The Real Cost of Fracking (14 page)

I was thinking about her house, her dogs, her life, her options. She seemed able to read my mind. “I was sold my property with potable water, but now, if I were to put it on the market, would you buy it? Would you come here and buy this beautiful piece of property? If the water smells so bad, it makes you want to throw up? If you have to take a shower four hours before company arrives, so you can air the house out?”

She knew the answer to this question, but she was looking for advice—what should she do?

I had no clear-cut answers.

“I’ve spent forty years of my life to be able to get this, to be able to buy this property and farm this land, to have the American dream. And then corporations came in and took it away from us overnight.”

In March 2012, Samantha started a full-time job in a gardening center, tending plants. At home, there are five adult Newfoundlands with uncertain futures. It’s ironic that Samantha has found a job working in a gardening center, because she and Jesse had planned to have a greenhouse next year to produce veggies to sell at a small stand along with their farm-fresh eggs. Their goal for 2013 was to have thirteen breeding Newfoundlands along with the produce stand and a wood shop, but that seems impossible now. After repeated requests, the drilling company vented Samantha and Jesse’s water well in April 2012. Since then, the women have noticed that the water spits and sputters less frequently, but they still occasionally see some sand and grit. According to Samantha, they continue to leave the door cracked open when they shower, just in case.

Driving away from Samantha and Jesse’s home, I was reminded of the plans for Bradford and Tioga Counties. Looking at the map of leases and permits in these two Pennsylvania counties, it is clear that that the area will soon be saturated with gas wells. In fact, in all of Pennsylvania, only 2 percent of the projected number of wells have been drilled, and many fewer have yet to be hydraulically fractured.
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You can drive around these counties, and except for the intense traffic and occasional industrial sites associated with gas drilling, the area remains beautiful and rural. But in this little area of the world, Samantha and Jesse’s neighborhood, the build-out has begun. In their neighborhood, we can travel down roads with wells every few hundred yards, giving us an idea of what full build-out will look like.

The industry would like us to think that the industrialization of the area is just temporary and that everything will go back to normal after all the wells are drilled in ten or twenty years. But consider what is happening now in this small area that is being intensively drilled. In three years, there have been three major accidents within a three-mile radius. Two we have already discussed: the well that blew out during the hydraulic fracturing process and contaminated a tributary of the Susquehanna River and, a year later, the spill of 420 gallons of concentrated hydrochloric acid and drilling fluids. A third well was cited twice for a faulty casing.
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Several months after the second incident, methane was still being detected in water wells and bubbling up in streams in the area.
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Is this what we have to look forward to for the next ten to twenty years? And after all the wells have been drilled, will life return to normal? The economic activity associated with the drilling will cease, and if the current production numbers are correct, the economic benefits from royalties will soon plummet. We will be left with tens to hundreds of thousands of holes in the ground where we have exchanged freshwater for toxic chemicals and hydrocarbons. These holes will be sealed with cement that will eventually fail, with unknown consequences for the drinking water of future generations.

The term
nostalgia
is often used to describe the emotional stress of homesickness. But when an environmental event changes your home or way of life, the longing for better times can produce a similar stress. The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined the term
solastalgia
¹
to describe the distress caused by an environmental change directly connected to an individual’s current home. In this way, the home can become an emotional prison, and the only solution is to leave and establish a home in a new environment. This is the story of a husband and wife who endured but recognized the perils of solastalgia at several locations. As this book is being written, they are considering yet another move.

When I first met Ann Smith and her husband, Andrew, in August 2012, they were living in their fourth residence. Over the past thirty-five years, they had moved three times to escape the health impacts of the fossil fuel industry, from nice homes sitting on nice pieces of property, to a beautiful home ten miles from their first house and surrounded by roads sprayed with drilling wastewater.

During our talk, both Ann and Andrew referred to their previous homes as
incidents,
as if their houses could be reduced to unpleasant events, rather than places where they had lived. It wasn’t until we discussed their third move that I began to understand why. They told me about a neighbor who stayed on even though her health had been severely affected by the shale gas drilling in their neighborhood. When I asked why she didn’t move, they explained, “She’s lived there thirty-five years, and she’ll never leave, no matter what.”

“That’s a hard thing for people to admit [that you must leave your home for the sake of your health]. I’ve gone through it with this one,” Andrew said, pointing to a picture of Incident 3. “I said, ‘I’m just gonna get the hell out of here. Move on.’ ”

Solastalgia, I thought. It’s probably something you can never fully understand until experiencing it, and I hoped I never would.

About an hour south of Ann and Andrew’s current residence, I observed miniature oil rigs on lawns, where geese or deer statues might otherwise have been. Very soon, I understood why. I was passing through Titusville, Pennsylvania, where Edwin Drake (“Crazy Drake”) of the Seneca Oil Company and William “Uncle Billy” Smith together drilled the first successful oil well. They hit oil on August 28, 1859, near present-day Oil Creek State Park, using a drill fashioned by Smith, who was a blacksmith, and a pine derrick that they had built together. The discovery set off an oil rush, the echoes of which have spread throughout the world. But the oil boom was first felt in Titusville, where the population grew fortyfold within six years and where eight refineries were built within the decade. I had not realized that Ann and Andrew lived so close to Titusville, as they hadn’t mentioned this landmark when we discussed directions. Then again, passing through Titusville, I wondered if the average person would have any idea that the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania. I suspected that most people would say somewhere in the Middle East or maybe Texas. But certainly not in Pennsylvania.

With photos spread on their dining room table—documentation from the three previous incidents—the Smiths were ready and waiting for me. A middle-aged couple from this region of Pennsylvania, they balanced each other perfectly. Ann is a short, energetic, quick-witted housewife, a horse breeder, and a self-described go-to person. Andrew is a tall, calm, and thoughtful businessman, the owner of a successful sawmill who has been in the lumber industry all his life.

When she wasn’t leaving the room to find more documents in her files, Ann stayed seated during the interview and Andrew stood beside her, occasionally elaborating on her statements whenever the opportunity arose. Some of the photos on the table—close-ups of bubbles frozen in pond ice and of bubbles percolating from wet ground in the pasture and the dirt driveway—I recognized from Incident 3, the residence I knew the most about. But today my goal was to start from the beginning, from the first house, and move forward to where they lived now. I was particularly curious about what happened at Incident 1, because I grew up in a small town in south Jersey, surrounded by three large oil and gas refineries, and never realized what clean air and fresh water was until I moved to upstate New York.

Ann showed me a photo of Incident 1. A colonial mansion, built in 1863, sits high above the town, with tall windows all around and columns in front, reminding me of a luxurious antebellum Southern plantation home. It was in this house that Ann and Andrew began their life together. Andrew explained that his family owned nine hundred acres of oilfield in the area and that this house sat on four hundred acres of unleased land adjacent to the oilfield, not too far from where we were now talking. The Smiths lived there from 1978 to 1988, in their spare time restoring the mansion, which had been built and owned by Andrew’s great-great-grandfather. While living there, they developed a high-grade herd of registered beef cattle, bred and showed horses, and had several beloved English mastiffs as pets. And while living there, Ann became very ill.

Because the Smiths had documented the events carefully, and because they sought help from politicians, reporters, the PADEP, and special commissions, I was fortunate to have mounds of records and letters to piece together what had happened to them. In mid-1981, Ann began to experience bizarre allergic reactions to many substances, with severe episodes of sneezing and nosebleeds. Although she was seeing an allergist, her symptoms seemed to intensify. Over the Christmas holiday in 1983, she developed stage IV status asthmaticus (a sudden worsening of asthma symptoms that are not responsive to treatment), with more episodes occurring over the coming months. For Andrew, who rushed an air-starved Ann to the emergency room countless times, life devolved into spending evenings in the ER and working during the day.

That year, before Ann’s attack of status asthmaticus, the Smiths had noticed changes in the air and water quality. Their well water would periodically turn brown with white specks, and there was often a smell of sewage or rotten eggs in the air, so intense that it would force them to leave their home and stay in a travel trailer graciously lent by a neighbor. During 1986, the Smiths observed a fine white powder in their home and on their vehicles, lawn, and trees, and they and their animals had frequent health problems. Ann and Andrew suffered from blisters, nausea, headaches, nosebleeds, and a burning sensation while breathing. Meanwhile, their cat, dogs, horses, and cattle had recurring respiratory and skin problems, including blisters and hair loss.

In December 1986, Ann and Andrew discovered that not only did their neighbors have similar symptoms, but a spill of liquid naphtha—produced during the distillation of crude oil—had occurred at the oil refinery storage facility located on a neighborhood tank farm. They would later learn that spent catalyst powder, a fine white powder used in petroleum refining processing, was being deposited here.
²

When I inquired about legal issues, I quickly realized that both Ann and Andrew were still distraught about all that had happened with Incident 1 and the refinery, particularly their lawsuit, even though it happened nearly twenty-five years ago. Raising her voice a pitch or two, Ann described the many hours spent in law, medical, and chemistry libraries researching refineries, catalyst powder, and environmental lawsuits. When she was finished recounting this to me, Andrew gave his opinion loudly and firmly. In contrast to the calm, soft voice he had been using, he now spoke more forcefully as he explained that from this experience, they learned that a lawyer may all too often make more money defending the fossil fuel industry than prosecuting cases for private citizens, such as themselves.

Their first move was to Jamestown in Chautauqua County, New York (Incident 2). There, the Smiths rebuilt a dilapidated farmhouse and barn and lived there from 1988 to 2005, on 135 acres, continuing to keep both their beloved horses and dogs. During the next nine years, both Andrew’s and Ann’s health improved, and both were happy to breathe the air.

But Incident 2 was less than thirty minutes away from Incident 1 and the refinery. “Why not move further away?” I asked.

“There were two big positives,” Andrew answered. “We were still near the business, and there was no hydrocarbon extraction in the area.”

Yet. Although they moved when there was little drilling activity in the immediate area, this part of New York has been the most intensively drilled area for both oil and gas since the nineteenth century. In fact, William Hart drilled the first commercial gas well only thirty miles away from Incident 2 in Fredonia, Chautauqua County, in 1821. Hart, a local gunsmith, first dug a twenty-seven-foot-deep well and then drilled to seventy feet to reach a pocket of gas. He put in a gas meter and piped gas to a local innkeeper. In the next few years, Fredonia became known for gas-fired street lighting made possible by a multitude of shallow gas wells.

Today, while Chautauqua and Cattaraugus Counties in New York are not the largest producers of natural gas in the state, they do have the largest number of active gas wells. Although Chautauqua County is often noted as a place where tourism and hydrocarbon extraction and use can coexist, it remains the part of New York outside of the New York City metropolitan area with the poorest air quality. The Levant area of Chautauqua County is known for a 1980s case of gas migration to drinking water, which resulted in the explosion of a water well and contamination of a number of other water wells in the area. Gas wells had been drilled in the year prior to the explosion on a nearby hillside. Using radiocarbon dating, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) showed that the source of the gas found in the water wells came from deep sources and was consistent with the gas produced from recently drilled gas wells.
³
So, while the Smiths moved at a time when drilling south of Incident 2 was not particularly active, the area was no stranger to hydrocarbon extraction.

The Smiths explained that when they bought Incident 2, they bought both the surface rights and the mineral rights but that a previous owner had leased these rights to a drilling company. Because their research indicated that no drilling was likely to occur, they thought they were safe, but they hadn’t researched their neighbors’ opinions on the subject. They soon discovered that almost everyone around them wanted gas wells, and in 1997, Ann and Andrew were introduced to the world of gas drilling. The first well, approximately nineteen hundred feet away, was conventional, using approximately sixty thousand gallons of water and chemicals. After the hydraulic fracturing was completed, the Smiths’ water quality changed, slowly becoming too salty to drink and forcing them to buy bottled water and haul water for their horses. So the Smiths drilled another water well. “The first water well we had was at a hundred thirty-five feet,” Andrew explained. “We went down ninety feet on the second well and had potable water. The crazy thing was, the neighbors still wanted drilling.”