The Real Cost of Fracking (15 page)

According to the Smiths, after the first gas well was drilled, their health and the health of their animals again began to decline. “We found out we really couldn’t take the rock cuttings, neither one of us,” Ann said. There was a period of approximately two years in between bursts of drilling. During drilling events at Incident 2, the Smiths experienced health issues similar to what they had encountered at Incident 1: difficulty breathing, burning throats, mouth blisters, rashes, upset digestive systems, and nosebleeds. “We’d take it for so many hours, but then we would get to the point where we couldn’t take it anymore,” Ann said. “We’d take off in the vehicles with our dogs for a few hours, detox, and come back. Often we’d sleep in our vehicles at Andrew’s business.”

But they couldn’t take their horses, all coughing and heaving, and on steroids because of breathing problems. In 2003, the Smiths were evacuating every night because of the drilling, and it was hard to stay home during the day. At one point they vacated for a full month with all of their animals by leasing a barn for the horses and renting a travel trailer to stay nearby. Still, the horses may have suffered the most, because other than this month away, they rarely left the farm.

After the Smiths’ experience with the refinery lawsuit at Incident 1, I truly doubted that they would have jumped into another fight with the industry. But they did. They were slow learners, Ann said, because over the next six years, they hired several law firms, most of which soon came to the Smiths asking to be released. The Smiths suspect that the lawyers were approached by the gas exploration company and promised large amounts of legal work. In their lawsuit, the Smiths asked basic questions about the fairness of land contracts and the rights to all water in a community. They asked moral and ethical questions. For example, does a drilling company owe a duty of care when operating in the vicinity of a heart or lung patient? If rock cuttings are considered hazardous waste if submerged in water, how can they be benign when blown indiscriminately into the air, especially if they can be inhaled?

“We took an unpopular stand, and we weren’t very successful,” Ann noted. “Our mission was not to prevent drilling; it was to force the exploration company to use diligence and care in the vicinity of a lung patient. We felt strongly that we should not be driven from our home.”

Instead, according to the Smiths, 2005 arrived with a projection of more gas wells in their area. This, combined with soaring health insurance premiums due to a legal loophole between the two states, forced them to forsake the second place they had loved.

On the way to the Smiths’ current home, I took a detour to the location of Incident 3, approximately an hour south from Incident 2, in Pittsfield, Pennsylvania. The property sat at the top of a very steep dead-end dirt road in the middle of thousands of acres of Allegheny Forest timberland. Just off the road were two ponds, and nearby, the farmhouse and barn sat on forty wooded acres spaced far from other houses, giving the appearance of complete privacy. I could understand why they fell in love with the place: it looked like a dream home.

The Smiths bought Incident 3 in 2005, remodeled the home, and rebuilt the barn, moving in 2006. They moved to escape the previous drilling company, but also because they were told the new area was not promising for hydrocarbon exploration. “We went to two different geologists from surrounding leaseholds, and they said ‘No!’ ” Ann said, banging her fist on the table. “ ‘No drilling in the foreseeable future. No drilling!’ ” She waved her arms in a complete circle, “Everything around us—dry!”

Andrew explained, “Even though we owned the surface and mineral rights, forty acres doesn’t mean anything, because we were surrounded by others who had leased.”

As they reminisced about moving into Incident 3 and their first years there, I noticed a distinct change in Ann’s and Andrew’s moods. “We had a blessed year and a half where things got really better. Air was wonderful, the water was clear and good. Horses got better. Dogs got better, we got better,” Ann said calmly, as she and Andrew smiled at each other. “Ha! We were away from the drilling company, and I was able to get off my asthma medicine. The one mare that was having such respiratory problems, I was able to ride her, and we were thinking about showing her. We had plans—we were going to get on with our life. We rebuilt the barn and had a contractor lined up to rebuild the house, set back behind the ponds—something we felt we deserved.”

In the summer of 2007, the PADEP called and informed the Smiths that a company was coming in to drill a vertical gas well within a mile of their home. “We couldn’t get our minds or tongues wrapped around the word ‘Marcellus’—it sounded so silly,” Ann said, as if the word
Marcellus
tasted bitter. “We didn’t have a computer, so I couldn’t research this easily. We thought, they’re just going to drill a test well, just one well. Then we were told four test wells—we had no clue what a test well was. Still, we thought, we could put our heads in the sand, we could evacuate, detox, come back. We could get through this.”

“Forty-five hundred feet away,” Andrew said. “We could tough this one out. And the prevailing winds would be away from us.” Incident 3 was downhill from the well site, with a lot of woods to go through.

According to the well record and completion report supplied by the Smiths, drilling at this gas well lasted only five days in August 2007, and hydraulic fracturing took place twice over several days in August and October 2007. There is nothing on the record, however, about the venting that apparently occurred over the subsequent weeks. Soon after completion (hydraulic fracturing and production), the Smiths noticed that the air quality changed. They’d wake up in the middle of the night and feel as if they were suffocating. Andrew called the drilling company and the PADEP two or three times per week and complained that there was something wrong. He was told that there was nothing wrong with the new well site.

“So I began walking the hill where the gas well was,” Andrew said. “And I found I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t smell anything unusual; I just couldn’t breathe.”

The Smiths began evacuating on and off that fall of 2007, just as they had in their previous two homes. They managed to keep working and to keep their lives on track, but it took enormous energy and courage to do so. “I remember one night was so bad,” Ann said, “I called the county fairgrounds and asked, ‘If I have to evacuate these horses, can I bring ’em down?’ ” At this time, the Smiths discovered that an old gas pipeline, cutting across their backyard and close to the horse barn, was leaking. “The pipe had rusted through and the gas was bubbling into the pasture, sixty-five feet from the horse barn,” Ann explained.

Christmastime 2007 is a time Ann and Andrew will never forget. There was a heavy snow that year, and Andrew had gone out to watch another pipeline repair on their property. On his way out, he was shocked to see that the large pond by the house was bubbling like a cauldron, with a hole through six inches of ice and two and a half feet of snow.

In the commotion to document this event, the Smiths found that both their and their neighbor’s camcorders were dead. Ann and Andrew immediately called the drilling and pipeline companies as well as the PADEP. The next day, representatives from the drilling and pipeline companies arrived, but by then, the bubbling had stopped. The Smiths strongly suspected that under pressure, gas and flowback fluids had escaped onto their property through natural faults in the underlying rock.

In the coming months, both ponds bubbled and developed an oily sheen and white film, which Ann and Andrew also observed in their springhouse and well water. As they spoke, the Smiths showed me photos and videos of the ponds: bubbles in the winter caught frozen, and in the summer, an oily film with slick-coated bubbles. There are hours of footage with bubbles rising upward and breaking at the surface as if duck bubblers—aerators that keep duck ponds ice-free—had been installed.

The PADEP visited the Smiths’ property many times after their pond’s blow-out, sampling the water in their spring and pond, surveying the pond, and inspecting the gas wells closest to them. In September 2008, the Smiths received a letter from the agency stating that there was no indication that their waters were affected by oil- and gas-related activities.

In the end, neither the drilling company nor the pipeline company was held accountable. With arms crossed in front of her, fingers pointing in opposite directions, Ann said, “And the Smiths sat in the middle!”

From the stacks of letters and reams of test results and other records they kept, I can attest that the Smiths did more than simply sit in the middle: they were proactive in the strongest sense of the word. These were not people who needed encouragement to have testing done. The only thing they didn’t do was to have a predrilling air test done—something that would have been extremely useful but expensive and often is difficult to perform and interpret. Without a predrilling test, one could spend thousands of dollars on air and water testing, as the Smiths had done for the third time, and have no chance to definitively point to any chemical or substance as the cause of the problem.

So why do it? What drove Ann and Andrew to go nearly bankrupt a third time in trying to find a cause through testing? The answer is simple: their own health and that of their animals. At Incident 3, the Smiths reported symptoms that were very similar to what they experienced in Incidents 1 and 2, with burning in the eyes, nose, and throat being the most common. They also noted additional problems: their skin felt like sandpaper, their teeth and jawbones ached, and they suffered from nausea, breathing difficulty, severe headaches, and heart-attack-like chest pains. Their horses and dogs suffered from multiple health problems, including respiratory difficulties such as severe wheezing and coughing that could only be lessened with large doses of steroids.

“After 2007, through 2008 and into 2009, things just got worse,” Ann explained. “I really destabilized—I went back to being status asthmaticus. My sinuses got worse, my eardrums ruptured, I became deaf. Andrew and I suffered severe fatigue.”

There’s more, I thought, remembering the thick packet of lawyers’ letters, names removed, that Ann had sent me months ago. Ann and Andrew were down for the third time. Why did they try again?

“If it gets to a point where we can’t make headway, we do what we call Plan B, which is to pack up and move,” Ann explained. But first they tried because they thought they had a fighting chance. “We took Incident 3 up to the point where I contacted five lawyers and finally retained one from Pittsburgh. I contacted twenty-one testing firms. A few of the really big ones were going to come in with air testing, were going to come in with water testing. The Pittsburgh lawyer told us we’d need three hundred thousand dollars to initiate and run the lawsuit, then we’d need another three hundred thousand if we got SLAPP suited [in a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP), a party is sued by the plaintiff in an attempt to stifle public criticism]. We just looked at each other and said, ‘We can’t live here. Period. So why don’t we just move.’ ”

Still, they hesitated. In the early summer of 2009, the Smiths were notified that the drilling company was planning a second Marcellus well adjacent to the first. In light of their two-year nightmare, the Smiths asked the drilling company to buy them out, but their request was ignored. There was no other option but to secure a large mortgage, buy another house, and take another loss—this time over $500,000.

In the fall of 2008, during one of the many times the Smiths had evacuated Incident 3 to detoxify, they had passed through a neighborhood with many gas wells, within ten miles of Incident 2, and noticed an abandoned house and barn. By the summer of 2009, the property was theirs, and for the fourth time, they found themselves rebuilding a house and a barn. The house sat just off the road, on 75 acres with mineral and surface rights that were not leased, and was surrounded by several smaller unleased lots for sale, which the Smiths quickly bought, increasing their acreage to 115.

“What about the neighbors?” I asked, with trepidation.

“I went to the courthouse and looked up everybody’s deed,” Andrew said confidently. “Nobody around us is leased.”

Ann added, “That was a big criterion. We’re only here while there’s a hiatus in drilling. We’ll never be able to stand being next door—”

Andrew interrupted his wife. “We will not stick around,” he said defiantly. “We know better than to try and fight. They have too much power.”

Did they mean it? If drilling started near them, would they move yet again?

Ann answered calmly, “We take it day to day to day. You get up each morning, thinking, ‘Is this the day I’ll have to leave?’ Because we wouldn’t be able to stay. This time, if the drilling starts, it’ll take me about five minutes to keel over.”

I wondered whether they noticed a change in their animals’ health after moving to their current location. Fortunately for the Smiths, most of the health problems their animals experienced at the previous location have abated. According to Ann as well as her farrier—who had spent the most time with the horses at Incidents 2 and 3 and continues to take care of the horses at the current location—the biggest change observed was in the horses’ feet: they had improved dramatically since leaving Incident 3. And because it takes approximately a year for a horse to grow a new hoof, the horses’ feet were continuing to improve. When I asked Ann if she was able to ride any of the horses yet, she smiled and answered in the affirmative that one particularly nice-looking horse often “hauled the royal ‘ass’ around the farm.”

Regarding Ann’s and Andrew’s health, the answer was complex. Andrew no longer suffers from many of the acute respiratory, gastrointestinal, and neurologic symptoms that he once endured, but he still experiences the same extreme fatigue and weight gain that Ann did. Ann’s hearing has returned, and her asthma is now stable. But since moving to her current home, she has developed imbalances in her parathyroid and adrenal glands, possibly due to the steroids taken for many years to control her asthma and sinusitis, although no definitive cause has been found. She doesn’t blame any of these current health problems on this particular location, but does say that before Incident 1, she was as healthy as an ox. Photos taken at Incident 1, before she became ill there, show a woman who worked the farm; baled hay; drove a tractor; raised cattle, horses, and dogs; and took care of her home and man. According to Ann, years of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals and years of medications to control her symptoms and keep her alive have taken a toll and her body is now worn out. At this location for more than three years, she is fighting hard to stay stable.