Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  After arriving in southwestern Pennsylvania in 2007, Toby had built Rice Energy from four employees, including his fiancée, to several hundred. Among locals, Rice’s reputation varied. Some people sized him up as a trust-fund kid playing at country boy, but Stacey liked him. He seemed down-to-earth. He was the head of the company, and he still came to places like Rinky Dinks sometimes and rode on hoverboards around Southpointe with his employees. He also knew Harley was sick, and empathized. Stacey thought he saw her side of things. At Rice Energy, Toby tried to avoid using waste ponds. The company did own and operate one in Pennsylvania, but attempted to store most of its waste in steel tanks. At the bar, Rice told her that her kids’ photos hung on his wall from buying their animals at the fair in past years. Later, when asked, he didn’t remember the details of their conversation. But Stacey wrote that night in her journal that Toby had said he looked at Harley’s picture every day and thought of them, and that Harley had a “black mark” on him because of the public fight with Range.

  Makes me so mad, especially at the fair, she wrote. Here was one more way in which Range had ruined their lives, she thought, making her already-shy son the object of rumors and doubt. Stacey wrote that she was heartened when Toby Rice promised to buy Paige’s and Harley’s animals at the fair this year. (Despite their displacement, she’d managed to keep two pigs in a coworker’s barn.) That would show Range.

  The next month at the fair, true to his word, Rice bid on and bought Paige’s pig. Paige credited the pig socks she’d worn to the show every year since she was eight. Stacey was grateful to Rice and counted his purchase a small victory. There was infighting at the 2012 fair, however: the cash infusion from gas leases meant families could invest more in their children’s animals, and as the stakes increased, parental competition predictably worsened. After Stacey’s friend Linda Winklevoss’s daughter’s pig won Grand Champion, someone slipped an anonymous letter under the door at the fair office saying that the pig was on steroids, which Linda Winklevoss swore it wasn’t. The competition has gotten out of control, Stacey wrote.

  On the day that Rice bought Paige’s pig, Beth Voyles called Stacey to let her know that another of their horses was dead. This time it was Ashley’s four-year-old Oakie. In order to train Oakie, Ashley had overcome her reluctance to getting so close to another horse. She’d struggled with her fear of loss, and conquered it so she could get Oakie to be her best at running barrels. Ashley’d just finished breaking her in. Two days earlier, Ashley’d ridden her at a barrel race in West Virginia, and she won by half a second, which was a lot. Within forty-eight hours, Oakie couldn’t stand up. As Oakie flailed in the hay, Ashley lay down and put her body between the horse’s head and the floor of the barn, trying to cushion Oakie’s skull as it beat against the ground. Dr. Cheney came out to give Oakie an IV, but within an hour, the horse died. The vet couldn’t figure it out. Beth was beginning to worry about her daughter’s mental health. In the past two years, she’d lost Cummins, Jodi, the puppies, and now Oakie. In her grief, Ashley had gotten another tattoo. She had a photograph of one of Oakie’s eyes and had the image tattooed on the back of her neck.

  Stacey found it hard to believe that the Voyles still lived next door to the site, but Beth refused to move. “Where can we go that we’re sure to be safe?” Beth asked me. Well sites and compressor stations were springing up everywhere. What if they moved only to find themselves in the same situation? Instead, she tried to spend most of her days away from the farm, loading up the seven dogs and driving them to a park in Washington. Beth’s wheezing worsened, along with the dizziness and violent splotches of rash on her skin. Still Beth sat tight, keeping a sharp eye on the comings and goings of trucks, talking on the phone, and scouring the papers to follow the developments in her and Buzz’s lawsuits against the DEP.

  * * *

  During the summer of 2012, the Smiths’ fight with the state over Act 13, the new Oil and Gas Act, was also in the news. On July 26, 2012, the Commonwealth Court, a state court of appeals, handed down a split decision that struck down much of Act 13 as unconstitutional. The Smiths’ victory was stunning, yet it came with caveats. On some issues, including the physician gag rule, the court found in favor of the state. The court also upheld another provision that limited the disclosure of health hazards. If a landowner had a case of poisoned water, neither he nor the state nor the oil and gas company had any obligation to let neighbors who used private wells know about the contamination, or any compensation deal.

  Later, Stacey came to understand that this provision applied directly to her predicament. She learned through Beth that the Yeagers had struck a private deal with Range, under which the company paid the couple a hundred thousand dollars for the loss of their water, along with a lifetime supply of trucked-in city water to fill their buffalos. According to Beth, who attended Ron Yeager’s deposition, he testified under oath that they also paid him $27,000 each time the fluid in the pond was used to frack at another site. Although the DEP was aware of the contamination, the state never issued a notice of violation. So there was no public record of what had happened. The state wouldn’t list the Yeager site among its cases of water contaminated by gas drilling, thereby keeping the problem off the books and undisclosed to neighbors. Under the new provisions of Act 13, this was legal.

  These losses, however, paled against the Smiths’ monumental win. John’s argument that local governments had a duty to protect their citizens had carried the day. The scale of his achievement startled him. Little towns had vanquished the much more powerful state. At the same time, as he had expected, the environmental rights argument that Pennsylvania’s citizens had the right to clean water and clean air went almost nowhere with the largely conservative court.

  Right away, the state of Pennsylvania and the DEP appealed the decision, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The supreme court was led by Chief Justice Ronald Castille, a conservative Republican. The prospect of arguing against the state before him was daunting.

  The Smiths celebrated their win, and Stacey did too. Good news was rare enough, and every time public opinion swayed in her favor, she took solace in it, and also pride. She starred the day’s entry in her journal.

  *ACT 13 RULED UNCONSTITUTIONAL*, she wrote. The state judges ruled it unconstitutional! Thank God. It’s a good day for the state of Pennsylvania.

  22 | RUIN IS THE DESTINATION TOWARD WHICH ALL MEN RUSH

  The summer of 2012 was a Batman summer as well as an election season. The Dark Knight Rises, starring Christian Bale, was out in theaters. The film featured Pittsburgh as Gotham in decay, cracked water pipes issuing steam above the blasted macadam of abandoned sidewalks. The postindustrial landscape, its crumbling infrastructure, was intended to be a sign of our times. The breakdown of the physical world reflected a collapse of the social order. The collective no longer mattered: it was every man, woman, and child for himself, and even Batman was beyond caring.

  Around Amity, citizens expressed their displeasure at the local and national state of affairs, staking their various claims by posting road signs in front of their homes. Along a five-mile stretch of Amity Ridge Road, these road signs dueled. They began at the highway exit, where someone had planted a flock of black and red signs that read STOP THE WAR ON COAL, FIRE OBAMA. Less than a mile on, someone else had procured a backlit road sign, the kind you might find at a drive-thru, that read RANGE IS NOT A GOOD NEIGHBOR. RANGE & DRILLING = NO WATER! RANGE SAYS PROVE IT. Another read only THE WATER WASN’T BAD BEFORE.

  Finally, just before Dean’s Laundromat, another backlit sign read:

  OBAMA-BIDEN

  RIDDLER-JOKER

  GOD BLESS AMERICA

  One summer afternoon, two miles farther down Amity Ridge Road, Shelly sat on the porch of her two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. In her lap, she held an orphaned baby raccoon, the fifth raccoon pup she’d raised since the ten-thousand-gallon water trucks started hurtling up and down the road on their way to well si
tes. For the past several years, she’d taken to walking the roads to search among roadkill for survivors. This fifth one, whom she’d named Ripepi after her favorite doctor at the orthopedic hospital, she’d spotted from her car as she rounded a sharp bend. She hadn’t gotten out, just opened her door and scooped up the baby from the pulp of its siblings and mother.

  That summer, Shelly had won a major victory for the town of Amity. She called it “hitting the lottery.” She’d been fighting to bring the town a public water source, and now, as we talked on her porch, we watched one of the little yellow trucks laying a water line along Amity Ridge Road. For the first time in two hundred years, the town was getting public water.

  Her campaign had begun one Sunday in church two years earlier, when a fellow parishioner turned around in his pew. Wayne Miller drove trucks for the oil and gas industry. He wanted the local water company to run a line to his house, but the company told him he needed more people—nine customers per mile—to make it financially viable. Miller thought of the Presbyterians, their well rotten with formaldehyde. He also knew that neighbors like Shelly had very poor water or none at all.

  Tell me what needs done, Shelly said. She spent much of the next two years walking up and down the nine-mile stretch of Amity Ridge Road that marked the edges of the village. Heading up the right side of the road, she’d knocked on the doors of eighty houses, then crossed the dotted yellow line to the left side and knocked on seventy more on her way home. Only two people wouldn’t sign the petition for city water.

  Pleased with herself and thinking she was finished, she turned the names in to the local water authority, but the town needed money: a seven-and-a-half-million-dollar grant from Pennvest, a state agency that offered low-interest loans for building public water systems. The loan required signatures from twenty-five businesses in that nine-mile stretch. This, she thought, was impossible. There simply weren’t enough businesses in Amity. But she knocked on doors again anyway. When Shelly got her mind on something, she didn’t let it go.

  What she found surprised her: many people were running small businesses out of their homes, including a horse boarding stable, a photo studio, her mother’s Avon makeup shop, a masseuse, and someone selling candles. It turned out there were twenty-five businesses hidden along Amity Ridge Road. The town got the grant, and now the water was coming through. Delighted by the victory, she was still frustrated by the injustice of having to fight for the right to water in the year 2012.

  “What a shame to have to sit in a meeting and argue with people over trying to buy a natural resource that multimillion-dollar industries are ruining,” she told me. “I’m watching the fifth generation in my family struggle for water every time I watch my kids haul it from Ruff Creek pump station and dump it into a hand-dug well that runs off of a spring that comes from the great Marcellus land that we have in Pennsylvania.”

  Despite her efforts, Shelly wasn’t getting the new water. She didn’t have enough money for the one-time tap-in fee, which cost seven hundred dollars at first and would rise to fourteen hundred after the first six months. The rummage-sale Jacuzzi would remain in her living room as a laundry basket, she said. Her two boys, now teenagers, had long since learned to wash their own clothes. Her husband, Jim, was on disability, home from his road crew job at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, sitting around doing little because of a back injury, his eyes glassy from painkillers. Shelly was growing tired of him, and tired of being the only one working a job and holding their house together. When she’d bought it, no one had lived on the second floor in thirty years, and Shelly spent the first seven on a mattress on the first floor with J.P. and Judd, two turtles, and a nocturnal hedgehog.

  Shelly also collected fossils and kept one the size of a honeydew melon: a 350-million-year-old chunk of tree from a genus known as Lepidodendron, which flourished during the time of the giant dragonflies. Under pressure and over time, these trees became coal. That fossil was about all Shelly owned when it came to minerals, and she didn’t care. She’d never been concerned about grinding her way into middle-class life and acquiring possessions. On the wall of her kitchen, she hung a sign that read Jesus turned water into wine, I made it into liquor. She’d always been one to worry more about others than herself.

  The arrival of a city water supply solved only part of Amity’s problem. In the summer’s heat, a drought had begun, which compounded the problem of excessive water withdrawals. All over Washington County, and beyond, many of the region’s streams were at flow levels 50 percent lower than normal. The lack of rain played a role; so did water trucks dropping hoses into the creeks to suck out the four million gallons of water it took to frack a well. Anyone driving around Amity and Prosperity could watch fresh water disappear from two local reservoirs that a former real estate developer turned fracking mogul had bought in 2005. It was legal for drillers to use water they owned. It was also legal for them to drop hoses into the commonwealth streams. Or almost legal. In theory, there was a formula that regulated how much water could come out of a stream, but there was no one to enforce that regulation, so the water kept on disappearing.

  “We don’t know how much is in the bank and we keep giving away,” Rose Reilly, a biologist for the Army Corps of Engineers, told me later. For thirty years, she’d watched an upward tick in the quality of the region’s water. Yet with the return of industry, both quality and quantity were diminishing. In this way, coal mining had quite a lot in common with fracking: both were done by powerful industries successful in fending off regulation that could cut into profit. “We started mining coal in the 1700s and 1800s,” she said. “It took us a hundred years to regulate it. I don’t expect this industry to be any faster. Until then, it’s a free-for-all.” Reilly was talking about the waters of the commonwealth, held in trust for all citizens. Through a combination of ineptitude and inattention, the state was opening its vaults and cheering a run on the bank.

  Economists describe the Tragedy of the Commons like this: cattle herders sharing a pasture will inevitably place the needs of their cows above the needs of others’, adding cow after cow and taking more than their share of the common grass. The “free rider” takes advantage of the commons, and consumes it until it’s gone. This, the argument goes, is human nature, which sets individual gain over collective good. Traditionally, the Tragedy of the Commons has supported the case for individual property rights: since it’s impossible for people to act together to protect commonly held assets, we might as well carve up those assets and leave individuals to look after their own. But what if the commons did not need to end in tragedy? What if people were able to work out effective practices of sharing the commons and transmit those traditions to their descendants? Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University, argued that the solution to the Tragedy of the Commons for the twenty-first century lies in common sense. Sharing had succeeded in the past and could succeed in the future. Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. She died in 2012.

  Historically, in Amity, the solution to governing the commonly held asset of water was to share it. Draw from the Dods’ well until it runs dry. Take turns using the volunteer fire truck to fill cisterns from the creek. Send Stacey and Shelly next door to the neighbors with empty milk jugs. Yet this notion of sharing couldn’t be extended to extractive industries. Coal, oil, and gas companies weren’t regular neighbors taking sips from a shared straw: they were industrial guzzlers. This is where, in theory, government regulation could enter in. But this wasn’t so easy. First, the cash-strapped state government couldn’t afford to properly monitor water levels in the commonwealth’s streams. Second, the revolving door between industry and those who were supposed to police it weakened the ability to enforce laws. Third, many Western Pennsylvanians saw regulation as the enemy—one more instance of an invasive federal government poking its nose in where it didn’t belong.

  This wasn’t just the case in Amity and Prosperity. It was also the thi
nking among many residents of Rachel Carson’s hometown of Springdale, Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half away. On the first day of spring, I drove up to Springdale to walk in the woods Carson first wrote about when she was eleven. I wanted to hear how people in Springdale understood the celebrated environmentalist’s legacy. I knew that they lived in the shadow of a coal-fired power plant, and that Springdale was selling its water to oil and gas companies to satisfy the tremendous thirst created by fracking. I wondered how Carson’s memory survived alongside the give-and-take of profiting from the gas rush.

  I went for a brief walk in the remaining scrap of her woods, then went to meet with Dave Finley, president of the Springdale Borough Council. “In Western Pennsylvania, fresh water is the greatest resource we have,” he said. Rachel Carson, a local hero, was right to call for the protection of water and its quality, but not at the price of government interference, he felt.

  “Rachel Carson’s work led to the environmental movement,” Finley continued. “She was a trendsetter before her time, but I don’t think she envisioned the federal government getting involved. If she knew how much of the gross national product went into paper shufflers in D.C., she’d pass out.” Washington, D.C., had a bad name in these small towns, he added, and a much worse reputation than extractive industries did. Finley was right that Carson didn’t explicitly call for federal regulation of the environment. Her argument was much more tightly focused than that, explaining how synthetic chemicals entered the food chain in order to demonstrate the principle of interrelation. Yet according to the EPA website, Silent Spring did help lead to the formation of the agency in 1970. “The influence of her book has brought together over 14,000 scientists, lawyers, managers, and other employees across the country to fight the good fight for ‘environmental protection,’” the EPA website used to read, though this section has since been removed.