Holy shit, Kendra thought, the pit had leaked more than a year ago, and, according to its notice of violation, the DEP already knew.
* * *
On June 1, 2011, John and Kendra drove to pick up the Voyles for the four-hour trip east to Harrisburg for the first hearing of the case against the DEP. Although it wasn’t yet summer, the day was unseasonably warm. A sultry wind gusted up from the hollow where the Smiths turned to climb the hill to Justa Breeze in their white Escalade. They drove past Stacey’s newly abandoned farm. She and her kids had been gone only two weeks and already its unmown grass grew long and glossy. Stacey and the kids weren’t coming that day. Stacey didn’t like or trust the DEP either, but she’d never had the heated run-ins that Beth did, and she preferred to stay out of it. As soon as Kendra and John pulled into the Voyles’ driveway, seven boxers bounded up to the Smiths’ SUV.
A sturdy figure emerged from the ranch house behind the BOXER HEAVEN sign. From the car, John Smith asked, only half in jest, if it was safe to get out. When Kendra introduced Beth to John, she noticed that Beth’s cheeks were still violently splotchy and her breathing labored. But this was a warm day and Beth was working outside, so Kendra didn’t think too much about it. Beth herded the dogs into the basement laundry room, where the cleft palate puppy remained in the freezer. She called to her husband, John, and the two climbed into the back seat of the SUV.
Beth was bright-eyed and excited to speak in court. The DEP and Range Resources would have to sit there and listen. However, as she, her husband, and the Smiths entered the courtroom, they spied the DEP attorneys laughing and talking with Range’s attorneys and employees. Beth wondered how it was they already knew one another. For her, it was like watching the police cavort with the people they should be investigating. She spied one DEP higher-up hugging Carla Suszkowski, whom she recognized by her short red hair.
The Commonwealth Courthouse was only a few blocks away from the DEP’s headquarters, where Rachel Carson’s name was carved into the office building’s stone lintel. That day, as the hearing wore on, it appeared to the Smiths that Carson’s legacy ended at some distance. The DEP and the oil and gas industry seemed to be on the same side, and, sitting at one table on the far end of the courtroom, they weren’t even trying to hide it. The Smiths had heard the disparaging nicknames for the state’s collusion with industry, “Department of Energy Production,” and “Don’t Expect Protection.” They knew the DEP had been forced into a tough role policing an industry exponentially more powerful and knowledgeable than itself, but still.
At the hearing that day, the Smiths were expecting to present evidence. That’s why Beth and John were there: to give testimony. But the judge didn’t want to hear from the Voyles. He didn’t want to hear from Range Resources either. Instead of presenting the evidence she’d marshalled, Kendra was allowed only to give a rushed version of the Voyles’ story as to why the DEP wasn’t doing its job. The lack of due process alarmed Kendra. She thought to herself, That’s a red flag and we’re going to get screwed.
Then Michael Heilman, assistant council for the DEP’s southwestern division, argued that the agency “had investigated every complaint made.” An officer had gone out to the site and the Voyles’ property on May 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 26, 27, and 31. According to the DEP, he did not detect a bad smell “on any of those occasions.”
The Smiths were incredulous, Kendra especially so. How could the DEP claim that there were no problems up at the Yeager site when she’d already seen evidence of a leak? When the hearing ended, Gail Myers, an attorney for the Department of Environmental Protection, approached the plaintiff’s table. She handed Kendra a shiny black binder. Inside, Myers said, were the complete results of water tests that Range had given the DEP for both Stacey Haney’s and Beth Voyles’s properties. It was unusual to hand over documents in that manner, but this was early in the case, and things were still fairly friendly and informal.
Kendra began to flip through. Right away, she could see page numbers missing, so she turned to the end of the binder, where each test should have had an official page verifying that the results were accurate and complete. The verification pages were missing too. She didn’t want to jump to conclusions about what the missing pages meant. This could be an oversight. Or the missing pages could indicate that someone was trying to hide evidence. On the ride home from Harrisburg, she looked more closely, and made a note to herself to call the DEP to ask for what wasn’t there. There was another way to verify these results. She could see the name of the lab that had done the testing, Microbac Laboratories—a Pittsburgh-based company that began testing dairy milk in the sixties—on the letterhead. She could subpoena Microbac directly in her search for the missing pages.
14 | BUZZ
On the drive west from Harrisburg along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, an evil-looking clown leered down at passing drivers. The message below him on the billboard read “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” Then there was another: “Wind dies. Sun sets. You need reliable, affordable, clean coal electricity.” Yet another featured a picture of Yoko Ono and the message “Would you take energy advice from the woman who broke up The Beatles?” Sign after sign pitted energy companies against environmentalists. The billboards were the handiwork of a corporate lobbyist named Rick Berman, who had launched the Biggreenradicals.com campaign, working on behalf of industry. His campaign positioned fractivists as a bunch of rich outsiders. In his world, hypocrites like Robert Redford, who flew private, and kooks like Yoko Ono didn’t understand the give-and-take long established in Appalachia between extractive industries and the communities that relied on them for their livelihoods.
Beth was in the back seat of the Smiths’ SUV when her phone rang: it was her neighbor Loren “Buzz” Kiskadden. He lived about half a mile down the road from her and from the Yeager site, at the base of the valley. Neighbors called the place the Bottoms, or Dogpatch, and on its twenty-six acres, the Kiskadden family had run a junkyard until 2006. An ex-car-thief and recovering heroin addict, Buzz had been the neighborhood bad boy, “always driving around on something,” he told me later.
Buzz was clean now, but chain-smoking cigarettes.
“I’m trying to quit but I haven’t yet,” he said. “It used to be Marlboro but now it’s a cheaper brand. Pyramids.” He and his brothers were known to drive their junkyard’s tow trucks around the town of Washington, removing any breakdowns left on the roadside. Instead of repairing them, they stripped them for parts.
Of all of Buzz’s scrapes, his most notorious took place in 1995, when he’d led half a dozen police officers on a high-speed car chase over the county’s roads and back to Dogpatch. When Buzz came to a stop, one policeman tried to wrestle him out of the car, but Buzz slid out of his grip and the officer went over the side of an embankment along with Buzz’s vehicle. The officer wasn’t seriously injured, and Buzz spent five years fighting the case until 2000, when he served six months in Washington County Jail. That era seemed over now. Thieving was a young man’s game, and time, above all else, had rendered Buzz and his brothers largely harmless.
Since his release ten years earlier, he’d attended Mount Herman Baptist Church. He believed that God had straightened him out. “I kept praying about it,” he told me later, “so it must have been God.” Now fifty-four, he still lived at Dogpatch in a trailer he’d bought from his mother, Grace, who occupied a small house next door. For most of her life, she’d lived within a mile of her current home. She’d grown up as one of thirteen children living in the three-room house of a wheat and corn farmer who worked in the local glass factory, Hazel Atlas #2, during the 1950s, before mechanization drove the glass industry out of business.
At twenty-one, Grace had gotten married and bought the land on which she and her children now lived. Over the past forty-seven years, Grace’s three sons and four daughters had helped her run the garage and chop shop, removed radiators and batteries, and salvaged scrap metal from old school buses, cars, and trucks.
According to Grace, some vehicles had been there as long as fifty years, and they weren’t going anywhere soon. The bottom had fallen out of the family business. Along with a bakery delivery truck, the carcasses of pickups and school busses rusted on the banks of Banetown Creek. There was also a rarely used bulldozer, high lift, and backhoe.
“Car business is no different from mining or steel,” Grace said. “It’s gone downhill.”
Beth knew the Kiskaddens well; they were neighbors and also family. Beth’s half sister married Buzz’s brother, but the marriage had soured and Beth took the Kiskaddens’ side. Buzz was still close to Beth Voyles. “We been friends all our lives,” Buzz said.
On the phone, Buzz told Beth that his water had gone bad. He’d gone to fill up the kiddie pool for Junior and gray gunk had come out of the hose. Junior was Seth, the five-year-old grandson of Buzz’s girlfriend, Loretta Logsdon, and Buzz loved the boy. Seth, his sister, Jade, and his mother, Summer Runyon, stayed from time to time in Buzz’s trailer, along with Loretta. The smell from the water was god-awful: rotten eggs and raw sewage. If the water was bad, what did that mean for Buzz’s vegetable garden? Every summer, he fed himself and his neighbor Mr. Gray his prized tomatoes. He wasn’t sure if those tomatoes were safe anymore.
Beth told him to call the DEP and Range and have both come out to test his water. Buzz was upset. He’d lived in that trailer for five years, and spent most of his time on its couch smoking cigarettes with the air conditioner on and the TV blasting.
“I’ve never had any problems with my water before,” he said.
There was no way to prove whether or not this was true. Buzz, like Stacey and Beth, had never had his water tested before the drilling began. Without that pre-drill test to serve as a baseline, a company could argue that any chemicals in the water were already present. A pre-drill was essential in proving that oil and gas had contaminated the water. With a legacy of coal mining, which brought with it methane contamination, there were preexisting problems. And even if not, industry claims could introduce enough doubt into a case to defeat it.
Since Pennsylvania doesn’t require monitoring private wells, there was no record of what was in Buzz’s well—though it sat on a floodplain next to a creek that sometimes overflowed its bank. In addition to the rusted-out car hulks that littered the creek banks, the fields were full of old tires, which Grace Kiskadden was trying to dispose of. “I don’t want them. I’m trying to get rid of them. They’re an eyesore,” she said later.
Without water, Buzz wouldn’t be able to stay on his land. Unlike Stacey and Beth, he couldn’t afford to buy even limited amounts. He’d lost his job making pots and pans at the Dynamet factory, and his health had long been causing him trouble. Since his late thirties, he’d suffered from diabetes. He took pain medication every morning, along with six or seven other pills for arthritis in his knees, shoulder, and back; another for a heart condition; and yet another for gastric trouble.
When Beth got off the phone with Buzz, she repeated to the Smiths what Buzz had told her. As Beth shared Buzz’s history, the Smiths could tell he’d make the worst kind of plaintiff. His health alone, as well as his history of addiction and crime, would undermine his credibility in court. Still, he seemed to have a legitimate grievance, and possibly his test results could help them establish a clearer pattern of harm for their clients. They agreed to speak to him.
The following day, June 2, 2011, Buzz Kiskadden called the DEP and Range, and then moved a few hundred yards up Banetown Road to live in a cinder-block room in his mother’s basement. Grace had begun to worry that maybe her water or air had something bad in it too. The summer before, although she said she’d never had a headache in her life, she had a fainting spell. Although Grace and her son resembled each other, with their paper-pale skin, icy blue eyes, and thin white hair, the two were nothing alike. Grace didn’t take medication, not even aspirin. To treat ailments like colds, she relied on vinegar, honey, and dandelion tea. Soon, test results would reveal elevated levels of benzene in her urine too.
On June 6, 2011, a DEP water inspector came out to Dogpatch to conduct water testing. Just standing over Buzz’s well, he could see there were problems. It wasn’t properly sealed and it sat on a floodplain, so every time Bane Creek rose over its banks, the top of the well was submerged and anything could get inside.
15 | MISSING PAGES
After their trip to Harrisburg, Kendra began to search for the pages missing from the DEP’s black binder. She called the DEP to follow up, and waited for results to come in under subpoena from Microbac Laboratories. Slowly, by reading company names off of permit applications and site plans, she and John uncovered the other parties working up at the site, which led to more subpoenas, and shipments of bankers’ boxes began to pour into their office. The more evidence she and John gathered, the more clearly they began to understand what was happening at Yeager, as they called it, and how it was affecting their clients.
That summer of 2011, remediation reports arrived from the DEP that sketched a patchy narrative of a large-scale cleanup going on at the Yeager site. Range was paying subcontractors to dig out and remove 4,250,000 pounds of that hillside. Kendra knew that the government required this scale of remediation only when something had gone seriously wrong. Attached to the report, there were soil tests that seemed to indicate the ground was still contaminated with elements of BTEX and arsenic. Certain that she could build a larger case against Range, Kendra was going to switch sides for the first time in her career from corporate defense to plaintiff lawyer. The Smiths asked Stacey if she’d be willing to serve as the named plaintiff in the case. If it went forward, Haney v. Range would pit Stacey, Beth, Buzz, and their families against the company and others, alleging the company had harmed them in different ways. But exactly what ways the Smiths didn’t know yet. Given its scope, the case was going to take thousands of hours of legal and environmental research and a year to file in court. In the meantime, the Smiths would pursue two cases against the DEP: first, on Beth’s behalf, to make the state agency do its job; second, to get Buzz clean water if his well turned out to be contaminated.
In addition to building the timeline of potential errors at the site, Kendra began building one that detailed her clients’ health problems. Those water tests were essential: she needed to know what they’d been drinking and bathing in. Kendra and John began issuing subpoenas. As soon as they filed a case against Range, this information would become part of discovery, the pretrial process through which each side obtains evidence from the other. Kendra started with subcontractors she thought knew little about the case. It was standard practice to start with such outliers who might offer more information, since they didn’t know what to hold back or hide. Inside the arriving bankers’ boxes were stacks of printed-out emails, including waste manifests and field notes from workers documenting repairs up at the site. The surefire way to catalogue what had occurred was to follow these bills. Almost every contractor that had been paid to fix something or to truck waste submitted a manifest that detailed the work done.
To sort them, Kendra sat on the floor in her large office, which overlooked a corporate parking lot. A miniature skyline of paper stacks stretched from her desk to her cabinets topped with lamps with red satin shades. Manila folders covered her brown leather club chairs and piled up on the table where she kept a Day-Glo yellow vest and amber protective glasses for site visits. She separated paper into two initial piles: one that seemed meaningless and the other that might hold clues to her cases against the DEP and Range Resources. As she pieced together the narrative of the remediation, she realized that the chronology didn’t track properly. She knew that the pit had leaked once in 2010, but the cleanup was taking place a year later. She went back to the DEP website and discovered that the pit had leaked again in the spring of 2011. Eventually, she would uncover multiple leaks in the frack pond also. She realized that the problems related to the waste pond at the Yeager site were neither secret nor isolated. S
he suspected she was uncovering a systematic problem of Range’s: the impoundments were leaking, and so were the white temporary pipelines between them.
“We all know they leak,” one pipeliner working for a company called Red Oak Water Transfer wrote to another one. Issues at the Yeager site, however, seemed to be especially bad. In another email, a pipeliner asked another for directions to “the absolute worst flow back pit you can think of.” His colleague responded, “Definitely either the Carrol Baker or the Yeager for Range. I would head to the Yeager in Lone Pine.”
In her deepening piles, she found contractors’ notes about fixing numerous holes in the liners. On separate occasions, animals had fallen into both the large pond and the smaller pit. Two deer had to be fished out of the pond, and a fox out of the pit. According to the emails, the animals’ thrashing tore the liner, making holes through which contamination could leak.
There were also multiple spills, including the February 8, 2011, overturning of the tanker truck on an icy road that nearly killed the two security guards and spilled waste. She could also see from internal emails that Carla Suszkowski, the director of regulatory affairs at Range, grew angry at Range employees who called the DEP directly to report spills.
That winter, the temporary pipelines kept freezing and cracking. Apparently, Pete Miller of Range Resources was annoyed with Red Oak Water Transfer for not catching three separate leaks. “Mr. Miller is VERY frustrated with us,” Richard Hoffman, Red Oak’s director of safety and compliance, wrote in an email to his employees. They had to be sure that no more flowback spilled onto the fields from their frozen pipes. “We need to walk the lines regularly, our field employees do not make the decision whether something is a leak or not, one drop is a spill.”
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