“To give predictability to oil and gas, you have to take it away from every other Pennsylvania citizen,” Smith argued. People who’d bought their homes or chosen school districts based on health, safety, and property values faced the prospect of losing everything if the township could no longer protect them through zoning.
The Smiths were becoming the most formidable attorneys to oppose industry in Pennsylvania. They were also unusual. They weren’t looking for a national platform to advance a blanket argument against fracking; they were sticking close to the particular statutes and incidents related to their cases. For Kendra, that meant following the pathways of chemical exposure; for John, that meant adhering to the provisions in Pennsylvania law that protected people’s constitutional and property rights.
To bolster their challenge to Act 13, Smith went looking for partners. He started locally with Jon Kamin, one of the best land-use lawyers in Pittsburgh. Kamin, who called himself “a mercenary,” was used to taking on controversial clients. Among them were billboard companies and Blush, a Pittsburgh strip club—enterprises that communities typically didn’t want. But he was also the township lawyer in South Fayette, which wanted to join the fight against Act 13, so Kamin met with Smith.
You’re out of your fucking mind, Kamin told Smith when he first heard his argument. But when he listened to the substance, he changed his mind. Maybe Smith could prove that taking the right to zone away from communities was unconstitutional. In any case, the challenge was audacious, and Kamin liked that. So Kamin signed on, and Smith sought out other local allies. To contest the physician gag rule, he joined forces with a doctor named Mehernosh Khan, who was already concerned that this new law might affect how he could treat patients. Ostensibly, the gag rule allowed companies to share information with doctors while keeping their proprietary ingredients secret from the public. But Smith thought the gag rule was really a matter of making it impossible for doctors to testify on behalf of their patients in court.
The greatest divide Smith needed to bridge lay in the centuries-old split between Eastern and Western Pennsylvania. He now had enough of the scrappy western part of the state on his side, but what about the snobby east? In Bucks County, a wealthy eastern part of the state, Smith found Jordan Yeager (who bore no relation to the cattle farmers in Amity). A civil rights attorney who’d served as legal counsel for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, Yeager had experience in municipal law and in environmental issues. Yeager was already planning to challenge the law. He also believed that Act 13 violated the constitution, but for different reasons.
For the past forty years, according to Article 1, Section 27, an obscure amendment to the state constitution, Pennsylvania had guaranteed its citizens the right to clean air and pure water and to the commonly held assets of public natural resources. Pennsylvania was one of only three states in the nation to enshrine such environmental rights in its Bill of Rights. (The others were Montana and Rhode Island.) Jordan Yeager wanted to use the amendment to argue for the Public Trust Doctrine: that regardless of land ownership, there are some resources that the state holds in trust for public use.
The idea dated back to the Roman Empire. According to a mandate adopted by Justinian, who governed from A.D. 527 to 565, the sea, shoreline, air, and rivers belonged to everyone as part of the commons: Salus populi suprema lex esto. The welfare of the people is the supreme law. Since the Environmental Rights Amendment passed into law in 1971, it had remained largely untested. Although no one was certain whether it had teeth, Jordan Yeager believed that it could form the basis of a constitutional challenge.
To Smith, this seemed like a liberal long shot, which he feared wouldn’t play well to the largely conservative bench of the Commonwealth Court of Appeals. (The word “commonwealth” comes from “commonweal,” an archaic term for “public good.”) But Jordan Yeager had similar doubts about Smith’s claims about zoning. If the state said fracking was safe and legal, what could local governments actually do? Despite their skepticism about each other’s arguments, they agreed to team up. Smith realized that the legal challenge was going to be expensive, even at the reduced rate of one hundred dollars per hour he charged townships. (For other clients, Smith billed out at $250 an hour.) If he lost, he’d have spent taxpayer money on a lost cause that local supporters of industry were already calling frivolous. Elizabeth Cowden, a pro-drilling supervisor in Cecil, suggested that if Smith lost, he might have to pay back the township for anything he spent on the case. He gathered the partners at his firm and asked if Smith Butz could take the case on for free. His partners agreed. They estimated it would cost fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars; it would actually end up costing close to one million.
With the new Oil and Gas Act slated to go into effect in April, Smith and his team moved to block the law. They were going to ask a judge for an emergency injunction by arguing that once the new law was in place, you couldn’t “undrill” a well. Smith wanted the judge to hear firsthand what it was like to live next door to a waste pond, so he asked Stacey if she’d be willing to speak in front of a hearing in Harrisburg. No longer afraid of angering Range Resources, Stacey said yes. It was only a matter of time before she officially sued them. As soon as the Smiths finished writing their complaint in Haney v. Range and submitted it in the Washington County Courthouse, the plaintiff case would be public. Stacey wasn’t sure what the local notoriety of suing a big company would cost her family socially in Amity, but she didn’t care anymore.
“Ultimately what we want is for this not to happen to other people,” she told me. She was still a nervous wreck, however, on April 10, 2012, when she met the Smiths in a Harrisburg courtroom. “I’m always scared I’m going to say the wrong thing,” she told me. That morning, the judge called all the attorneys into his chambers, while Stacey and others waited in the courtroom. Behind closed doors, both sides laid out their arguments. On one side of the judge’s table sat John and Kendra, along with Jon Kamin and Jordan Yeager, arguing to protect the constitutional rights of Pennsylvania citizens. On the other, Pennsylvania’s attorney general sat alongside attorneys for the oil and gas industry, arguing together to allow the law to go into effect within days. The optics were bad, the Smiths thought, and soon, when the DEP joined the case to support the new law alongside oil and gas, it would look even worse.
Stacey never had to speak. After an hour of listening to heated arguments in his chambers, the judge excused everyone and said he’d make a decision that day. The Smiths were driving back from Harrisburg when they got a call from their office. The court had granted the emergency injunction. The Smiths couldn’t believe it. It took judicial guts to block a powerful industry, as well as the governor himself. As he cheered, John had trouble keeping the car on the road. Although the case was far from over, their victory that day halted the drilling and validated their arguments in the eyes of those who’d said they had no chance of winning.
21 | WHAT MONEY DOES
Stacey and the kids had learned to avoid the camper’s aluminum walls while they were sleeping. On freezing nights, if they rolled over, they stuck to its sides. In general, despite having to squat in the camper in Mam and Pappy’s driveway, they felt their lives were getting better as 2012 began. Away from the site, Harley was beginning to improve and Stacey’s hypervigilance eased. Despite working overtime to pay for the camper, the mortgage, and ongoing medical co-pays, Stacey had the mental space to return to what she loved. She could hunt again with the kids during deer season and spend time with Chris on weekends.
Stacey went back to the Lower Ten Mile Presbyterian Church on Sunday mornings, which gave her a sense of being part of the community again, and a better person in trying to get right with God. Since this mess began, Stacey had prayed more than ever before, speaking to God on a daily basis, asking for help in just getting through the day. But she was also angry, asking, in exasperation, why God was putting her and the kids through these trials. Harley had similar questions. When he was first
diagnosed with arsenic poisoning, he had asked Stacey why God would choose them—him—to suffer these illnesses. Stacey told Harley that their family had been selected to serve a greater purpose because they were strong enough to bear it. God wanted to warn people of what these chemicals could do to children, she told Harley. And it wasn’t like they were babies, so they’d survive. What’s more, God knew that Stacey wouldn’t sit back and keep her mouth shut. In this vision, she cast herself as chosen by the Lord. He was testing her and she had to prove she was up to the task.
The Lord sent her strange signs. At a gun bash held as a fund-raiser for a nearby fire department, Stacey had recently won a crossbow, which she was struggling to learn how to use. One afternoon, as community service, she and her sister drove into the town of Washington to help clean out the house of a stranger who’d died. That day she was wearing a long-underwear shirt that read in cursive Bow-hunting is beautiful. She opened a dresser drawer in the stranger’s house and found an old pad of paper. On it, in ghostly writing, someone had scrawled a note that read Bow-hunting is cruel. She wondered what divine message she was supposed to glean from the note. The experience troubled her, and she tried to ignore her gnawing fear that God was punishing her in favor of positive thinking.
Toward the end of November, on one especially uplifting afternoon after Harley had gone three days without needing the anti-nausea medication Zofran, she dropped him off at basketball practice. He didn’t play for long. Although he’d once been a rising star, he was self-conscious and out of shape. Harley was sitting on the bench so much, he told Stacey, that it wasn’t worth it. “Mom, I could be working,” he told her. Harley was already working at the local mall, at a store called Zumiez, a skate shop that sold tween T-shirts and Vans. At the time, Harley was trying on another identity—skate rat—to render his loner lifestyle a little more palatable, and Stacey wanted to support that even if it made no financial sense. Working part-time, he made fifty to a hundred dollars a week, and it cost Stacey almost an extra hundred dollars a month to put gas in his car. But she thought it was worth it to have him talking to other teenagers while running the cash register or stocking shelves. He was also cutting grass after school and on weekends for his cousin Mike, who needed help mowing church cemeteries. With his own son grown, Mike wanted Harley to take over the business. Harley agreed. Maybe mowing lawns was a more viable future than serving in the military. Sick all the time, he didn’t think he could pass the necessary physical exam, and after the state’s failure to protect his family, he no longer trusted the government. Why would he sign up to fight for a country that had sacrificed him to corporate greed?
When Harley came to Stacey with the idea about running Mike’s mowing business, she knew that meant more work for all of them. “How are we going to take that over?” Stacey said, but she wanted to encourage Harley, and maybe mowing was his future, so she spent seven thousand dollars on a mower, borrowing some from her mom. Getting Harley out of the house had been the right move, Stacey thought. Other than a cough, he was feeling better and actually felt like eating. Stacey could turn her attention toward finding them a new home.
On Google Maps, she and the kids had figured out how to measure distances so that she could determine how far a prospective home was from the gas wells and compressor stations she could see on-screen. She was committed to keeping them at least a mile from any kind of drilling infrastructure. But there were limits. “In Texas, they’ve found that the chemicals go five miles before they dissipate,” she told me. “I don’t think we can get five miles from a compressor station.” Finding a new home around Amity proved difficult. Property was in high demand due to the influx of gas well workers into an area where people rarely moved and families occupied properties for generations. “I can’t believe it, but there’s nothing,” she said. “Everyone is holding on to property because they think they have a fortune in this gas well shit.” She’d made a flyer to stuff in mailboxes that read “Local family desperate to build or buy.” She and Chris’s mom drove around Washington County hanging the flyers in supermarkets and Laundromats, even going door-to-door to hand them out.
Her best bet, in the short term, was finding a house that belonged to the coal company, which owned much of Prosperity. Stacey was looking to rent one of these abandoned farms. She saw the irony: moving the kids into a home damaged by a previous generation of extraction. They’d be living with a water buffalo no matter what.
Money was also a problem. Stacey still owed the bank $140,000 for the farm and continued to pay a $1,200 mortgage payment each month. She asked John Smith for help, but when he went back and forth with the bank over selling the farm, an agent told him that the bank couldn’t issue a mortgage to a buyer due to potential contamination. Stacey was also afraid of saddling another family with health risks from exposure. She resolved to hang on to the house as long as she could, even though it was empty and the thought of leaving her home abandoned tugged at her.
The worst part was leaving the animals unprotected. She’d managed to find temporary homes for most, including Bob the Donkey, the Casanova of McAdams Road. For a while, Beth and John Voyles tried to keep him, but he risked injuring Doll with his advances, so Stacey’d found him a place at the farm of one of her fellow nurses. She’d kept Bob to ward off coyotes, as donkeys do. With Bob gone, Stacey worried more about what might befall those left behind.
One day that past December, Stacey had gotten a phone call from Lora Werner, the Philadelphia health professional working for the CDC. Werner told her that Stacey’s favorite federal agent, Troy Jordan, was leaving the EPA.
Troy Jordan went to work with Chesapeake [Energy], Stacey wrote in her journal that night. Will be moving to Ohio. I’m shocked, but just one more example of what money does to people. Although she felt betrayed, she also understood; Jordan had to support his family. The pattern of swinging through the revolving door from regulation to private industry was more common than she knew. In Pennsylvania, from 2007 to 2016, tracing the arc of the gas rush, thirty-seven people had moved between the public sector and private industry. Public institutions couldn’t retain skilled people because they couldn’t afford them. The best people tended to go work for industry. Scott Roy, who had served three separate Pennsylvania governors in Harrisburg before going to work for Range in Southpointe, epitomized this lucrative migration from public to private.
* * *
One day in December, Stacey was on her way to an appointment at her endocrinologist’s when Beth called to say that she and John had been up until 4:00 a.m. fighting off a pack of wild dogs that kept running the horses. A German shepherd, a Dalmatian, and a dingo-looking dog among them, they were likely abandoned pets.
After Beth and John managed to chase the dogs off, Stacey could only imagine where they’d gone. She climbed into the Pontiac and drove to her abandoned farm. When she got out of the car and waded through the winter wheat toward the barn, she heard silence rather than the familiar bleating of Paige’s goat, Floppy. Then she saw a smear of blood in the pale grass and the mangled body of Chuck the Chicken. She looked for the duck but didn’t see him as she continued to the goat shed in dread. Floppy’s pen looked like a crime scene; there was blood bumped across the wooden walls, along with bloody paw prints. Floppy’s body lay in red hay.
Stacey turned and ran outside to track down their old horse, Duchess. She found her in the hayfield, wounded and unable to walk. She called Shelly and her husband, Jim, to come help so she could still make it to the doctor on time. Stacey went to the endocrinologist only once every six months, and it was likely that if she contracted some kind of cancer from exposure, the first place it would appear would be in her glands.
When Shelly and Jim drove over to help, Stacey got into the car and sped toward her doctor’s office. She sent me this text:
we had a mess today wild dogs killed Floppy last night and Duchess until she couldn’t walk we had to put her down they killed Chuck the chicken and we think they took th
e duck it was horrible
A few nights later, after working overtime, she went to Chris’s house in Eighty Four. Desperate to crawl into bed, she entered the bedroom and slipped off her scrubs. She reached for a T-shirt to sleep in—she soaked one through with sweat every night. She was so broke, she couldn’t afford new bras, and tried to make the four she had last, despite their broken clasps. Chris squeezed into the cramped room behind her. He was nervous as hell as he dropped to one knee, his fingers clutching a ring set with a top-cut square diamond that he had picked out himself.
“Are you sure?” she asked him, and they laughed.
* * *
Despite the bright moment of the engagement, the wild dogs ruined Christmas and marked the beginning of a downward spiral that continued into the new year. Stacey watched in dismay as Harley sickened once again. He felt nauseous every morning. Reluctantly, she went to the medicine cabinet and retrieved the Zofran. The doctor had also prescribed Cymbalta, an antidepressant, for Harley’s deepening sense of despair. Stacey and Harley were having a hard time. She’d found bongs and a scale in his room, and then he got caught high at school. When she went to pick him up, she lost it in the car. She was terrified that Range was looking for evidence to use against them in court and that Harley had just handed it to them. She called Shelly and told her that something really bad had happened. Her golden boy was gone, and she feared that Harley’s pot-smoking was evidence of newly antisocial behavior, but Harley swore it wasn’t. His stomach felt terrible, he told her, and he was still spectrally thin. Smoking pot was a way to make himself hungry enough to swallow food, and to find a way to relax. Stacey wasn’t so sure. She started drug-testing Harley at home.
Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America Page 17
