The two of them grasped for any external solution to fix Harley. Since he felt he had no friends, they decided he should change schools that fall for eleventh grade. Stacey signed him up as a homeless student at Bentworth High School in a small, rural school district nearby. Being a student in the homeless program embarrassed Harley, and although it was true they’d lost their home, he felt the teachers treated him differently. Also, most of his classmates had been in school with one another for a decade, and he hated being new. Feeling frustrated and alone, Harley increasingly turned to Shelly and Jim for consolation. In their run-down home, with two wild boys of their own, they were more tolerant of mistakes. Harley texted his aunt, I hate myself, this is all my fault. Shelly didn’t tell Stacey, fearing she’d worry her sister that Harley might be so full of self-loathing he’d hurt himself. Shelly was sure Harley would be okay. So she tried to ease the friction between mother and son by listening to her teenage nephew. She knew how bad the gas wells had been, but she wished her sister would ease up a bit. Her rants about Range weren’t helping Harley.
Harley rebelled in smaller ways too. One day, while Paige was riding in a horse show, Take the Money and Run bucked, and Paige ended up in the hospital with a concussion. Stacey got a text in the emergency room that Harley was getting his ears pierced. Before she saw him, she wrote in her journal, I told him it better not be those damn gauges or I will chew his ear lobes off with my teeth. They were gauges, but small ones.
Stacey kept shuttling Harley to doctors, trying to puzzle out what could be sickening him still. On her own, she’d gone to see toxicologists at UPMC in Pittsburgh, a large hospital conglomerate and the region’s biggest employer. But now that the Smiths were involved, she no longer had to bear the burden of his illness alone. Kendra Smith, as a fellow mother and an assiduous investigator, was focused on helping Stacey figure out what was going on with Harley. But after Kendra called UPMC to follow up on Stacey’s appointment and introduced herself as Stacey’s attorney, a UPMC representative told her that getting involved in the case, or trying to make a causal link of any kind, could cost them their funding.
We’re going to have to take this out of state, Kendra told John. Finding specialists outside of Pennsylvania wasn’t cheap. As the cost of the case mounted, so did the financial burden the firm bore. In addition to their unpaid hours, they hired a temp just to handle the photocopying, and their copy costs ran to thousands of dollars. There were also expert fees for engineers, industrial hygienists, analytical chemists, toxicologists, and hydrogeologists. For an engineer trained in well pad construction to look at three pieces of paper could cost as much as ten thousand dollars. In these fees alone, Kendra and John were watching their bills rise toward two hundred thousand dollars.
To be sure, the Smiths stood to make millions of dollars if Haney v. Range eventually settled on the right terms or a jury found in their favor. Kendra and John kept on going, even after a partner left their firm because the pro bono work on Act 13, along with their two cases against the DEP and their preparation for Haney v. Range, was taking so much of their time and cutting into the firm’s revenue.
Personally, the Smiths were able to manage. Having paid off their school loans and mortgage years earlier, John and Kendra had never run on a deficit in the course of their twenty-year marriage, and they weren’t going to start now. Other than tuition for three kids at Catholic school, they cut back on costs, including going out to dinner. The Smiths’ caseload doubled. They worked into the night and on weekends to make sure they were billing enough hours to paying clients. Together, they managed to earn between four and five hundred thousand dollars a year. For Kendra, most of these hours involved defending railroads. In addition to working more hours than she and John ever had, Kendra had the intellectual challenge of switching sides in her mind every day. Of all her cases, and all her clients, Harley’s ailments churned in her mind.
There were two kinds of doctors who could help her answer her questions: epidemiologists and toxicologists. Kendra didn’t spend much time seeking out the former. Although their job involves determining possible environmental factors making people ill, epidemiologists can rarely establish a direct causal link between illness and a particular exposure. Toxicologists use clinical techniques on bodily fluids and tissue samples to identify chemicals in the body. Their results are more reliable and legally dispositive. So Kendra went looking for knowledgeable toxicologists, and eventually found one in Texas. Still, very few had any experience analyzing health problems related to fracking waste ponds. In addition to the potential exposures to glycols and elements of BTEX, there were issues with bacteria. Yet the possibilities of exposure were too new, and no one was studying them yet. When bacterial studies did begin to appear, they didn’t investigate pathogens that could harm humans. They focused instead on what grew deep beneath the surface in a highly salty environment with almost no oxygen.
To determine what was ailing Harley, Dr. Michael Pezzone, Harley’s gastroenterologist, wanted to perform an endoscopy. The Smiths had also found Charles Werntz, an occupational health physician and professor at West Virginia University. Dr. Werntz was seeing similar problems in gas well workers who came to him from across the border in West Virginia. He suggested that a bacteria or a virus from the waste pond might have lodged in Harley’s gut. There wasn’t enough literature out there to support such a claim, however. If a human pathogen from the waste pond had caused Harley’s illness, then his would be the first documented case.
Even if a pathogen was the culprit, no one knew which strains of bacteria to test for. So Stacey went looking for experts. She started with John Stoltz, a microbiologist from Duquesne University she’d spoken to over the years, and he called colleagues who put together a list of seven different types of bacteria that might be in the pond. This was nothing more than an educated guess, and Kendra didn’t hold much hope for the tests, but she went about finding a lab that would be able to perform them. With the help of Stacey’s colleagues at Washington Hospital, she discovered one in Pittsburgh that could test Harley’s specimens.
On February 20, the day of the endoscopy, a courier waited nearby to carry the specimens by hand to the lab an hour away. Since Stacey worked at the hospital, she was allowed to remain in the nurses’ lounge while waiting for Harley to come out of the operating room. As she waited, Stacey grew furious at herself. Why hadn’t she gotten Harley an endoscopy a year ago? Why hadn’t she gotten one for herself and for Paige too? She’d assumed that their illnesses were tied directly to exposure—that simply being around the chemicals in the air and water was making them sick. She’d also feared the possibility of genetic mutation or cancer in the future. On Kendra’s advice, she’d taken out an insurance policy against cancer treatment, for which she paid $33.80 a month for her and the kids. However, she hadn’t considered the kind of mysterious chronic illness that Harley seemed to present. Dr. Pezzone, the gastroenterologist, came into the lounge to find Stacey.
Harley had a gastric ulcer and several gastric and duodenal erosions, the doctor told her. Stacey was surprised. As a nurse, she was used to dealing with people with ulcers, mostly elderly people who either struggled with alcoholism or took too much anti-inflammatory medication.
With all of the possibility of unknown ailments, Stacey decided to get her tubes tied. Two weeks later, as she drove to her tubal ligation at Washington Hospital, she stopped to get donuts for her fellow nurses. The procedure went fine, she wrote in her journal. If it wasn’t for all this mess, I probably would’ve tried to have more kids, since Chris doesn’t have any. It’s just too much of a risk with all the chemicals that are in me.
Later, when she came across a peer-reviewed health study that established a correlation between birth defects and babies born within a half-mile radius of a well site, she felt that she’d done the right thing. The lingering effects of the exposure were hard to predict. Paige, who was athletic, kept getting injured with small things like stress fractures or broken
bones in her foot. These weren’t major injuries, but they took forever to get better. “After the gas wells, we just don’t heal right,” Stacey said. She often struggled at work with the other nurses’ perfumes, which had never bothered her in the past. Her complaints created odd frictions, which made an already difficult job all the more challenging. Kelly, protective of Stacey, listened for any fellow nurses who might be speaking against Stacey or gossiping about Harley, but no one did. If any of her colleagues doubted what Stacey was going through, they kept it to themselves.
The following month, the EPA came out again to test water at her abandoned farm. Stacey took off work to spend most of the day with the inspectors. It was a longer period of time than she’d spent at the farm in more than a year. The metal taste in her mouth, headache, dizziness—all of her symptoms returned, and the next day, she passed out on a gurney at work. Her arsenic level had spiked. She called Dr. Fox, who thought it likely arsine gas was still in the house.
That made sense to Stacey. She could follow the basic mechanics of exposure. Harley’s ongoing illness was harder to understand. Now that his ulcer had been diagnosed and treated, he should be faring better. But he wasn’t. When the results of the tissue samples in his gut came back, they confused her too. Ulcers are most often caused by a bacterium called H. pylori, which Stacey was just learning about. But Harley tested negative for H. pylori and positive for the presence of two forms of streptococcus and another bacterium called neisseria, which Stacey had never heard of.
* * *
On May 25, 2012, the Smiths filed Haney v. Range. At 182 pages, it was the longest complaint either had written, and the first they’d written together. It named as defendants Range Resources, along with sixteen other parties, including two labs and two individuals, Carla Suszkowski of Range Resources and Scott Rusmisel of Gateway Engineers. Rusmisel had designed much of the site, and his wife, Laura, worked with Suszkowski at Range. Among the violations, the Smiths’ case charged negligence, conspiracy, and fraud.
In their filing, the Smiths argued that, for at least two years, Range had known about serious problems at the Yeager site: groundwater on the Yeager farm had become contaminated before flowing downhill to the Voyles, Haneys, and Kiskaddens. They alleged that even though Range Resources knew the pit had been leaking, Carla Suszkowski, and possibly others, colluded with two supposedly independent water testing laboratories, Test America and Microbac, to hide test results from Stacey, Beth, and Buzz, as well as the DEP. This, they argued, involved both conspiracy and fraud.
The complaint noted that Test America had created a computer program called “Total Access” that allowed users like Carla Suszkowski to take off or change unwanted test results. In an email related to the case, a Test America employee named Barbara Hall had written to her colleagues:
Just got off the phone with Carla Suszkowski of Range—we walked through Total Access and she couldn’t say enough good things about it. Once I walked her through the reg limit comparisons, explained how she can customize the columns, and especially how long the data was accessible to them, she said she was wild about it. I think it is a great selling point for us … She is very vocal in the producer community and I think she may tout this tool to our benefit.
What Hall called “customize,” the complaint called fraud.
Microbac, the other water testing company contracted by Range, had also altered test results, according to the suit. Laura Rusmisel of Range, the complaint specified, had tried to get Microbac to use the symbol “ND,” or non-detect, to indicate that glycols weren’t there, which, the Smiths alleged, was a lie. The head of the lab demurred. So Rusmisel and Microbac struck a different deal: if there was a low level of contamination in the water, instead of using an absolute value, the lab would employ a less-than symbol, which was legal. To the untrained reader, including John Carson of the DEP, as he testified under oath, a less-than symbol on a water test implied the chemical wasn’t there. But Kendra could see this wasn’t necessarily so. She had collected at least twelve different copies of results that Microbac had printed out and she could clearly see where, on the results that Range gave to Stacey and to the DEP, the glycols were missing. This kind of laboratory fraud, the Smiths said, wasn’t new. The EPA called it “pencil whipping.” Alongside this and other conspiracy and fraud theories, the suit alleged a series of environmental crimes that violated the Pennsylvania Clean Streams Law, the Solid Waste Management Act, and the Hazardous Sites Cleanup Act, as well as the Oil and Gas Act.
With exhibits, the case file came to 1,734 pages. To back her assertions, Kendra attached an exhibit for every allegation, which was highly unusual. “When you present an argument, you’d better be pretty right,” Kendra said. Knowing they were going up against formidable foes with a history of aggressive measures, the Smiths took extra precautions. Range Resources had a record of suing those who spoke out against them—including families and activists—for defamation. The Smiths wanted to be sure, after all that Stacey and the kids, along with Beth and Buzz, had been through, that they weren’t putting them at further risk of retaliation.
As soon as the Smiths had filed the case in May, Matt Pitzarella of Range Resources issued a statement to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “This isn’t about health and safety,” he wrote; “it’s unfortunately about a lawyer hoping to pad his pockets, while frightening a lot of people along the way.”
* * *
Stacey was distracted from the back-and-forth. In May she and the kids finally moved out of the camper and into the former Amity post office, a white house trimmed in dark green that was just across the street from Mam and Pappy’s. Some kindly neighbors were willing to rent it to Stacey and Chris until the neighbors found a buyer. The old post office was perfect for now, but Stacey didn’t want to buy it and couldn’t afford to anyway. She didn’t want to live in the middle of town where there was no room for animals. One warm afternoon, Stacey cleaned the cobwebs out of the basement, feeling that the move was bittersweet. Soon they’d have to leave again, but the small farm she was looking for wasn’t materializing. All those flyers were yielding nothing.
Moving into the old post office didn’t seem to help Harley. In June, he spent his sixteenth birthday in the bathroom, doubled over in pain. Demoralized and frightened, he called Stacey in. Stacey wrote in her journal: *Harley’s 16th birthday*—He had a large amount of black stool in the commode … I don’t know if his ulcer won’t heal. I don’t know if it’s the Cymbalta. I don’t know what to think. The poor kid. Hasn’t had a good birthday the past few years. So much for his 16th.
Paige, however, was thrilled by the move out of the camper. She had her own space; and although Stacey couldn’t pay for much, she bought pink paint to decorate Paige’s room. In celebration, Paige dragged her nest across the road to their new home. She was starting to do better in school again. Like Harley’s, her grades, which had once been As, had dropped precipitously as they shuttled between different houses, but now they were climbing, mostly because Stacey was making her put the time in.
One evening, Paige lay on the braided rag rug in their new living room and sketched an English-class project on a piece of poster board. She drew farm animals with Xs for eyes. Next to the pond they were drinking from, she’d drawn barrels of poison, then wrote in black marker: “Fracking is an unsafe procedure and should not be permitted.”
The old post office was only about half a mile from Shelly’s farmhouse. Between them lay Rinky Dinks Roadhouse, where Stacey and Shelly used to take the kids for burgers and curly fries. A twenty-foot cowboy stood lit up outside the weathered false front of an old-timey saloon. Children were now banned from Rinky Dinks due to the changed atmosphere. Gas well workers or pipeliners up from the Gulf came there to drink and sometimes to fight. They overran the place, and Shelly called them “gasholes.”
With their arrival in rural Pennsylvania, crime rates had spiked: DUIs, theft, sexual assault, and disorderly conduct, which usually meant bar fights, doub
led from 2008 to 2011. “We had quite a few numbers of pipeliners and fracking people, and they brought drugs and drug culture with them. Every other license plate was Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico,” Blair Zimmerman, the former mayor of Waynesburg, told me. “They brought in prostitution, and that was unheard of.”
Rather than walking down the road to Rinky Dinks, Stacey and Shelly drove the kids eight miles to Rudnick’s instead, taking along stacks of quarters so that the kids could play pool. One night, while he was standing near the pool table, Harley overheard two kids bragging about robbing a farmhouse near Amity. He loped back to Stacey right away. Stacey put her burger down. She knew the kids weren’t talking about her house. She’d been over there earlier in the day and everything was okay. Next time, however, it might not be.
The drug scourge affected not only out-of-towners but local kids as well, particularly young men. To scrounge a few dollars, they broke into houses and stole any kind of metal they could sell. Now that the farm was empty of both people and animals, it was a perfect target.
* * *
Sometimes, without the kids, Stacey still went to Rinky Dinks. One July evening in 2012, she ran into Toby Rice there. Rice was the CEO of Rice Energy, the rival oil and gas operator to Range Resources around Amity and Prosperity. Although the two companies competed to sign local leases, they also cooperated by swapping them when one needed a particular plot to be able to drill. Rice also looked the part of a wildcatter. Thickset in work pants with shaggy hair poking out from beneath a hat, he didn’t appear to be who he was: the twenty-nine-year-old son of a hedge fund manager from the affluent suburbs of Boston.
Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America Page 18
