The Real Cost of Fracking (18 page)

Meanwhile, we shouldn’t wait until all the science is in before we decide to protect the public’s health. In the early 1990s, nuanced approaches to risk management were successful in preventing an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the United States.
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These actions prove that we
can
make a careful analysis of risk with incomplete data sets and prevent such public health disasters as we have seen with tobacco use and may yet see in areas undergoing unconventional fossil fuel extraction.

Beyond worries of food safety, the larger issue looming before farmers in several drought-stricken, intensively drilled states in the West and Southwest is whether they will be able to farm in the future.
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In these states, farmers are competing with the fossil fuel industry for a rapidly dwindling water supply: in Colorado, more than 90 percent of unconventional wells were hydraulically fractured in extremely high water stress areas while in Texas, more than 50 percent of wells were hydraulically fractured in high or extremely high water stress areas.
⁴¹
Without water, farmers are forced to fallow fields that would otherwise be productive, or lease the land to the oil and gas companies. Either way, less food is produced. If the fossil fuel industry continues to use the water that our nation’s farmers so desperately depend on, we will be asking ourselves not how safe is our food, but where will our food come from?

In
chapters 6
and
7
, we illustrate the problems associated with farming in intensively drilled areas with the stories of two farm families raising cattle in Pennsylvania. These are people who have lived in the same area since they were born and who have long histories of farming. When they tell us that their herd’s health has changed since drilling began, they mean that the health of their cattle has been the same for many years but has dramatically changed within a few short years. These farmers are not environmental activists—they are simply good people yearning for respect and acknowledgment of the problems that they have endured during the last few years.

SIX

MARY AND CHARLIE
Quarantined Cattle

The Jamesons’ farm sits six miles east of the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania,
¹
where Mary Jameson’s father kept concession stands for thirty years. Mary doesn’t come from farming stock, except for an uncle who was a farmer—“and that doesn’t count for much,” according to his niece. It’s Mary’s husband, Charlie, who has farming in his blood: he took his first breath up the road on his father’s farm, where the business was dairy cattle and potatoes. His mother sold her farm to Charlie for one dollar at a time when the farm was 73 acres with fourteen little red outbuildings; the farm now consists of 530 acres, with the Jamesons’ son Joe on the upper farm and Charlie and Mary on the lower farm.

Charlie’s original intention was to run a gentleman’s farm, but soon after he acquired thirty high-grade cows, the number in his herd ballooned to ninety. Charlie, as full-time dairyman, and Mary, as part-time help on weekends, kept the dairy business going for over thirty years. After they stopped sending milk, they continued to sell hay and put up corn, but soon threw in a few head of beef cattle, just to keep Charlie busy. Those few head gradually grew to over thirty, the number the Jamesons grazed before the gas drilling rig made its presence known in their backyard.

And it is literally in their backyard. Their driveway is now the access road, with trucks rumbling in and out just feet from their kitchen window. Facing me at the kitchen table, Charlie interrupted my questions to ask if I have seen the bank leading up to the well pad; he wanted me to see how close it is to the house and how it slopes right down to his barn.

I visited the Jamesons in October 2011, almost a year and a half after a wastewater spill into their grazing pasture led to the PADEP-ordered quarantine of most of their beef cattle and the subsequent loss of calves in the following breeding season. Of all the things that have happened on this farm, the placement of the well pad so close to his house, barn, and cattle pasture seemed to rankle Charlie the most. To me—an outsider and a nonfarmer—this looked small compared to the major cost of the herd quarantine and the loss of calves and many acres of pastureland and hay fields.

“That’s all we got to look at is that doggone bank and the well pad they put there,” Charlie said. “They give you a song and dance that they will only be there a couple years and then it will all be put back to its natural state. Well! That’s gonna stay like that indefinitely. It came right up next to our shed here, and I just took my little farm loader and opened it up a little bit so I could get around that.”

I stared at the banks, and the banks stared back, unmowed and untrimmed. “So they’re supposed to take care of all that?” I asked.

Both farmers snickered. “Especially if they’re in your backyard!” Charlie answered. “If it’s out in the back forty, where nobody sees it, I can understand—maybe not mow it. But right here, they should keep it tidy a little bit, especially [with] people with hay fever.”

Charlie dropped his gaze to the table and said, “We can’t get ’em to do anything.”

To demonstrate what their farm looked like before drilling, Mary showed me a large framed aerial color photo of the farmhouse, barns, shed, cattle pasture, and cattle. Behind the barns and shed was pastureland, gently sloping upward and divided by a stand of trees with a dirt road running alongside. I noticed the missing stand of trees and what was once the gentle hill behind the barn, now built up by thirty feet. The pasture had been ripped apart for transmission pipelines that will trespass across the property and up to an adjoining well at a higher elevation, above the airport. That means more fencing to be interrupted and rebuilt. Because of the constant upheaval on their farm, they keep a six-strand barbed-wire fence on hand.

The farmers lost a pasture, a gravity-fed manure system, and a beautiful view from their house and from the top of the hill. The cattle lost continuous grazing land.

But it’s how they’ve been mistreated that gets under the skin of both farmers—ignored by drillers who call themselves neighbors. A request for compensation for a cattle chute to manage the bull calves held under quarantine was refused, and a demand to have the herd replaced was ignored. Recently, the company voluntarily raised the issue of compensation for the beef herd. Mary’s response: “A dollar late and a day short! I have turned that over to our attorney. That ’til it’s all said and done will take years—maybe more than we have. The last person they paid off had to sign a gag restriction. They won’t get that from us. Any story that I have given [to the media] has not been nasty but rather reaching for answers and attempting to educate people as to what they need to look out for.”

These were not the happy farmers to which the gas industry proudly refers—the ones with the new barn, content cows, new fences, and new stake on life. I wondered if Charlie and Mary were ever happy with the drillers. Did the Jamesons know what they were getting into when they leased? Mary answered, “No, no, no. We were just gonna help pay the taxes.” And if they could do it over again, would they? They both responded at the same time: Mary didn’t think so. She’s had enough to take care of, she said, she didn’t need this. Charlie was more direct, more emphatic. He stiffened and looked me straight in the eye: “No. Absolutely, no.” Years ago, they explained, leasing helped pay the taxes, but there was deep regret in their voices and a desire to explain more. Charlie described how a landsman first came around in 2000 and asked if they wanted to lease their land for $1 per acre.

“Well, that sounded pretty good then. So we said, ‘OK, why not?’ You know, well, I mean, you got nothing to lose, right?” To emphasize the absurdity of this situation, Charlie pointed to the well pad, grinned, and asked again, “Right?” After ten years,
²
the landsman returned and offered to double the leasing rate to $2 per acre, which the Jamesons accepted. Shaking his pencil at the well pad area, Charlie said, “And that’s what they put that on: a two-dollar-an-acre lease.” He let the pencil fall to the table. “We hung ourselves.”

According to the farmers, almost everybody in the county was leased at that point, “one way or another.” The few who didn’t gobble up the $1- and $2-per-acre leases held out for the $5,000-per-acre leases. Charlie added, “So they’re the only ones who are winning, I guess, if there’s a win to it.”

I asked about the well location site fee; did that help? Charlie grimaced before answering, “They take a lot of ground. And they only pay fifteen thousand dollars to be tied up, how long? Maybe fifteen, maybe a hundred years. You know, that’s not compensation enough.” Did their lease give them any say on where the well would be located? According to the lease, this is supposed to be negotiable. But when the Jamesons pressed the issue, they began to fear they would not receive their $15,000 site fee, so they backed down. But a neighbor didn’t, and so far she has not received her site fee. Mary explained that there is no specific clause in their lease stating that the site fee must be paid. In fact, leases sometimes include a site fee clause, but it’s often conditional and goes unpaid.

Were these farmers ever told what might happen? No, they said, they were not. “We never realized that all this could explode like this,” Charlie said, shaking his head. They noted that in their neighborhood, a lot of real estate is for sale—mostly houses—not selling because of problems obtaining mortgages.

According to the Jamesons, the landsmen were out to get everyone “leased up” and became angry and began yelling if the farmers questioned anything. But a year ago, a landsman offered them $800 an acre to put a seven- or eight-acre freshwater impoundment on a part of their land located across the road from the cow pastures and barn. Mary and Charlie refused out of concern for their neighbors as well as the loss of more of their land, but this particular landsman wasn’t upset by their reply. Charlie, who had his chair rocked back from the table while Mary was talking, drew back in and assumed an elfish grin. “Well,” he said, “that was one of the most sincere people they sent around; that landsman said he wouldn’t allow it to be put on his ground!”

On July 1, 2010, the PADEP issued a press release: wastewater from a drilling site had leaked into an adjacent cow pasture on a beef cattle farm.
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Minerals and metals were found, including strontium, and the entire herd, save two bulls, was placed on quarantine.

Several things bothered me about this press release. First, there was nearly a two-month gap between the time the Jamesons’ quarantine was instituted on May 5, 2010, and the time it was reported to the public. Second, there was no mention of tests for radioactivity or organic compounds. This was a food safety issue, and I had some basic questions. Did the drilling company provide the PADEP with a list of the drilling muds and hydraulic fracturing fluids that were used? Was the wastewater tested for these chemicals as well as others released from the shale during fracturing, such as radioactive compounds and the carcinogen benzene? Were the quarantine recommendations based on solid knowledge of the chemicals that are often found in shale gas wastewater?

I immediately called the PADEP and was connected to the animal health division. After several calls and emails, I learned that the Jamesons’ quarantine had developed into a legal matter, and details of this case could not be discussed with anyone. Apparently, the case arose from the drilling company’s questioning of the legality of the quarantine. This seemed strange to me, since it was the farmers, not the drilling company, who stood to lose the most financially. Yet no one, including the drilling company, was offering any compensation to Mary and Charlie. By year’s end, the case was resolved, and the quarantine remained in place.

Because of my veterinary and pharmacology background, I contacted the Food Animal Residue Avoidance Databank (FARAD),
⁴
the group advising PADEP on the Jamesons’ quarantine guidelines. Unfortunately, the initial response was that unless I was the attending veterinarian, my questions would not be answered. Surely, I thought, FARAD would answer general questions from a concerned veterinarian. So I sent an email listing several chemicals commonly occurring in drilling wastewater—chemicals such as radon, radium-226, arsenic, barium, cadmium, lead, mercury, strontium, benzene, toluene, xylene, diesel fuel, kerosene, naphthalene, methylene, ethylene glycol, and hydrochloric acid, and I asked several questions:

The response from FARAD was simple: “We do not answer ‘general questions.’ ” The agency referred me to a state veterinarian working in conjunction with a state diagnostic laboratory, or someone at a veterinary school. After several additional emails, I heard from one of FARAD’s codirectors, who advised on quarantine guidelines. He was lamenting his inability to answer my questions due to a lack of federal funding, specifically that related to chemical contamination.

I first spoke with Mary in January 2011, when the Jameson herd was eight months into the quarantine. Mary mentioned that due to the quarantine, she and Charlie would be forced to keep the bull calves for two years and that the bulls were hard to handle even with a cattle chute. Mary estimated that they had lost more than $10,000 but were not pursuing a lawsuit as they hoped they would make this money back in royalty payments once the wells were actively producing. Nevertheless, six head had gone to slaughter—as either adults after six months’ quarantine or yearlings after eight months’ quarantine. The cows that did not become pregnant were sent to auction. Only one cow of these had anything wrong with it—a cancer in the eye. Mary was concerned about this cow, so she specifically asked that the carcass be checked at the slaughterhouse to see if the cancer spread (it had not). Afraid that no one would purchase her cows because everyone knew what had happened on their farm, Mary wasn’t looking forward to the auction. Despite her fears, the cattle were purchased and sent on to slaughter, and she was happy with what she was paid for each carcass.