The Real Cost of Fracking (12 page)

As I pulled into Samantha Waller and Jesse Klein’s driveway, I didn’t notice the dogs at first. I fumbled for notebooks and cameras and momentarily forgot that Samantha and Jesse bred Newfoundlands. Still and quiet, they were watching me, waiting for me to make the first move. Samantha greeted me just as I noticed her stoic giants, patient behind a pasture gate, calm and politely curious even after Samantha quickly introduced me to each of the half dozen dogs that were lounging in her large yard. The kennel was next door, and Samantha promised a complete tour and more time with her dogs after the interview.

Samantha is tall and has a commanding presence, a broad smile, and a deeply resonating voice. A self-proclaimed country girl from a family where music and farming are important, she moved from Bradford County to the outskirts of Philadelphia straight out of high school and played with her band that still includes a brother on the sound board. After ten years in the city, she missed the peace and quiet of the countryside.

“I moved here because I grew up here and I went to school here,” she said, “and it’s just the country and the fresh air. I can tell you the difference when I moved here from the Philadelphia area—I could breathe again.”

Three years before unconventional gas drilling hit her neighborhood, she returned to start a dog-breeding business and a farm with her partner, Jesse.

“Before, you’d be lucky if you passed two cars and an Amish buggy on a fifteen-minute drive into town,” Samantha said. “Now, I can’t even get down to Leroy before I’m sitting in traffic behind hordes of water trucks and dump trucks, or big trucks that have huge things on ’em that take forever to drive down the highway. When these trucks are sitting in a line, all you smell in the valley is diesel fuel. Before, all you had to worry about was the odor of cow poop. Before, you could go outside at night, shut your eyes, and listen to the crickets, the peepers, and maybe hear a coyote howl. Now, if you go out my front door at night, all you hear is, beep, beep, beep and boom, boom, boom!” she said, clapping her hands loudly.

It’s the sound of trucks backing up, crews building pads, drilling holes to preserve leases, and then moving on to build the next pad and lock the next lease. Without activity, the lease could be lost. And many leases were up for renewal in this neighborhood.

Samantha and Jesse’s situation is not uncommon—they own the surface rights, but a local farmer, who sold them the house and the land, owns the mineral rights, which he leased to a gas drilling company. The farmer recently passed away, and the rights and the lease now belong to his spouse and children. “We didn’t know what was going on until they [the drillers] were here,” Samantha said. “Everyone was excited at first, thinking about how much money they were going to make. They didn’t think what could happen. And now everybody is like, ‘Ah, this is crazy! I can’t sleep, I can’t get to town.’ Many people say it feels like we’re being invaded. Aliens. They’re everywhere. No matter where you go. And that’s a sad, sad thing, because how do I know they won’t come on our property?”

Samantha and Jesse’s ten acres are situated on the corner of two narrow dirt roads on the side of a mountain just a short distance to downtown Leroy and nearby Canton. Next to their gravel driveway, a sign advertises brown eggs for a dollar a dozen. Samantha and Jesse’s Rhode Island Red chickens live in a coop out back and share space with Piglet, the potbellied pig. The Newfoundlands’ kennel is up front, right next to the driveway. On the other side of the driveway is their garden, in raised beds. The front porch looks down into the valley and across to the other side. From here, it’s not obvious that within ten miles of this property, there are approximately four hundred permitted gas wells, most of these high-volume, hydraulically fractured Marcellus wells.

On a tour of Samantha and Jesse’s neighborhood, we passed many unkempt properties with grass overgrown and appearing to be abandoned. Samantha pointed to three houses, part of what used to be a working farm. “This guy had a business,” she said. “There were cows grazing here. This all happened in the last six months. People have been displaced from their homes, and the drillers have moved in. People who were renting—they can no longer afford to rent.”

We drove onto a newly widened road that was once a one-laner, a back road used by teenagers to avoid the police after a night of heavy drinking. We passed many places where steep sides of hills rose twenty or so feet before flattening to a several-acre area, some topped by drilling rigs, condensate tanks, compressors, and trucks. Some appeared to have nothing on top, while many had grayish vegetation leading down one corner of the outside slope—places where chemical spills probably occurred or where wastewater may have run off the pad. Some of these flat areas appeared wet, others dry. Many had cornfields below them, and all were surrounded by either grazing deer or cattle, or sometimes both.

Samantha promised that we would see a lot today because “every back road leads to a well or well-related activity.” Just a few minutes from her home, we stopped near one of the pads. Although we couldn’t see very much, we could hear the sound of many trucks going by and compressors running. “This is the one closest to me,” Samantha explained. “There was a spill of 420 gallons of concentrated hydrochloric acid and several thousand gallons of wastewater at this well site in 2009. It contaminated a pond and killed a thirty-foot swath of vegetation less than a mile from my home. Nobody was told. I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what ‘frack’ meant at that time. Now, I know when something happens. I’ll see fifty white pickup trucks flying by, blinkers on.” The water from the spill was never tested, and although the acid was neutralized, some of it undoubtedly leaked into the bedrock.
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I wanted to drive up closer so that I could get some pictures. “Oh, they won’t let you—they’ll arrest us!” Samantha said, pointing to the signs on the billboard at the entrance to the pad. In addition to the large No Trespassing sign, another sign read:

And in small print at the bottom, this curious sign assured anonymity.

After giving this sign careful thought, I felt empowered to call the number listed and collect my reward. This land is being violated both above and below the ground. I could report the name of the drilling company (easy enough—it’s on the sign) and say what the land looks like and what the air smells like in this particular spot. I could join the ranks of energy crime stoppers in several other states including Texas, and remain anonymous!

We drove on, and Samantha asked me to stop again. “Now you can see where the runoff is,” she said. “Those big black things are supposed to stop a leak from going down to the creek.” She was referring to the booms, what we had seen on this tour at the base of all the pads and impoundments. Some booms looked like big black tubes, and others were substantial tubular cushions held in place by posts. We continued on a little further, following a boom as it snaked along, and we observed many areas where the runoff had sneaked past the boom, making its way effortlessly into the ditch at the side of the road.

Soon we reached the site of one of the best-publicized gas drilling spills in Pennsylvania, where thousands of gallons of flowback blew out during an initial stage of hydraulic fracturing, flooding the well pad before surging into a cow pasture, a tributary, and, finally, Towanda Creek. Six months later, beef cows grazed lazily below the pad, as if nothing had ever occurred here. The sides of the pad facing the road were very white, like they were covered with snow. I was glad to see that a fence separated this herd from the white-sided slope, but as the pasture lay directly below the pad, I wondered if anyone was monitoring the soil, grass, and surface water for contaminants from the slope runoff, contaminants such as the heavy metals, minerals, and radioactivity that were found to be elevated in nearby water wells following the blowout,
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contaminants that would tend to stay in the soil, be absorbed by the grass, then eaten by the cattle in this pasture. I wondered if the steak and hamburger made from this herd would contain these contaminants.

And what about the cattle, including pregnant cows and calves, that were on this pasture at the time of the blowout—what exactly had they been exposed to? Later I learned that the company had released the names of some of the chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process on the FracFocus website, but only after repeated calls from the news media. In a case like this—an emergency situation where families were evacuated—all chemicals used should have been disclosed to the public and to health-care providers immediately after the accident, if not before.

Leaving this well site, we passed many pads and impoundments. At several sites, the cows stood in the barn or huddled just outside while trucks rumbled in and out, transporting gravel, building the pads. The cows appeared on edge, vigilant. On sites where bulldozers were breaking ground, bright orange flags were strung across the entranceway, giving the construction a festive appearance. Samantha called these “grand-opening flags.” They were ubiquitous.

As we headed back to her house, I asked Samantha if I could ask her neighbors a few questions.

She shook her head and frowned. “No!” she replied. “They are too afraid to talk. You start talking about things like I did in the last couple months, and all of a sudden, every hour, you got white trucks going slow by your house.”

I was surprised and asked for specifics.

“We had one [truck] the other night,” she said. “They were going so slow, and staring at us. Jesse was on the front porch and said, ‘What is this guy doing?’ And so I went out, and we stood there and watched ’em. It was four guys with cowboy hats, just gave us the eye while they drove by real slow. A lot of people be scared by that.”

Returning to Samantha’s house, we passed several gas wells sitting on a pad above a veal calf barn, with rows of corn growing just beneath them. Samantha described what had been on her mind as well as the minds of other farmers.

“There are things that people don’t think about when they’re driving through here. People aren’t thinking, ‘Hmmm. We just passed a table of fresh fruits and vegetables for sale.’ Or like at our house—farm-fresh eggs for sale. I want to know, how fresh are these things when there is a wastewater pond or hydraulic fracturing going on just a hundred feet away from where the vegetables were grown? How good will the fish from Towanda Creek taste after all that wastewater flowed into it following the Leroy blowout? How about the field corn that grows where runoff has occurred? Nobody is thinking about how that corn will be fed to cows or pigs.”

I was hoping, at least, that the fields where sweet corn is grown were nowhere near any well pads. But Samantha drew my attention to fields of corn surrounding a well pad we were passing. “All that corn you see is sweet corn that’s sold at produce stands and markets all around here.”

We were nearly back to her place, yet we continued to pass pads. I ran a quick tally in my head—we had passed nearly twenty pads and had been on only two roads.

“Leaves you speechless, doesn’t it?” Samantha asked. “And there are thirty pads on the other side of the valley I could have shown you.”

I remembered what Samantha had said when we started out and how I found it difficult to believe—every back road leads to a well or well-related activity. Finally, we were on the road that led to her house—a road also not exempt, as she and Jesse have lately observed trucks driving by, loaded with drilling equipment. They suspect it is for construction of the well pad that will soon sit behind their home.

“I’ll know when the grand-opening flags go up,” Samantha said. “I’ll be standing out there with my shotgun, saying, ‘Don’t you bend a blade of grass!’ ”

Several adult Newfoundlands sat behind the gate that opened to the backyard and kennel. As I greeted them, they gently wagged tails and heaved their heft to meet me eye to eye. Samantha reintroduced me to each of the eight dogs, showed off her pristine kennel space, and then filled up a black five-gallon bucket with water. It bubbled for a few seconds before turning pearly white, looking like 7-UP with milk added to it. After a few minutes, the water began to slowly clear. Later, in the house, she held a glass for me to sniff—it smelled like a sewer and caused my handheld methane detector to buzz like a beehive. According to Samantha and Jesse, the water doesn’t always smell like a sewer—some days it smells like turpentine. And some days, it will have black or brown specks, or sand. And yes, they say, they can light their water on fire.

Ever since they have lived at this location, Samantha and Jesse have bought bottled water for themselves when they could afford it, because they don’t like the taste of the well water either before or after it has gone through the water softener. But the dogs never seemed to mind the well water and in fact thrived on it. When the water quality changed in the summer of 2009, Samantha wrote it off as caused by the drought that year. It wasn’t until the end of 2009 that she suspected that something was seriously wrong with her water.

“We started to have all kinds of issues with our animals,” Samantha said. “We lost about seven chickens suddenly—we found them dead on the floor of the coop in the morning after looking fine the day before. And we started having trouble with the dogs—they wouldn’t drink the water, and they began to have problems getting pregnant.”

When I first heard about Samantha’s dog-breeding problems in the summer of 2011, I suggested she get the dogs off the well water. Samantha reminded me of this now, two months later, as we talked at her kitchen table. Her Newfies, at 150 pounds each, are big drinkers—about a gallon of water per dog every day—and that’s not counting the extra water needed in the summertime, to cool off and for bathing. Even though these dogs are Samantha and Jesse’s livelihood, the women can’t afford to provide the dogs with bottled water. So they began to catch and save rainwater. But this wasn’t enough, so all of their animals, including the dogs, were forced to drink the well water.