The Real Cost of Fracking

How America’s Shale Gas Boom Is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food

MICHELLE BAMBERGER and ROBERT OSWALD
Foreword by
SANDRA STEINGRABER

BEACON PRESS
BOSTON

For the animals

Foreword by Sandra Steingraber

Introduction

ONE:
Families and Their Pets

TWO:
Sarah and Josie: Violated Families

THREE:
Samantha and Jesse: Shattered Dreams

FOUR:
Ann and Andrew: Reluctant Refugees

FIVE:
Fracking, Farming, and Our Food Supply

SIX:
Mary and Charlie: Quarantined Cattle

SEVEN:
Sharon and Wade: Disrespect of Farmers and Farming

EIGHT:
Environmental Justice

NINE:
Claire and Jason: Forsaken Community

EPILOGUE:
Where Do We Go from Here?

Appendix: A Primer on Gas Drilling

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Years ago, my home state of Illinois entertained the proposals of an industry that claimed to have a magic solution to both fossil fuel dependency and overflowing landfills: generate electricity by burning garbage, including industrial waste.

Thus began the incinerator wars.

In the early 1990s, one such facility was sited a half mile from my grandfather’s farm. Members of the village board that green-lighted its application were wined and dined by the out-of-state owners and enticed by promises of a new school library. Some of them, as it turned out, were also investors with a direct financial stake in the outcome.

On the other side were farmers who stood to lose their water, their property values, the peaceful enjoyment of their homes, and the privilege of piloting their tractors down county roads unclogged with convoys of trucks ferrying toxic ash.

Tensions were high. Neighbors squared off against neighbors; opinions within families splintered; brothers were no longer on speaking terms. And yet, public conversation about the issue roiling the community was, at first, rare. When I asked my grandmother why her church did not take a position on the incinerator, her reply came in the form of a truism:

Silence is the sound of money talking.

Two decades later, there are no trash incinerators in downstate Illinois. A forceful citizen uprising eventually put an end to all nine proposed incinerators, and nary a one was built. (Which is a very good outcome. What was then called “state of the art” would be, by now—as municipalities in other states went on to discover—dangerous, fire-breathing relics and a sunk-cost disincentive to curbside recycling.)

It was data that broke the silence. The data said that incinerators, even state-of-the-art ones, emit a potent synthetic carcinogen: dioxin. While rural communities considered the seductive pitches from incinerator salesmen, the United States Environmental Protection Agency released a draft of its long-awaited dioxin reassessment; risk analyses were promulgated; and emissions data were published and publicized.

In response to the science, people started talking.

They said: Dioxin lasts in soil and in human fat for thirty-five to fifty years.

They said: Dioxin causes cancer, incinerators make dioxin, and, look, here are good studies to back up these facts.

They said: One overturned ash truck on a windy day spells ruin. And even without accidents, dioxin will seed itself into the air from the fly ash—and sift down over farm country, over the soil that is the beginning of the food chain, over our hogs and turkeys, over creation itself.

The message that science brought was transformational—especially when amplified by community teach-ins, ballot referenda, letters to the editor by local physicians, and a float in the annual Fourth of July parade that proclaimed, “God recycles, and the Devil burns.” By the time all the talking reached the buyers of central Illinois’ agricultural products (e.g., popcorn), a new day had dawned.

The incinerator wars at the end of the last century became the fracking wars at the beginning of this one. This time, however, science has been bound, gagged, and tossed into a corner.

At least three layers of scientific silence surround fracking.
*

Making up the first are legal exemptions—granted by the 2005 Energy Policy Act—to key provisions of our federal environmental statutes. These allow companies engaged in the extraction of gas and oil from shale via fracking to conceal the names of the chemicals and chemical mixtures they blast down holes in the ground. No other industry can withhold such information. Fracking companies are also unburdened by any requirement to monitor their emissions. Methane may seep out of well casings; heavy metals may slosh out of flowback pits; benzene may rise from wellheads and compressor stations; radon may be pushed through pipelines; formaldehyde may flow from flare stacks. But no one is routinely measuring it and estimating its cumulative impact.

And without right-to-know data or emissions data, public health science doesn’t operate very well. Without knowing what chemicals and mixtures are used and what pollutants are released, researchers can’t systematically measure human exposures or definitively connect exposures to health outcomes.

Second is the silence emanating from state and federal agencies, which both remain curiously uncurious about the public health effects of fracking.

With more than 6,000 active gas wells and more than 3,300 documented violations, Pennsylvania is already an intensely fracked state—with much more fracking to come. And yet neither the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection nor the US EPA has conducted comprehensive measurements of air and water contaminants. And neither agency has made any systematic effort to interpret the findings they do possess. It was detective work by the
Scranton Times-Tribune
that found—buried deep in the Department of Environmental Protection’s own records—161 cases of water contamination from fracking in Pennsylvania.
¹
It was an individual engineering professor, slogging through industry statistics, who discovered just how leaky cement well casings really are: operator records show that the well casings of 6 to 7 percent of new gas wells drilled in Pennsylvania fail outright or suffer from structural problems that could result in groundwater contamination.
²

When it uncovered actual evidence of such contamination in real people’s drinking water, the US EPA bowed to industry pressure and suspended all further investigation.

In Dimock, Pennsylvania.

In Pavillion, Wyoming.

In Weatherford, Texas.
³

And, so, where there should be inquiry, debate, hearings, and peer-review publications, there is only the sound of a closing book.

The third layer of silence takes the form of nondisclosure agreements and the hush money that comes with them. These take the form of contracts with secrecy clauses that are signed by homeowners who allege that their water has been ruined or their health damaged by nearby drilling and fracking operations. In such cases, the price of a cash settlement or property buy-out is the agreement
to tell no one
the story of what happened—not the neighbors, not the newspapers, and not the public health community. Ever.

A 2013 investigation by
Bloomberg News
of hundreds of regulatory and legal filings across the nation found this kind of enforced silence to be the rule rather than the exception. A strategy of muzzling accusations of harm with sealed settlements, noted
Bloomberg
reporters, “keeps data from regulators, policy makers, the news media and health researchers, and makes it difficult to challenge the industry’s claim that fracking has never tainted anyone’s water.”
⁴

In at least one case, the lifelong ban on speaking out about the harm of fracking—imposed as part of a cash settlement—extended to all members of a family, including young children. The Hallowich family of southwestern Pennsylvania had claimed that drilling and fracking operations near their home had sickened them and damaged the value of their property. Their agreement with the industry—including the draconian family-wide gag order—came to light when the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
itself successfully petitioned to unseal the court records. (Full disclosure: Both the authors and I were among a group of scientists who supported this petition as part of an amicus brief.)

In Pennsylvania, the code of enforced silence has even ensnared physicians. According to a state law called Act 13, doctors may obtain information from a gas drilling company about the specific identity of proprietary chemicals used in fracking operations to which their patients may have been exposed. In exchange for this confidential information, however, they must give up their right to warn the public—including patients and including public health authorities—about the health dangers associated with fracking. As I am writing, a federal judge has just denied a doctor in Pennsylvania the right to challenge in a lawsuit the constitutionality of Act 13.
⁵

Against this background of the unspoken, the suppressed, the stifled, the gag-ordered, and the censored comes this important book. Ultimately,
The Real Cost of Fracking
is a collection of stories that bear witness to extremity. Its narrators, as the book’s title implies, are the voices of real people living in the fracking fields of America. As these chapters make clear, they have endured conditions of corporate censorship, persecution, occupation, and virtual house arrest. Under the protection of pseudonyms, they are—in some cases for the first time—breaking silence and speaking out.

And because my fellow writers on the oil and gas industry’s payroll will predictably attempt to dismiss these testimonies as “anecdotes,” let me save us all a lot of time and say right now: Don’t even bother.

The coauthors of this book—scientist and veterinarian—have done far more than assemble the words of human witnesses. They also translate for us a story that is inscribed in the bodies of animals—wildlife, livestock, pets—that live alongside the human narrators of this book. Here are the autopsy reports, the blood tests, the records of birth defects and reproductive outcomes, the air samples, the water-testing results. Here, woven among the courageous words of human witnesses, is the unimpeachable story of science carried out in extreme and intimidating circumstances.

It is the sound of silence breaking. It is speech to inspire our own. Let’s pull up a chair and listen.

SANDRA STEINGRABER

*
Like the authors, I use the word
fracking
in an expansive way to refer to the entire unholy process of shale gas and oil extraction—from drilling and cementing a mile-deep, mile-long, L-shaped hole, to smashing apart bedrock with prodigious amounts of water, sand, and chemicals to the conveyance of pressurized gas through pipelines, to the jet-roar of sixty-foot flare stacks, to the fleets of trucks ferrying fracking waste through residential areas.