Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  June was turning into a very long month. One night, she sped home from a twelve-hour shift to don black dress pants and a white blouse. In response to national concern over fracking, President Obama had ordered Steven Chu, the secretary of energy, to form a natural gas subcommittee to advise the federal government on how to make the process safer. That night, at Washington & Jefferson College, the panel was holding a public meeting to listen to Washington County residents.

  The oil and gas companies bused in supporters. A week earlier, Tom Shepstone, a consultant who worked for Energy in Depth, a pro-industry blog, sent out an email offering bus transportation along with free hotel rooms, meals, and tickets to see the Pittsburgh Pirates. The baseball tickets were later rescinded when the email came to light, but Chris Tucker, an Energy in Depth spokesman, defended the effort, saying, “It’s exactly what the opposition does for every single local township meeting anytime one’s held anywhere across the entire mid-Atlantic region.” He added, “Difference is, we’re not busing people in for a local township meeting. This is a public forum sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Our folks have the right to be there, and if we have any say in the matter, they will be.”

  The small auditorium was now crammed with nearly five hundred people, the majority oil and gas supporters. By the time Stacey arrived at 7:05 p.m., they’d filled the two-minute slots to address the panel with pro-industry testimony. She wasn’t going to be able to speak after all. Then a professor she knew gave her his slot. While she waited four hours for her turn, a heckler at the back of the auditorium held up a dollar bill every time anyone took the microphone to talk about the problems related to fracking. Stacey went up to him and put a finger in his face.

  It’s like this, buddy, she said. My kids are sick and people are trying to talk. He stopped jeering. Around 11:00 p.m., Stacey was one of the last of the two-minute speakers to come down the auditorium aisle and duck her head toward the standing microphone.

  “My children are the real people that are dealing with this toxic chemical exposure,” she began, setting herself apart from the boosters who’d preceded her. “Our lives have been ruined because of this and there’s no job, there is no amount of money that any revenue can generate, that can replace the last two years of my children’s lives.” After she finished, she looked up at the five tired faces of the panelists on the stage and hoped she’d reached at least one of them.

  As the summer wore on, she was still helping to gather evidence for a case against Range. A few days before the 2011 Washington County Fair began, after stopping at the farm to feed the animals, Stacey drove up the hill to the Yeagers’ farmhouse. By now, it seemed clear that the cattle farmers’ drinking water was contaminated: Range had paid for Dean’s Water to deliver a 5,100-gallon water buffalo in July, which everyone could see.

  Though they didn’t initially know it, Ron and Sharon Yeager had one essential element of evidence that neither Stacey nor Beth did: a pre-drill test that established the baseline quality of their water. By law, Range had to test their water, as it lay within what was called the zone of presumption.

  Kendra knew that the DEP must have a copy of the test and went digging. When she found it, she alerted the Yeagers’ lawyer that it existed and might help him procure clean water for his clients. She also wanted a copy but needed the Yeagers’ permission for the DEP to release it. Stacey took it upon herself to stop by and see if she could help move things along.

  That afternoon, when Stacey pulled up in front of the farmhouse, she found Sharon Yeager outside. Stacey asked Mrs. Yeager for the pre-drill, but Mrs. Yeager demurred. Every time they called their lawyer, it cost money, Stacey recalled Mrs. Yeager saying. They didn’t want to get in the middle of it. Stacey lost her temper. Get in the middle of it, she said to Mrs. Yeager; they were the middle of it. Stacey told Mrs. Yeager that she’d lost the total value of her home, and she didn’t know what was going to happen with her kids with all of these cancer-causing agents in their blood. If you don’t send those results, she told Sharon Yeager through the car window, my attorney will subpoena you, and that will cost you more money. Stacey peeled away, her tires spitting gravel.

  A few days later, Stacey managed to get the kids and their animals to the fairgrounds. That Saturday in August, Stacey and Shelly set up the animal hair salon at their camper. Stacey blew out Paige’s goat, Crunch, then Harley’s goat, Winston Churchill. (Shelly named Churchill on Harley’s behalf, since he was too queasy to care.) It was hard to imagine it was only one year since he’d won Grand Champion Showmanship with Boots, and since Cummins had died. Together, they walked down to the 9:00 a.m. SPAM contest for which Stacey and Paige had concocted a SPAM-infused cornbread they called SPAM Good Morning Muffins, salty with baking soda and a preservative tang.

  Although Stacey had rescued a blue and white tin spatterware plate from the farmhouse, she had no doilies. A doily-free plate wouldn’t win with the judges. “I couldn’t find a doily anywhere,” she said to Paige as they stood beneath the humid pavilion watching the judges move up and down on the dais.

  “Mom, that’s how we roll,” Paige said.

  “That’s how we roll now,” Stacey replied.

  When the judges announced their results, Stacey was disappointed. It was the first time in three years that Paige didn’t place. Stacey milled around the fairgrounds, hardly noticing the events she loved, including the pedal pull, in which a toddler wearing a pink FUTURE DAIRY PRINCESS T-shirt was straining against the pedals of a toy John Deere tractor. Stacey was distracted by the brightly colored banners hanging from the rafters of the show barn. The number of oil and gas sponsors was proliferating, including Rice Energy and EQT, as well as Range Resources. Dozens of employees volunteered at the fair. To the company, the outreach and direct contact with the community that the fair allowed were crucial. As Mike Mackin of Range told me later, “Where we live and work is Washington County—and what better way to set up shop and have people come to us with their questions.” Range was also able to collect valuable information; the company had become close with members of the Fair Board. “They can tell you a lot about people,” Mackin added, “and a lot about the things you’re doing right and the things you’re doing wrong, and how to correct them. That’s something important to us—real honest feedback.”

  To Stacey, Range’s presence seemed anything but honest. It struck her that the companies were trying to slap their name on someone else’s way of life as a form of cheap advertising. She wandered into a 4-H hall, where Pappy’s butternuts waited to be judged. There, among the arts and crafts, was a Patterson drilling rig built out of Legos. From it hung a blue ribbon.

  Stacey was raising her kids to play by rules that no longer seemed to apply. But her hopelessness proved partially misplaced. Although Paige didn’t place at the SPAM contest, she took first in goats and rabbits. Harley was a separate case. He drifted glowering around the fairgrounds. Forget college, he thought, forget the brief dream of becoming an architect. He was going to get out of Amity, to join the military like Pappy. He wanted to be anywhere but the fair, and it showed. Winston Churchill misbehaved and Harley took a humbling sixth. He held Range responsible for his lost love of the fair, of his life.

  And it turned out they weren’t returning home. Stacey and the kids tried to spend a few nights at the farm, but Harley was sick within hours. Fumes were still wafting down from the site, and soon they learned from the EPA that the pond wasn’t going to be closed after all. Stacey decided they couldn’t keep shifting from place to place every night. The best solution she could find to their housing dilemma was to try to sleep in a camper parked in her parents’ driveway. It meant she’d see Chris even less, since Harley would no longer be sleeping at his house and she didn’t want to leave the kids alone for the night. But she saw Chris so rarely anyway, and she had to put the kids first. Sticking together was the important thing, and living in a camper was the only way to make this possible. They wouldn’t last a winter in thei
r old blue and white Coachman, so Stacey traded it in and paid an additional $27,758.65, in monthly installments of $230.51, for a new camper. She used some of the money that she and Beth were just starting to receive each month in royalties from Range. For the first six months, when the well was at its most productive, Stacey received big checks, which ranged from almost $3,500 to just under $6,000. After taxes, that figure dropped by a third, but it was still substantial. She was trying to put away as much as she could for a down payment on a new house, if she ended up needing one. Buying the camper was part of her savings plan. It was much cheaper than renting a house. With the arrival of out-of-state workers, demand for housing outpaced supply and rents were climbing by as much as 12 percent a month. This had unseen costs for rural families: in the neighboring county, those who could no longer afford adequate housing were forced to hand their children over to foster care. Stacey was determined to keep her family intact, even if they were living in a camper, with Paige in a bunk and Harley on a pile of leopard-print cushions on the steel floor.

  18 | INSURGENTS

  The debate over fracking was more polarized than ever by the fall of 2011; it reached well beyond Pennsylvania and across the nation. In blue New York, activists were bidding to ban the practice. They based their arguments on water contamination and other hazards. Their position was grounded in the precautionary principle: if a product or practice could put public health at risk, even if such risks were not yet fully understood, better to avoid it.

  To combat this argument, and its potential to turn communities against them, members of the oil and gas industry gathered in Houston, Texas, in October 2011. The conference, “Media and Stakeholder Relations: Hydraulic Fracturing Initiative 2011,” was billed as a means to form “a united front” against false claims about harm and the threat of “intrusive regulation.” Sharon Wilson, an environmental activist known as “TXsharon,” decided to attend. She registered openly on behalf of Earthworks, a nonprofit with the stated mission to protect people from the negative effects of mineral extraction. Earthworks paid her registration fee. Wearing a nametag that read EARTHWORKS OIL AND GAS ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT, she headed into the conference past men in black suits wearing earpieces. It was a far cry from the gatherings she was used to, which resembled Hang ’Em High, with frightened farmers clutching jars of cloudy water.

  As she started recording, her thighs began to sweat. She was waiting for one of those besuited guys with an earpiece to tap her on the back, or worse. She was surprised when the first speaker began the day with a call to be kinder and gentler, in order to win public opinion. By the time the second speaker rose, however, that conciliatory message was lost.

  “Download the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual because we are dealing with an insurgency,” Matt Carmichael, manager of external affairs for Anadarko Petroleum, said. Although she wanted to sneak out before she got busted, Wilson kept her seat for another session, led by Matt Pitzarella, the Range Resources spokesman. Pitzarella was raised in Washington County. He’d attended California University in Pennsylvania. Balding, he kept his head shaved and often balanced sunglasses atop his forehead. He spoke next.

  “We have several former psy-ops folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments,” he said. “Psy-ops” refers to psychological operations, a counterinsurgency tactic, which the Department of Defense defines for use exclusively outside of the United States. According to Pitzarella, Range was employing these methods in Pennsylvania. “Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that,” he said. “But very much having that understanding of psy-ops in the army and the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.” One of the people he was talking about was Jim Cannon, a U.S. Marine and now an army reservist with the 303rd Psychological Operations Company, who served under the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Cannon was now the local government relations manager for Range Resources in Pennsylvania. When he learned what Pitzarella had said, Cannon was irritated. Pitzarella’s remarks had put Cannon in an untenable position. He knew it would’ve been illegal to conduct military psy-ops inside the United States, and he was doing nothing of the kind. To be fair, the primary aim of psy-ops doesn’t involve killing; it’s designed to win over a population. And while it was true that Cannon’s time in Iraq had prepared him to stand up in front of five hundred angry people at a community meeting and attempt to quiet their ire by conducting field PR, any other comparison was nonsense.

  After Wilson released her recording to the press and Pitzarella’s claims were made public, he tried to shuffle back from the idea that Range was waging a counterinsurgency. “That’s not something I think that we would do,” Pitzarella said. “You’re not dealing with insurgents, you’re dealing with regular people who live in towns and want to know what you’re doing.” But the idea that Range saw itself as battling insurgents in Washington County was now part of the public record.

  For Wilson, Range Resources’ talk of waging psychological warfare wasn’t the most disturbing aspect of the conference. Worse was the sales pitch for a burgeoning industry called stakeholder intelligence. Aaron Goldwater, a software promoter, stood before the crowded conference and said: “A number of people today have—in my words … how I’ve heard it—talked about having a battle with stakeholders and a bit of a war with stakeholders. So, if you look at the people who are experts at it, which are the military, the one thing they do, is gather intelligence … How do you gather intelligence about your stakeholders?”

  He was promoting mapping software, which tracked the networks that people like Wilson belonged to: family, friends, fellow activists. On-screen, a series of dots and lines stretching across a map traced the kind of information Goldwater’s services at his company, Jurat Software, could provide. His was not the only mapping service available. FTI Consulting, a corporate research firm, offered a similar service. The firm’s clients included many big oil companies. Spooked by industry’s mapping networks of people like her, Sharon Wilson did some research. She found that FTI Consulting shared links with Big Tobacco. The FTI executive David Quast, for instance, was the former manager of media affairs at Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris USA; now he worked at Energy in Depth, the industry blog that took on opponents. Energy in Depth was funded in part by Range Resources.

  After Wilson blogged about the conference and about an ongoing case of water contaminated with benzene in Texas, Range Resources tried to sue her for defamation. Wilson kept blogging. “I was very sassy although inside I was quaking a little bit,” she told me. Being targeted by Range Resources elevated her to superstar status in the fractivist community.

  “Thank you, Range Resources, for shooting yourselves in the foot,” she said.

  For the industry, these kinds of scraps went beyond bad PR. High-profile opposition from activists like Wilson and celebrities like Mark Ruffalo, as well as Robert Redford and Yoko Ono, posed a substantive threat. Having drilled for decades overseas in war zones and unstable places, the oil and gas industry was accustomed to managing political risk. Calculating uncertainties related to war and unrest was part of the business. One upside to working in the United States was that Big Oil foresaw more stable political relationships. Yet grassroots opposition to fracking threatened that. It had the potential to change public opinion, and in a democracy, changing public opinion had the power to change votes and laws.

  19 | BURDEN OF PROOF

  Kendra Smith’s SUV was piled with bankers’ boxes when soccer season began that fall. Each day, at the office, she set a stack of documents before her. When she didn’t get through them all by 5:45 p.m., she threw the rest into another white box and tossed it into the back seat, then drove the kids to soccer practice. She was coaching three separate teams, and during practice, she tried to leave the documents in the car. Her
son, Dakota, asked her why she always got so much homework, and her kids grew accustomed to looking over to the sidelines and seeing the top of their mom’s dirty-blonde head staring down at her iPhone. She didn’t notice that her hair was starting to gray.

  As Kendra built Haney v. Range, she recognized the hardest part of the task before her: to make it clear that her clients had been harmed by chemical exposure. If she could establish that the chemicals up at the site were in her clients’ bodies, then she should be able to prove that the two were definitively linked.

  It wasn’t going to be easy, for various reasons. First, she still didn’t know all of the chemicals Range and its subcontractors had used. Although Range told its shareholders that it listed every constituent on FracFocus, an online registry, that information was not at all comprehensive. With twenty years’ experience as a civil defense attorney, she knew how to introduce doubt into a case, how to make it hard for the other side to meet its burden of proof. This time she was the other side: up against a powerful industry rather than representing one.

  It wasn’t simply about marshaling the evidence. In a case this complex, winning or losing would also be based on who told the better story, on who could convince a listening judge or jury that the facts supported their claims by as slim a margin as 51–49. The Smiths’ victory hinged upon their ability to turn all this evidence into a clear narrative. With the litany of unfamiliar chemicals, conflicting accounts, and plaintiffs who included children, the case could be hard to comprehend. As Kendra explained to me one afternoon in the conference room, “Translating that evidence for the court is a job and a half.”