“It’ll be a destination wedding,” Paige joked. “Alaska.” She packed a plastic bag full of Pringles and beef jerky, along with a coloring book full of inspirational sayings. Stacey tucked a picture into her purse of Harley and Paige at eleven and eight, smiling and holding Phantom the rabbit between them. She wanted the judge to see who the kids were before all this mess began.
Harley was doing remarkably better. Ciarra was proving a loving and steadying influence, and Harley was excelling at work on the pipeline. He had the opportunity to train as an electrician. Still, on the verge of these talks, he was struggling mightily with anxiety. He’d been talking to his counselor for weeks about this day. She’d taught him a technique to ground himself that involved repeating to himself the sequence of his daily routine. On this morning, he’d wake up, brush his teeth, take a shower, and put on his best pair of dress jeans. He’d drink orange juice and leave the house with his mom and sister by 7:30. Then the list ended and the unknown began.
The talks were scheduled to begin in Southpointe at 8:30 a.m. They were taking place at the Smith Butz offices, and Stacey, Harley, and Paige were meeting Grace there, along with Beth, John, and Ashley. Buzz was home sick. The seven would wait in a separate room while the mediator, Gary Caruso, a well-respected retired judge, tried to work out a deal between the defendants’ attorneys and the Smiths. By days’ end, they’d either reach an agreement or head to trial.
In the conference room at Smith Butz, John Smith negotiated alone. Kendra was in a hospital back in New Jersey caring for her ailing father. She stood by his hospital bed waiting to call in to the negotiations as needed throughout the day. At 9:30 that evening, after thirteen hours of talks, the parties managed to reach a settlement.
Although Stacey and Beth weren’t allowed to discuss the terms of the agreement with anyone, the amount they received left both of them feeling angry and defeated. Yet settling, they recognized, also offered some relief. It was a chance to move on, whereas continuing to fight could have meant years more in court and endless appeals.
Stacey and the kids drove home from Southpointe in silence. She woke on Saturday, January 20, and didn’t want to leave the house. Chris coaxed her with all of his fun-loving tricks—he took her out to throw beer bottles at signs along Amity Ridge Road, and down to the Anawanna club to register for a raffle. But she couldn’t stop crying. In contrast, Harley was feeling a palpable relief. He put away a picture from Paige’s coloring book—the single page he’d worked on for most of the previous day, which read Don’t Give Up. He made a plan to go bowling with Paige and, that Saturday afternoon at 3:30, when Stacey wanted to crawl back into bed, he suggested they all go out to eat at the Kopper Kettle.
Stacey knew she had to keep moving, so she joined Harley, Ciarra, Paige, and Chris. They were midway through dinner when she spotted the Voyles coming through the door. She went over to speak to them. Beth rose to hug her. Holding each other, they refused to cry, and said nothing about the day before, out of fear of being overheard and accidentally violating the gag order.
When Chris finished his burger topped with onions and pierogis, he joined them. He brought along a scratch-off card, a lottery ticket he’d bought for ten dollars from the Kettle’s vending machine. The families shared a tradition. One night at the Kettle several years earlier, Chris had borrowed John’s penknife to scratch off just such a card and won four hundred dollars. On this Saturday night, Chris thought a small win might cheer them, but Beth didn’t want to play. She wasn’t feeling lucky, she said. The card was a dud.
Beth and John thanked Stacey for agreeing to sell her farm to Ashley. Stacey was happy to do it, she said, but she warned them again that the contamination from chemicals and mold had made the house unlivable. It would be dangerous for Ashley to have kids in there, she reminded Beth. Then there was the issue of water. Since there was no way that the Voyles could afford to run the line from Amity, Beth told Stacey that Ashley planned to rig up a system using gutters to catch storm water and fill a cistern.
It’s how I grew up, Stacey thought to herself. But she didn’t say anything to the Voyles. It was too sad to think that Ashley would become one of a new generation waiting for rain.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
This book was born in Nigeria in 2007 after a bridge collapsed. I was riding across a river on an empty oil drum thinking about Minneapolis, where the I-35W bridge had recently fallen into the Mississippi River, killing thirteen people. So many of the problems of collective poverty plaguing Africa and Asia were becoming more evident in America. I decided it was time to come home, to turn my attention to how we tell stories about systemic failings here in the United States.
In Nigeria, as elsewhere in the Global South, some of the poorest people in the world live on some of the most resource-rich land. Yet this phenomenon, sometimes called the Resource Curse, applies to America also. I wanted to examine how it applied—and how it didn’t—to the new gas rush striking Appalachia. I wanted to tell a story about people who were paying—and getting paid—for America’s energy, and to look at how that experience fed not only poverty but also a deeper sense of alienation.
Over the past seven years, beginning in March 2011, I traveled to Western Pennsylvania thirty-seven times to follow the stories of forty-five people involved in four intertwined court cases. The mystery of what was happening to Harley Haney and to his neighbors’ animals began in 2009, nearly two years before I arrived, and I have relied on recollections of that period from those I’ve spoken with. In several cases, individuals involved declined to be interviewed, particularly those in active litigation. In these instances, and others, I’ve relied on public court documents, trial transcripts, affidavits, and depositions. These records include extensive statements and testimony from Range Resources’ current and former employees, chemical manufacturers, waste haulers, fracking companies, tracer companies, liner manufacturers, and laboratory technicians, as well as officials at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. In the text of the book, I have used direct quotation marks only when I was present and recorded what was said or when the material came from court depositions, hearings, or trials.
The Smiths’ case Haney v. Range was filed in May 2012. The initial complaint was 182 pages with 1,734 pages of exhibits. These included incident reports, trucking manifests, site plans, internal emails, construction documents, news sources, personal journals, professional field notes, water test results, medical records, aerial photographs, and state-issued notices of violation. Over the past five years, through the discovery process, this public record has expanded greatly and could now fill a room.
In addition, my reporting has included extensive interviews with confidential governmental and corporate sources, energy analysts, specialists in regional history, experts in exposure-related illnesses, and specialists in state and federal law.
In Amity and Prosperity, in order to gather perspectives beyond the primary characters with whom I regularly communicated, I attended and listened to proceedings at town meetings, county and state fairs, church services, the covered bridge festival, and court hearings. Some of these gatherings were highly contentious, as reasonable and intelligent people disagreed passionately over what was best for their town, for the country, and for the earth.
Five years into my reporting, just over 60 percent of voters in Washington County cast their ballots for Donald Trump. Reporters flooded rural America to profile the Trump voter, an enterprise that risked reducing sophisticated points of view to sound bites and missing the larger story of a complex American landscape. This is the story of those Americans who’ve wrestled with the price their communities have long paid so the rest of us can plug in our phones.
Some feel that price was worth paying; others don’t.
NOTES
A NOTE
Exploiting energy often involves exploiting people: For an excellent historical overview of resource extraction farther south, on Appalachia’s Cumberland Plateau, s
ee Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2001) by Henry M. Caudill.
2. WHEN THE BOOM BEGAN
The companies also paved back roads: To enumerate the public costs of oil and gas production in Western Pennsylvania, I relied on two sets of data. The first, primarily related to social costs, comes from Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Natural Gas Development in Greene County, Pennsylvania: A Case Study (Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, and Keystone Research Center, 2014) by Stephen Hertzenberg, Diana Polson, and Mark Price. The second lays out the private costs transferred to public infrastructure: “Estimating the Consumptive Use Costs of Shale Natural Gas Extraction on Pennsylvania Roadways” (Journal of Infrastructure Systems, 2014) by Shmuel Abramzon; Constantine Samaras, A.M.ASCE; Aimee Curtright; Aviva Litovitz; and Nicholas Burger, and published by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
3. THE MESS NEXT DOOR
trees “as old as America”: For a historical portrait of Ron Yeager’s farm, see Louise McClenathan’s letter to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Long Before the Yeager Impoundment Became a Source of Controversy, the Site Was Part of Louise McClenathan Family’s Peaceful Homestead,” published on September 7, 2014.
5. AIRBORNE
“Undoubtedly, these shortcomings have eroded the public’s trust”: The best analysis of the DEP’s struggles to keep up with the oil and gas industry’s lies is the Pennsylvania auditor general’s report, “DEP’s Performance in Monitoring Potential Impacts to Water Quality from Shale Gas Development, 2009–2012.” The full text is available at www.paauditor.gov/Media/Default/Reports/speDEP072114.pdf.
7. “ONE HEAD & ONE HEART, & LIVE IN TRUE FRIENDSHIP & AMITY AS ONE PEOPLE”
Ten Mile Creek was also a dangerous place: There are many fine histories of Washington County. The two I found most useful were Boyd Crumrine’s History of Washington County, Pennsylvania: With Biographical Sketches of Many of Its Pioneers and Prominent Men, published in 1882 by L. H. Everts & Co.; and Harriet Branton’s Washington County Chronicles: Historic Tales from Southwestern Pennsylvania, published in 2013 by the History Press.
This was part of the legacy of William Penn: For the larger historical landscape of the frontier, I relied most on two excellent books, Kevin Kenny’s Peaceable Kingdom Lost (Oxford University Press, 2009) and William Hogeland’s The Whiskey Rebellion (Simon & Schuster, 2010). There are also two rich local sources: Rural Reflections (1977), a four-volume series by the Amwell Township Historical Society regarding the local history of Amity’s township of Amwell, and The Reverend Thaddeus Dod: Frontier Teacher and Preacher, written and published by the Reverend Rawley Dod Boone, S.T.M.
8. DOUBTERS
from 2007 to 2012, the gas boom brought fifteen thousand industry-related jobs: This statistic comes from the Pennsylvania Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, employment statistics regarding the natural gas boom are contested. Studies produced by those who oppose drilling and those who support it make contesting claims, which are often used to judge whether or not the costs of industry are worth paying.
the average age of local farmers climbed to fifty-six: The fact and other context related to the plight of Pennsylvania’s farmers comes from “A Devil’s Bargain: Rural Environmental Injustices and Hydraulic Fracturing on Pennsylvania’s Farms” (Journal of Rural Studies, 2015) by Kathryn Teigen DeMaster and Stephanie A. Malin. This study also provides an overview of the complex relationship between the state’s farmers and the oil and gas industry.
9. HANG ’EM HIGH
Rachel Carson, the legendary environmentalist, grew up against the backdrop of this devastation: Linda Lear’s definitive biography Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (Mariner Books, 2009) provides a brilliant account of Carson’s life and times.
“beneficial use”: For more on the law surrounding “beneficial use,” and how it is that oil and gas industrial waste can be spread on farmers’ fields, see www.dep.pa.gov/Business/Land/Waste/SolidWaste/Residual/BeneficialUse/Pages/default.aspx.
earthquakes: Fracking has been definitively linked with earthquakes in two different ways. First, injecting wastewater into deep underground wells was shown, beginning in Oklahoma in 2014, to cause earthquakes. Second, by 2017, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, the unconventional drilling process itself was demonstrated to cause earthquakes. Reid Frazier of NPR’s StateImpact broke the story; see https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2017/02/18/pennsylvania-confirms-first-fracking-related-earthquakes.
10. BLOOD AND URINE
Dish, Texas: The full history of the Dish, Texas, battle with the oil and gas industry has been reported in full by Reeve Hamilton in The Texas Tribune. For further information on drilling in North Texas, Saul Elbein of Texas Monthly has also written an account, which can be found at www.texasmonthly.com/articles/heres-the-drill.
benzene, a chemical compound: For the potential illnesses related to oil and gas industrial exposure, I relied on the following environmental and medical studies: At Duke University, Christopher Kassotis’s work on endocrine disruption “Endocrine-Disrupting Activity of Hydraulic Fracturing Chemicals and Adverse Health Outcomes After Prenatal Exposure in Male Mice” (Endocrine Society, October 14, 2015); “Dangerous and Close: Fracking near Pennsylvania’s Most Vulnerable Residents” (PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center, September 2015) by Elizabeth Ridlington, Tony Dutzik, and Tom Van Heeke (Frontier Group) and Adam Garber and David Masur (PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center); “Association Between Unconventional Natural Gas Development in the Marcellus Shale and Asthma Exacerbations” (JAMA Internal Medicine, 2016) by Sara G. Rasmussen, MHS; Elizabeth L. Ogburn, PhD; Meredith McCormack, MD; et al. Although to date no peer-reviewed studies have examined the potential health effects of bacteria in waste ponds, Paula Mouser at Ohio State University has studied the issue. In 2014, she, along with Maryam A. Cluff, Angela Hartsock, Jean D. MacRae, and Kimberly Carter, published the study “Temporal Changes in Microbial Ecology and Geochemistry in Produced Water from Hydraulically Fractured Marcellus Shale Gas Wells” (Environmental Science and Technology, 2014).
12. “MR. AND MRS. ATTICUS FINCH”
“Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmo at 10 Cash-Strapped Lane”: The fight over fracking in Mount Pleasant Township was the subject of “Game Changer,” an episode of NPR’s This American Life, which originally aired on July 8, 2011.
13. MUTUAL DISTRUST
“It’s the right thing to do morally and ethically”: Range’s announcement that it would disclose all of the chemicals used in the fracking process was originally reported by Russell Gold of The Wall Street Journal, whose book The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, 2014) provides an excellent look at the early days of the gas rush.
18. INSURGENTS
“Download the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual because we are dealing with an insurgency”: Sharon Wilson took her recordings from the Houston oil and gas conference first to Don Hopey at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Hopey broke the story of Range’s use of psy-ops tactics and closely followed many of the local legal proceedings discussed in this book, and I’m indebted to his excellent environmental reporting. Sharon Wilson writes more about this conference and her opposition to fracking on her blog, www.texassharon.com.
20. POLICING THE STATE
Salus populi suprema lex esto: For a definitive history of the concept of public welfare in the United States—salus populi suprema lex esto—see William J. Novak’s The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
21. WHAT MONEY DOES
In Pennsylvania, from 2007 to 2016, tracing the arc of the gas rush: In Pennsylvania, Marie Cusick of StateImpact, a collaboration among several NPR affiliate stations, has traced the migration patterns of state environmental employees into the private sector; see https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2016/01/21/where-are-the
y-now-track-top-state-officials-with-pennsylvanias-blurred-lines.
22. RUIN IS THE DESTINATION TOWARD WHICH ALL MEN RUSH
“We don’t know how much is in the bank and we keep giving away”: Rose Reilly, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers biologist, explained that the amount of water a driller can legally take from a public stream is expressed in the formula (Q × 7) ÷ 10. Q represents a stream’s lowest daily flow as recorded over the past ten years. Under the law, drillers are allowed to take 10 percent of a week’s flow at that level, but there’s no mechanism in place to enforce legal limits on withdrawals.
Tragedy of the Commons: For more on Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize–winning work related to the commons, see her Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
23. REMOTE PEOPLE
the DEP was testing for twenty-four different metals, yet it was reporting results for only eight: Jon Hurdle of The New York Times broke the story of the controversy surrounding the DEP’s use of codes in “Pennsylvania Report Left Out Data on Poisons in Water Near Gas Site,” November 2, 2012.
24. IGNORANT MOTHERFUCKERS
Cyber schooling was a growing trend: Cyber school is becoming increasingly common in Pennsylvania, where one of every fifty students attends a cyber charter school, a publicly funded online-only form of homeschooling. To learn more about the challenges cyber school presents, see Kevin McCorry of NPR’s Philadelphia-affiliated WHYY: https://whyy.org/articles/temple-prof-pa-cyber-charters-turning-huge-profits-sending-tax-dollars-out-of-state.
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