Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  “We’ve had gold rushes before,” Finley went on. “We’ve had the steel gold rush. We’ve had the coal gold rush. The last twenty percent of what they leave behind, someone else has to clean up. It happened with coal and steel, and it will happen with Marcellus. It sounds like a big sad tale of woe, but it isn’t.”

  23 | REMOTE PEOPLE

  Despite the leaks and spills Kendra uncovered, she didn’t focus her disappointment on Range Resources. By 2012, the company’s stock price had climbed by twenty dollars to seventy dollars a share, and, as natural gas increasingly replaced coal in fueling power plants, the price was poised to sour higher. Range was a billion-dollar public company: it was duty-bound to serve the interests of its shareholders, to tout quarterly profits on phone calls with stock analysts and not mention glitches like leaking ponds. Kendra understood. What she couldn’t fathom was the state of Pennsylvania’s role in this saga. The DEP kept making mistakes. One concerned an air study that the state had conducted at several sites, including Yeager. In it, the DEP concluded that there were no significant problems. But when Kendra requested the raw data, she discovered serious errors in the calculations that, as she redid the math, revealed astronomic levels of a gas called methyl mercaptan, which was hazardous in its own right and often found with hydrogen sulfide. When she pointed out the faulty math to a DEP technician, he admitted his mistakes and confirmed the accuracy of Kendra’s numbers. There were ongoing concerns related to both air and water. As she studied the tests the DEP performed for homeowners who complained that oil and gas may have contaminated their water, she found them to be sorely lacking—“a joke,” as she put it.

  By the fall of 2012, she thought she’d uncovered a larger pattern, in which the DEP was giving people results so limited as to be intentionally misleading. The issue revolved in particular around potentially hazardous metals. When a DEP water inspector went out to someone’s home to test water, he submitted his samples to the lab to be tested. When the results were ready, he typed a code into the computer to access them. But what came back to him was incomplete. There was a gap between what the DEP was testing for and what it reported to homeowners. In its lab, the DEP was testing for twenty-four different metals, yet it was reporting results for only eight. Copper, nickel, zinc, chromium, boron, titanium, cobalt, and lithium—all could be harmful and relevant to drilling contamination. However, if any of these were in someone’s water, they were missing from the test results homeowners saw.

  If the DEP were a company, Kendra, in her world of corporate law, would charge that it was committing fraud. But this was a state agency, and at first she wasn’t quite sure what to do. She decided she had no recourse other than to kick up a controversy. She wrote a public letter accusing the DEP of withholding critical results from citizens and sent it to Michael Krancer, then secretary of the department. Secretary Krancer made no secret of his position on oil and gas. He saw it as his job as DEP secretary to facilitate drilling. “At the end of the day, my job is to make sure gas is done and gas is done right,” he said upon his appointment. After resigning in 2013, he returned to private practice as an oil and gas attorney, with Range as one of his clients.

  In November 2012, when The New York Times reported Kendra’s discovery that the DEP withheld data on poisons near a gas site, the story broke nationwide. The DEP denied the charges immediately. Kevin Sunday, the DEP spokesman, called Kendra’s claims an “outrageous contention.” The agency released a statement saying that the letter was “an effort by a plaintiff’s attorney to mislead and manipulate news coverage in an effort to litigate his cases in the press instead of the courtroom.” According to the DEP, the test methods were standard and similar to those used in other states. Matt Pitzarella of Range Resources, who was openly calling the Smiths ambulance chasers, echoed those comments. “They have absolutely no case whatsoever and they know it, which is why they’ve resorted to taking their argument to the media,” he said. “We will continue to fiercely defend our operations and our reputation.”

  * * *

  The Court of Common Pleas at the Washington Courthouse is an imposing stone building with a demilune colonnade. A statue of George Washington still stands on its dome, looking over the city and warily waiting for the annual march of Whiskey reenactors. Like much of Washington, the courthouse, originally a log cabin, has seen more prosperous days. A parking space for ASAP Bail Bonds is reserved permanently out front.

  On January 29, 2013, when Haney v. Range landed in a courtroom for the first time, Kendra, in her black pantsuit and curled hair, stared down at least a dozen corporate defense attorneys representing Range Resources, along with Halliburton, which had supplied some of the chemicals up at the site, and fifteen other parties. That day, several of the defendants were arguing that they should be let out of the case.

  From the back of the courtroom, its walls painted red against dark wooden benches resembling church pews, a casual observer might have thought that the tiny woman pitted against the phalanx of besuited men was in trouble. She wasn’t.

  Kendra also wasn’t the only woman at the front of the courtroom. That day, the Washington County president judge Debbie O’Dell Seneca was hearing the arguments. At sixty, O’Dell Seneca was the first female justice in Washington County; she’d already been sitting on the bench for twenty-two years. Kendra knew that the judge had a history trying asbestos cases, which meant she’d be familiar with the basics of exposure. This made Kendra’s job of telling a comprehensible story about complicated science a bit easier. Kendra didn’t have to make her case that day, however; instead, she had to argue to O’Dell Seneca why these defendants bore responsibility to her clients and shouldn’t be dropped from the case.

  The defendants’ argument centered on the interpretation of strict liability. Halliburton’s attorney argued that Stacey, Beth, Buzz, and their families weren’t the intended end users of their products. Under the terms of strict liability, the company bore no responsibility to them because they were bystanders. Under Pennsylvania law, if a defective tractor blade flew up and chopped off the head of the farmer driving the tractor, then the blade company could be held liable. Yet if that same blade flew up and chopped off the head of a neighbor, the blade company bore no responsibility, since the neighbor wasn’t the intended end user of their product. The attorney for Red Oak Water Transfer, the pipeline company being sued for negligence, argued along similar lines. It didn’t matter if their temporary pipelines had frozen and cracked, leaking chemicals into the fields uphill from homes. The leaks didn’t occur on the plaintiffs’ properties, and the Smiths hadn’t cited any cases in their brief in which a pipeline company bore a responsibility to “remote people.”

  The attorney for Test America, the independent laboratory that allowed Range Resources to edit the results of water tests through their Total Access system, made a similar case. The Haneys, Voyles, and Kiskaddens weren’t paying them, so the families weren’t their clients. Range Resources was their client, and the company had the right to do what it wanted with the results Test America supplied.

  Kendra, unsurprisingly, argued the opposite. Bystanders or no, her clients had been harmed by these companies. The companies had a duty. They breached it and caused injury. The harm had already begun, she argued: “Part of the skin thickening, the blistering of the nostrils, the throat, and that coupled with the toxins that have been found in their bodies, benzene, toluene and arsenic have resulted in these future diseases … It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when for them in terms of what’s in their body.”

  The same rules applied to the water-testing laboratories that had presented themselves as independent. Their employees had met with her clients; they’d visited their homes. They had a duty to present full results. They couldn’t simply claim a lack of responsibility now. Kendra argued, “‘It’s not our problem. We washed our hands of it because we just report whatever our client wants us to report and it’s on them what they do with it,’ is in essence gi
ving someone a gun and bullets and laying it in front of them with a bottle of whiskey, saying, ‘It’s not our problem. Do with it what you want.’”

  Whiskey, bullets, and a gun. When the words reached Beth and Stacey, sitting toward the rear of the courtroom, the two women looked at each other. To hear their side argued aloud was a salve, proof that they actually existed, and Kendra was more of a bulldog than they’d dared to hope.

  “As small as Kendra is, with her words she is so mighty,” Beth said. In the mostly empty gallery, Stacey and Beth sat a row apart. A stranger wouldn’t have associated one with the other. Stacey, her arms folded uneasily, was self-conscious about being the subject of the heated discussion unfolding at the front of the courtroom. Beth was the opposite. She seemed to relish every moment of scrawling copious notes in her new notebook. Beth’s old notebook had been stolen several weeks earlier. Her half sister, Lori, an ex-con who’d served time in prison on charges related to drugs and prostitution, had come to the Voyles’ for a New Year’s Eve party and left with a Dean’s Water jug filled with pennies, some brand-new cooking pots Beth got for Christmas, and the notebook. She’d called Beth to tell her so.

  Lori told Beth that she gave Beth’s notes to Range. It was too odd. Could it be true? Lori was always looking for money. Could she have found some other interested party to buy the notes? It was far-fetched—to an outsider, implausible—but in the unexpected events in Amity, and in particular around Beth Voyles, it was impossible to rule out. Later, while she was being deposed by a Range attorney, Beth asked him if Range had her notes. He told her no.

  * * *

  Among all the daily disappointments for Stacey and Beth, finding the Smiths was the one good thing that had happened to them. As the winter of 2013 wore on, each woman placed more of her hopes in the Smiths than ever. Stacey’d given up on the state’s ability to protect them. The DEP was useless; they’d failed to do anything to stop Range from ruining their water and air and driving Stacey and the kids off of the farm. Stacey was losing faith in the federal government also. That parade of EPA investigators who’d shuffled through her home seemed to have marched right out of the picture. Their investigations were proving not only endless but also inconclusive.

  I just don’t understand what it is with the EPA, she wrote in her journal. They are supposed to be protecting us. Even kindhearted Lora Werner, the health inspector from Philadelphia, was growing frustrated with the agency’s pace. She apologized to Stacey that everything took so long, which Stacey appreciated. Yet it didn’t change her mind that the federal government was either ineffectual or deliberately dragging its feet.

  For the past year, Kendra had also grown more and more skeptical about the EPA’s involvement. After the pond had been found to leak, the state mandated that Range install ground-well monitors up at the site. When the results came in, they indicated the presence of ethylene glycol at a depth of up to eighty-two feet. To Kendra, contaminants at that depth suggested that fracking fluids had reached the groundwater. But the EPA wasn’t planning to test her clients’ water either for ethylene or for propylene glycol, even though it had already been found at low levels in the Haneys’ and Voyles’ water.

  “Can you tell me why that particular glycol is not being tested for?” she’d written in March 2012 to Rick Wilkin, who was leading the EPA study. “In testing done by Range, propylene glycol was found in both the Voyles’ and Haney’s drinking water sources.”

  “Propylene glycol is not being tested for—we are working on more reliable methods for propylene glycol and ethylene glycol,” Wilkin replied.

  To Kendra, this seemed like a dodge, a way for the EPA to deliberately avoid finding problems in the water. In fact, the EPA had been searching for more reliable methods to test for low levels of glycols, and one agency scientist had recently found them. The oil and gas industry, however, according to sources familiar with the testing, was fighting approval for the new methods, so the agency was stuck relying on tests it didn’t fully trust. Still, the federal government was their last hope, so Kendra allowed Wilkin’s team to return, with the following caveat: “It remains our hope and that of all our clients that the EPA’s motives for this second round of testing are science based and not politically driven as our clients have already been abandoned by the state agency entrusted to help otherwise powerless people.”

  Her dealings with the EPA remained fraught. Finally, in March 2013, Rick Wilkin contacted Kendra. His team was ready to give the Haneys, Voyles, and Kiskaddens their results. Yet he wanted to do so over the phone, not in writing, as Kendra had asked him to do. So the Smiths set up three different conference calls in their offices, one for Stacey, one for Beth, and one for Buzz. During each, Kendra drilled questions into the speakerphone. On the other end of the line, there were members of several governmental agencies, and she thought this was their chance to get answers to technical questions.

  The EPA’s answers were mixed. Beth, Stacey, and Buzz had chemical compounds in their water that could indicate the presence of diesel fuel but didn’t definitively do so. And these issues were bad enough that none of them should drink it. But the government agents weren’t willing to link these problems to drilling. Nor would they put them into writing, unless the Smiths petitioned the EPA, and that could take years. Over the phone, Kendra found herself pleading for them to do so, which caught her by surprise, since pleading wasn’t her style. If the federal government sent a letter outlining the trouble with Buzz’s water, she could take it to the state of Pennsylvania and try to get him a new supply.

  Without such a letter, she could do nothing at all. The health inspector Lora Werner suggested that Kendra appeal to the federal government. How long would that take? Kendra asked. A year and a half, Werner replied. That would put the case into 2015, and Kendra assumed—wrongly, it would turn out—that the case would be long over by then. A few minutes after the conference call ended, their speakerphone rang. According to Kendra and John, it was one of the health inspectors calling from his cell to say once again and emphatically that Buzz shouldn’t drink his water. Later, however, when I contacted him directly, the inspector said he’d never made the call.

  24 | IGNORANT MOTHERFUCKERS

  Kendra liked to perch on the rock wall in her backyard and study the magenta blossoms on her weigela shrubs. The blossoms didn’t yell or come at her across a conference table. On a mid-August afternoon in 2013, she was sitting on the wall when her phone rang: Buzz Kiskadden was calling. Buzz liked Kendra; he trusted her plainspoken approach. Stacey and Beth turned to John as their messenger, since he was easier to reach and Kendra often had her head in a binder of blood-test results, but Buzz called Kendra when he had something to say.

  He had cancer in his blood and a tumor the size of a softball, he told her.

  Although he didn’t use the word, Kendra knew that cancer in the blood meant leukemia. She, like everyone else, also knew that he was a chronic, pack-a-day smoker, and a former heroin addict. And still, Kendra thought. August was becoming a rough month for her clients.

  Ten days earlier, Stacey had driven back to the farm with Pappy to retrieve circuit breakers. She and the kids were moving again, this time into a cousin’s home on Mankey Lane, which she and Chris were renting. The two-bedroom house was cramped and it needed work, but there was room for the animals and they’d managed to stay within Amity limits. Within a few months, they’d converted Chris’s proceeds from selling his bungalow to a down payment. Even in the new house, she cooked with bottled water, just in case.

  To keep the move as cheap as possible, Stacey was salvaging everything she could from the old place. Although a new circuit breaker would run less than twenty dollars, she was going to squeeze every last penny she could out of what she’d had to leave behind.

  That morning, she took her pistol and a respirator along. When she and Pappy arrived, she noticed the grass outside had been smashed flat. With humans gone, she assumed that deer had taken to bedding down in the
yard. Then she spied a pile of ashes. At first, they looked like snow out of season, and Stacey couldn’t figure out where they had come from. When she reached the porch, she found part of the living room’s wood-burning stove. The front door to the farmhouse had been kicked open. She and Pappy stood still for a moment, to make sure there weren’t sounds coming from inside, and then pushed open the splintered frame and walked into the kitchen.

  The place had been ransacked; anything metal had vanished. The stove, the refrigerator, the dishwasher were gone. Stacey and Pappy moved slowly through the living room, where the couch and the recliner had been flipped over and their remaining possessions, old kids’ Christmas TV shows on VCR tapes, were strewn over the shag carpet.

  In the first-floor bathroom, where Stacey had tried to mask the water’s stink with potpourri, the plumbing had been pulled out of the wall. So had the copper piping that ran up the dining room wall by the stairs that Stacey had once lovingly stenciled with ivy.

  The house felt gutted in an animal sense, its arteries and veins ripped out. Stacey climbed the stairs to look into her bathroom, which was also missing its fixtures. Oddly enough, the only other thing missing was her nail polish collection. Later, she learned that the acetone in nail polish remover could be used to manufacture methamphetamine. In Paige’s room, the pink John Deere valances still moldered in the window, and in Harley’s, the bear, moose, and white-tailed deer tracks remained intact on the wall.

  When she and Pappy headed down into the basement, they discovered that the thieves had severed the oil lines and bled the oil all over the basement’s cement floor. They’d busted out the basement window, and there was broken glass everywhere. She was grateful that Pappy, a man in whom suffering had bred a powerful quiet, was with her.

  * * *

  In Amity and Prosperity, the scrap metal market worked much as it did all over the world. When the price of metal spiked, people hauled whatever scrap they had in their yard to sell it. A glance at the Kiskaddens’ junkyard could tell you where the metal market stood. If prices were high, the mangled heaps were gone, and the gulley was suddenly pristine.