where she’d gotten badly sunburned so early in spring. At the kitchen table, armed with her own folder, Beth laid out similar medical complaints and explained to Kendra what had gone wrong with her water. In their basement, the Voyles had a system that allowed them to toggle between two sources: spring and well water. The spring water came out of the ground below the hill, and of the two, the Voyles preferred drinking spring.

  For Kendra, an East Coaster who’d always lived on city water, the distinction between spring and well was a new one. Spring water tasted fresher and flowed faster, Beth said. When their well ran dry and their water flow lessened to that “sprinkering,” Beth explained, Range had supplied the same 5,100-gallon water buffalo they’d brought next door to the Haneys. The company sent Beth a letter conceding that the construction of the nearby waste pond might have diminished the flow of their springs. Yet they insisted the quality of the water was not affected. Even so, Range had paid to dig the Voyles a new well, but that too failed, Beth said, when tests came back saying it was full of E. coli. Then, after the January meeting at which Laura Rusmisel and Carla Suszkowski had told the families they had nothing to worry about and were going to remove Beth’s water buffalo, Beth had ceased being solicitous. She felt taken.

  Beth had no problem calling Range, the DEP, the Fish and Boat Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Response Center, the twenty-four-hour hotline for the Environmental Protection Agency, the local newspapers in Washington, or any of the other numbers she’d posted on the side of her black refrigerator. If something smelled funny, or if the road was torn up, she picked up the phone, earning something of a reputation for being difficult. After Beth called so many times to complain, one Range employee labeled her internally as an “anti-industry activist.”

  Kendra listened to the two women for four hours. It was late afternoon by the time she and her associate got up from the table to leave. Stacey walked them to the door and watched as they backed out of her grassy driveway. Then she and Beth sat at the kitchen table to decide whether or not they wanted the Smiths to handle their case. Stacey was certain.

  “I think they’ve been sent by God,” she said.

  Beth still had a question. “Those guys were so down-to-earth,” she said. “If they’re so down-to-earth, how good could they be as lawyers?”

  Kendra wanted to drive past the site on their way back to the office. As the SUV climbed past Beth’s house, Kendra spied the high green fence ringing the hilltop on the far side of the road. The blanched grass around the fence appeared yellow against the green hill, but dead grass could mean anything. Other than the gravel access road and the white trailer that served as a guard shack, there wasn’t much to see. As she powered the Escalade forward, she noticed that the road grade of McAdams was sharper than she’d thought. Maybe she’d underestimated the likelihood of exposure. She was accustomed to playing out such scenarios in her head. Now she reconsidered. If the hill sloped steeply enough, surface runoff might flow farther and faster than she’d estimated.

  They drove on past the Yeagers’ farm, where a yellow sign trimmed in blue read PENNSYLVANIA BEEF QUALITY ASSURANCE PROGRAM CERTIFIED PRODUCER. They drove on past the Lone Pine truck stop and entered I-79 heading north. Once the winding roads were behind them, Smith asked the young associate if he had an odd taste in his mouth. He didn’t, but Smith did. For the next two days, the taste of metal lay like a film on her tongue. Whether or not she and John took the case, she decided that she’d never tell Stacey and Beth. It seemed prejudicial. Smith preferred to deal with her clients on demonstrable facts. Yet the trip stayed with her; it was changing her mind about signing Stacey and Beth as clients. If there really was something from industry sickening Harley, she figured that together, she and John stood a good chance of determining what it was.

  * * *

  On Mother’s Day 2011, a few days after Kendra’s visit, Stacey took the kids to the Cracker Barrel in nearby Washington for lunch with her mom and sister. Driving home, they crested the ridge by the Yeagers’ farm and hit a putrid wall of stench coming from the waste pond. It was so thick, it felt like being struck in the face. Stacey drew stars aro
und the event in her notebook: *Smell from impoundment terrible, worst we have ever smelled.*

  The next day, Monday, when the kids came home from school, the stench was still bad. By that evening, all three had headaches and Paige’s nose was bleeding. When they woke up on Tuesday, however, Stacey thought the reek had dissipated. That afternoon, Stacey asked Kelly to come over and help sort through papers before she handed them to John and Kendra Smith. Although she felt sure that the husband and wife attorneys were the right choice, she hadn’t officially retained them yet and she wanted to talk the situation through with Kelly, her confidante on all matters. At 3:00 p.m., when she and Kelly were going through her binder, Harley came in the door from the bus stop. His eyes were burning, and so were his nose and throat. He lay down on the living room carpet and went to sleep.

  After an hour, Stacey tried to wake him to go to his guitar lesson with Rick Baker, but he was still too drowsy. She managed to coax him upstairs to his bed. Within minutes, Harley was asleep again. That afternoon, Stacey took Kelly on the driving tour. Kelly’d heard so much about what they were living with—and breathing—but she’d never seen it. The two headed down the road toward Prosperity and the Anawanna Hunting and Fishing Club, following the winding back roads to the top of a hill where they could see much of the surrounding countryside. At the top of a rise, Stacey counted three new well pads to add to the five she already knew surrounded her farmhouse.

  When Stacey and Kelly returned, Harley was still asleep. They took Paige up to Justa Breeze to ride horses at Beth and John’s. In the ring out behind the ranch house, Paige clucked at her favorite gelding, Take the Money and Run. She’d been riding Money since she was two. Now almost twelve, she was old enough to saddle Money and take him around the ring on her own. Stacey loved to watch her ride; she’d always loved horses, and providing Paige access to them was part of the way she strove to be a good mother. She wanted to buy Money for Paige, and Beth was considering it. But how Stacey would pay for upkeep she didn’t know yet. Beth, Stacey, and Kelly leaned on the split-rail fence watching Paige ride until the sun dropped behind a stand of oaks. In shadow, the spring earth cooled fast and Kelly and Stacey called to Paige to come in so they could head back down the hill.