28 | DREAMS
Stacey counted the supreme court win as the most important accomplishment of her life, after giving birth to Harley and Paige. Although she and the kids didn’t benefit from the decision financially, she clung to the public victory all the more as the cost of the battle bore down on her throughout 2013. By year’s end she was $224,000 in debt, which included the cost of the camper, the two mortgages, and tutoring for Paige when she floundered in English. Stacey attributed all of these financial setbacks to the gas wells. Every day brought a fresh outrage that seemed to lead her further from the life she’d envisioned. She’d been so sure that her goodness, paired with relentless work, would yield success. In her mind, she’d set herself apart from her parents, who worked impossibly hard but still fought to secure the American dream of upward mobility. Now she, like them, was failing to rise through no fault of her own. As this core optimism crumbled, a new, painful worldview took its place. The world was against her. She muscled through her days at the hospital and managed to hold down three jobs, teaching, nursing, and working at the orthopedic hospital alongside Shelly, who was suddenly busy and ridiculously happy.
Shelly had fallen in love with the president of the Washington County Beekeepers Association. The president was an older man and a kind one. He insisted that Shelly stop living in a house where, during the winter, a glass of water left by the bed froze over. He helped her put in a furnace, and Shelly went back to church and started teaching Sunday school. For the first time in her adult life, Shelly felt taken care of. And although she worried for Stacey, sometimes she tired of her sister’s sense of being wronged by the world. Shelly didn’t doubt for a second the severity of what Harley had been through—she’d smelled the noxious fumes, seen the black water, and been stricken with headaches and dizziness at the farm—but she sometimes wished that her sister would try to let go of her self-righteous anger. The increasing crusade mentality risked hurting Harley and Paige by keeping them perpetually trapped in a story of victimhood.
Stacey felt utterly alone. Despite the fact that she and Chris were engaged, getting married with all of her debt seemed impossible. “I can’t afford a wedding dress, let alone a wedding,” she told me. She wanted to put the wedding off until the fight with Range was settled, which wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. In her mind, she remained a single mom on her own with Harley and Paige, and late at night her terrors of what might come next spun out of control. Even when she managed to sleep, her dreams betrayed the chaos and uncertainty that she and the kids were still going through.
She dreamed that Paige was stuck in a tank full of frack fluid and rolling down a hill.
She dreamed that she bought a thousand dollars’ worth of groceries, which were suddenly stolen. She wept knowing that she and the kids would go hungry.
She dreamed that she and the kids were wandering around an abandoned subdivision. Everything was pristine, but the inhabitants had vanished. Something had gone catastrophically wrong, but they had to pick an empty house to live in anyway.
She dreamed that they were back in their contaminated house trying to pack up and leave as quickly as possible. Paige’s friend was coming to pick them up, but once they got in her car, she kept driving backward. Paige fell in a hole full of mud and Stacey tried to drag her out while Paige yelled, “I’m just trying to be a normal teenager!”
She dreamed that she had a baby. She was trying to get animal pens ready when she realized she hadn’t fed it, and it had shriveled to nothing. She tried to give the baby a bottle, then an IV. She forgot its name.
She woke night after night with her heart raging against her chest. Half-awake, she was caught between gasping for breath and fearing the air. So much was out of her hands: What if one of her new neighbors signed a gas lease and one morning she woke up to a well site? What if she or one of the kids contracted cancer; would their cancer insurance actually cover the cost? Her mouth tasted of ash—cortisol, the aftermath of adrenaline. Overwhelmed with catastrophic fantasies, she went to see Chuck Porch, the counselor who’d seen Harley. Chuck wanted her to start taking the Zoloft he’d prescribed. But Stacey continued to refuse. “If I have to take that, Range wins,” she told him again. Now he diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, which made her self-conscious given what she’d seen as a girl of her father’s violent Vietnam-soaked nightmares.
Stacey was thirty-six and long moved out of the house by the time Pappy finally got help. After one particularly rough night in 2006 when Pappy woke up and saw the bruises he’d made around Linda’s neck, he decided to go to the VA Hospital in Morgantown for help. He spoke to a counselor who diagnosed him with PTSD. Attending sessions with fellow vets, he realized how isolated he’d felt for decades. A crack shot before he went to Vietnam, Pappy was awarded three Purple Hearts but accepted only one of them. “A lot of boys were like that,” he’d said. Pappy found that talking made him feel better. He drove down to West Virginia for group therapy, and Linda went along for her own sessions for wives. Traveling in their camper, they attended festivals selling military hats, shirts, pins, and flags. They also made a practice of greeting young soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to thank them for their service. That kind of welcome, Pappy thought, would have served him well all those years ago when he came home with feet too rotten to go back to work in the steel mill. Among his most prized possessions was a set of dog tags that read Never again will one generation abandon another.
Whether he liked it or not, Pappy’s life revolved around Vietnam, much as Stacey feared hers would spin around the gas wells forever. Every life seemed to have a central event—a marker of before and after. This would be hers. Still, how could she have contracted PTSD? The diagnosis seemed so extreme. She’d never been shot at. Chuck Porch wanted her to see a specialist, which she resisted at first. The co-pay was twenty-five dollars.
I just don’t want another expense, she wrote in her journal. Maybe it will get better. It didn’t. Eventually, the night terrors drove her to see a therapist in Washington. Using a method called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), the therapist led her to recall the worst of her fears—the idea was to help her body integrate trauma while awake, she explained to Stacey. In addition, she tried to help Stacey accept what she couldn’t control. She couldn’t control whether a well site sprang up near their new home. She couldn’t control what was in the air. She couldn’t control cancer. Instead of focusing on the sores in the book of Job, she could practice being grateful for the resources to fight back against feelings of rage and self-pity. She tried to spend more time thanking God for what she and the kids still had.
On Thanksgiving in 2014, she wrote: We have so much to be thankful for. Our home and our health improving. Our clean air and clean water and safe place to live. We have each other and our family. I thank God every day. We are thankful for John and Kendra and their family and staff with the sacrifices they have made. We are thankful for our pets that survived with us. And having everyone in one place again. We are thankful for all the good people we have met that helped us along the way. I thank the Lord every day.
The only person who could get her to laugh at herself, and even at her dreams, was Chris. In one odd nightmare, she’d dreamed that a dog with a rocket strapped to its back was poisoning Amity. She shouted something to that effect in her sleep, and Chris overheard her. When things felt particularly grim, Chris would tease her, saying out of nowhere, “It’s a dog with a rocket strapped to its back!” and Stacey would crack up despite herself. But such interludes were rare.
One evening late that fall, Stacey got a call from Beth. The Voyles had lost yet another horse that year, Zee, who’d reared up in fright when a truck driver used his jake brake on the hill by Justa Breeze. Zee’d struck a fence and nearly severed her leg. When the Voyles put her down, Ashley struggled to function, and throughout 2014, she’d plunged into a deep depression. Now Ashley had just called Beth from Burke’s stables, where she was gro
oming horses, hysterical, threatening to kill herself.
I’ve lost everything, Cummins, Jodi, Oakie, the farm’s worth nothing, I’ve got nothing to live for, she told her mom.
Ashley had a new boyfriend who worked in industry, as locals called it, meaning oil and gas, and he was proving to be aggressive. Beth, given her own fraught history with abuse, was overwrought. Listening to Beth, Stacey felt sick. She knew what Beth was going through.
Get all of the guns out of the house and call your family doctor, she told Beth. The next day, Beth drove her daughter to Washington Hospital and Ashley signed herself into the psychiatric ward. Ashley admitted to 3A, Stacey noted in her journal. Ashley wanted to leave right away, but the doctors convinced her to stay. Talking to people doesn’t help me, she told them. At five foot six, she had already dropped to a hundred pounds; the three days she spent in the hospital, she refused to eat. Finally, Ashley signed herself out and came home with a prescription for Xanax, which she took once a week, and an antidepressant she quit taking within months. Maybe it was living in a community ravaged by drug abuse, she told me, but Ashley, like Stacey, felt that taking medication to dull emotional pain meant she’d lost and Range had won.
29 | CLOSING DOWN THE PONDS
In June 2014, Range’s stock price hit an all-time high of ninety-three dollars per share. The abundance of accessible shale gas was exceeding even the wildest predictions, and Range was first in terms of production and acreage in the Marcellus. The company dominated its sector, and analysts often rated Range best in its midsize class.
To Kendra and John, it came as a shock that September when Range got hit with the largest penalty in Pennsylvania history to date. The DEP was fining the company $4.15 million for eight leaking waste ponds and ordered Range to close five of them for good. All were in Washington County, and the Yeager pond was one of them. For the Smiths, this extraordinary news arrived while they were preparing Buzz’s fight for clean water. Privately, one Range attorney told the Smiths that if it weren’t for their doggedness in bringing Buzz’s case, the leaks would never have come to light.
If Act 13’s being struck down proved their largest constitutional victory, then closing the waste ponds felt like their biggest practical win. But closure was proving tricky. In order to shut down the site, the company had to demonstrate they’d successfully cleaned up the remaining contamination, yet test samples showed elements of BTEX, oil, grease, and chlorides. Kendra could see them clearly in the ongoing remediation reports that came to her from the DEP. At least Range was now publicly admitting to trouble at the Yeager site. “We recognize that we’ve had some issues at the location, which can occur in our work,” Range’s Matt Pitzarella said. The record now reflected a history of spills, leaks, and a failed cleanup half a mile up the road from Buzz. The DEP had found as well that a number of the chemicals leaking at the site were the same ones in Buzz’s water.
By September 2014, John Smith hoped that all of these public findings against Range would give Buzz’s case a better shot as it came before the Environmental Hearing Board. The EHB was a trial court that functioned like a court of appeals: people and businesses argued in front of a judge against findings issued by the DEP. To the Smiths’ knowledge, however, no one in Pennsylvania had ever brought a case before the EHB in which a landowner charged that oil and gas had contaminated his water and that the DEP had gotten it wrong. The term of art for their challenge was “a case of first impression.” As such, Kiskadden v. DEP and Range Resources was likely to garner a lot of local attention.
Of all the judges they might have drawn, Thomas Renwand, the diminutive and fiery chairman and chief judge of the Environmental Hearing Board, seemed like a lucky selection. Since he was appointed in 1995, Renwand had established a long record of standing up to the DEP, and under his guidance, the EHB had agreed to hear the Kiskadden case, which the Smiths saw as a good sign. Even hearing the case required courage. John Smith believed they had a chance at getting Buzz clean water. Kendra, the skeptic, was less certain.
“I don’t think the court has the guts to go our way,” she told me. To find in Buzz’s favor could open up a flood of angry citizens alleging that the DEP had made mistakes with their water also.
The twenty-day trial was held downtown in Pittsburgh’s Piatt Place, a swanky office complex only an hour’s drive but a world away from Buzz’s junkyard. On one side, Michael Heilman, the DEP attorney, sat next to John Gisleson, a skilled litigator working for Range. The company had asked to join the suit to defend its interests, and Gisleson was there, as he saw it, to dismantle the Smiths’ case. By discrediting Buzz’s claims, Gisleson hoped to call into question the fundamentals of the Smiths’ larger suit against Range. And although the agency had recently issued sanctions against Range, the DEP wasn’t changing its position regarding Buzz’s contaminated water. Heilman was there to argue that despite the now-established fact that the Yeager waste pond had leaked, and despite the contamination in Buzz’s well, there was still no proof that Range Resources was responsible. What’s more, Heilman began, to meet their burden of proof, the Smiths had to establish a definitive link between the site and Buzz’s water, and that they couldn’t do. There was no “silver bullet,” he argued in his opening statement. There was not enough evidence to prove that Range’s actions had contaminated Buzz’s water. He continued:
Your Honor, this is a nostalgic time for me, late summer, early fall. Because we think back on our lives, this is the time of transition, the time when we move—we do different things, move onto new different adventures. And so, I realized last month, it had been thirty-eight years since I enrolled as a college freshman at Notre Dame. Amazingly, I still remember things from back then. I remember the football national championship with my good friend, Joe Montana … Even more incredibly, I remember some stuff that happened in class … that coincidence is not causation … And in preparing for this case, thinking of this hearing, this vignette came back to me and back to me because no matter the bar, it seems that the appellant’s case is based upon evidence, introducing evidence of coincidences and conflating them with causation …
Let me be clear though, the Department is not here to argue to the Board that the Department has regulated this well site as effectively as we could have. We haven’t. We are not here to argue that Range Resources is in full compliance with the law or its permits and regulations. It hasn’t done that. We are not even here to argue that Loren [Buzz] Kiskadden has great water quality, he doesn’t. What we are here to say is even if all the coincidences [advanced] by the appellant are true, it does not follow that gas well activities polluted appellant’s well. Coincidences of that are just coincidences.
In response, Kendra laid out the specific timeline of how problems at the site affected her client’s water. To underscore her facts, she called the DEP’s Vince Yantko to the stand and walked him through a litany of mishaps—from the leaks and spills, to the holes in the liners, to the fact that the leak detection zone was designed incorrectly. She laid out the DEP’s failure to enforce its regulations—how it hadn’t taken the leaking pond out of use or examined its liner for rips. She also detailed the large-scale, failed remediation that removed 2,125 tons of soil. Then she demonstrated to the court how the soil test results had been manipulated, altered to read to a lay observer as though there had always been contaminants in that field, when that wasn’t the case.
She walked Yantko through Carla Suszkowski’s decision—against his own advisement—to flush the contaminated drill cuttings pit with thirty thousand gallons of water. She returned Yantko to his notes, in which he’d called the action “intentional and reckless.” Yantko himself had said that her flush could drive contaminants deeper into the earth and the groundwater. Two weeks later, Kendra insisted, three known constituents of frack fluid, which had been in the drill cuttings pit, ended up at the bottom of the watershed in her client’s water.
It wasn’t enough, however, for the Smiths to prove that Ron Y
eager’s field was still contaminated, or that the DEP had relied on doctored water tests to determine that Buzz’s water wasn’t polluted by oil and gas. Each of these facts were already a matter of record, and the DEP had already admitted failure in overseeing the Yeager site.
Heilman had been correct in his opening statement: in order to meet their burden of proof, the Smiths had to make a definitive case for how the industrial chemicals at the top of the hill, at point A, flowed half a mile southwest to the valley bottom, where Buzz lived, at point B. The crux of the argument lay in how water moved underground. As the weeks of the hearing went on, a DEP hydrogeologist argued that the water flowed north and away from Buzz. The Smiths’ experts argued the opposite. The underground springs on the hillside flowed downhill and to the southwest. What’s more, after the pond had leaked, the DEP had mandated that Range install monitoring wells. Those results showed that ethylene glycol had somehow penetrated the ground west of the waste pond to a depth of eighty-two feet. Not only did that serve to indicate evidence of contamination, it also proved which way the water was moving. And the contaminants weren’t only moving underground. The poisoned springs also ran into a stream that belonged to the commonwealth called Tributary Number Four, according to the Smiths’ experts. This stream ran past Beth and Stacey, and then down to Buzz.
Range’s attorney, John Gisleson, called the Smiths’ expert findings into question. It was too simple to say that if chemicals were found at the site and in their clients’ water, that was definitive proof of contamination, he argued. Furthermore, the ratios found in Buzz’s water were different from those up on the hillside. And when it came to oil and gas contamination, particularly in regard to salts, those ratios mattered. There were also plenty of other potential sources of contamination lying around Buzz’s junkyard at the Bottoms. Buzz’s water may have been undrinkable, but that wasn’t Range’s fault. Gisleson took aim at Stacey and Beth’s case too, arguing that if the same water flowed downhill past their houses, then why were the chemicals different in all three homes?
Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America Page 24
