The Real Cost of Fracking (19 page)

Was the wastewater impoundment still on the Jamesons’ property? Soon after the quarantine was instituted, the drillers removed the impoundment and now store wastewater in very large trailer trucks on Mary and Charlie’s property and at another site where a wastewater impoundment leaked.

Exposure of wildlife, especially deer, to wastewater seemed to bother Mary much more than her cows being exposed and going on to slaughter. Deer were always on the well pad, especially when the impoundment was there, and it was impossible to keep them off. In a later interview, Mary mentioned two men who regularly hunted on their farmland and continued to do so after the Jamesons’ well was drilled and hydraulically fractured. The men shot a small and a large deer and became ill with vomiting and diarrhea after cooking the meat for themselves, and later for friends—where everyone became severely ill. They also noted that their cats and dogs wouldn’t touch the meat, cooked or raw.

Mary had ten packages of the meat in her freezer, including the liver from one of the deer, and was hoping that I could have it tested. She had tried to have it tested but was told that legally she couldn’t test the meat because it belonged to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and the commission couldn’t test the meat because there was no chain of custody, that is, no written documentation of the source of the meat.

Mary’s quandary of who should test her deer meat raised many questions regarding testing of cattle in situations where known exposures have occurred. Cows that were exposed to toxic chemicals from shale gas wastewater, that were not tested before or after slaughter, and that were held from slaughter based on incomplete testing (estimated withdrawal times for only one contaminant) would produce flesh that would be packaged and eaten alongside the flesh of other cows that had no such exposure, and whose rendered flesh would be fed to chickens and pigs, made into pet food, and gain entrance into our food supply, as well as that of our pets.

These concerns are also on the mind of the public and are the topic of intense debate. How safe are the meat, eggs, dairy products, and vegetable crops from farms where known exposures have occurred and from farms downstream and downwind of the exposure?

The answer is that without complete testing, without many more dollars targeted to food safety research specifically related to chemical contamination from shale gas operations, we will never know. And as long as we don’t know, the public health may be at risk.

Midway through our interview in October 2011, Mary disappeared and returned with a stack of photos. She spread them on the table, and Charlie picked out several and passed them to me. They were photos of the well pad during hydraulic fracturing.

In the photos, everything was jumbled and squeezed together, even to the edges of the pad. From a distance the pad looked like a dump, like vehicles of all sorts randomly thrown together. It reminded me of a child’s room: a pile of red, yellow, blue, and white blocks left behind after playtime, or the Rush Hour game, where all the cars and trucks sit on the board with no place to move. On closer inspection, I saw that many kinds of vehicles were represented, including a bulldozer, chemical tanks lined up in tight rows, white pickup trucks and vans, a hot-lunch truck, and the iconic water and sand trucks that all too often pass me on the highways. At the center was the wellhead, looking like a giant octopus, its arms the lines that are used to pump the pressurized water and chemicals deep down into the earth. Charlie described the vehicles and equipment on the pad as being so tightly packed that no one could walk up there. Their two-acre well pad (later expanded to three acres) had become the parking lot from hell.

While I studied the photos, I realized that this interview was making the Jamesons relive everything, and for that I was sorry. But they wanted me to know exactly what they endured, and to experience what it felt like to have their property invaded. Most of all, they wanted others to benefit from the mistakes they had made.

This first shale gas well sits directly behind their barn and next to their cow pasture. It was drilled in October 2009, was hydraulically fractured from January to April 2010, and reaches at least six thousand feet straight down into the earth. From there, it turns and runs horizontally to the northwest as far as it can, which is approximately another six thousand feet, butting up against unleased state forest land. Five more wells are planned, but the Jamesons were not told exactly when the others would be drilled.

I brought a paper map showing the permitted gas wells within ten miles of their home, according to the most current PADEP well data. On the map, Mary and Charlie’s farm was a blue teardrop completely surrounded by red balloons with black dots, representing gas wells on each pad. On the electronic version of the map, I zoomed in many times before the blue teardrop stood alone untouched by the red bubbles, and this was the first version I showed them, the one where all of the more than four hundred wells are still on the page. Zooming in further, the bubbles began to separate, and outlines of bubbles began to emerge behind what initially appeared as just one bubble, as if they were many soldiers standing toe to heel.

We were down to twenty-five bubbles, with each bubble representing one to six gas wells. I asked about several nearby bubbles that also bear their name. One of these is on a cousin’s land, they explained, located a little over a mile south of them, but Mary and Charlie were unsure of exactly how many wells sat on this pad. After further zooming in, we discovered that there are two Marcellus wells here: a vertical—drilled approximately six months after theirs—and a horizontal that has yet to be drilled. I asked about the other well bearing their name and located approximately one-half mile to the east of them. This well will be placed on their upper farm, they said, despite their objections and despite this being their best farmland. “We’re trying to get ’em to relocate that well,” Charlie said. “We’re looking for some top brass to talk to, to get ’em to do it, because we’ve had enough of it. You’d think with all that has happened to this well [the one within view of their kitchen window], they’d say, ‘Mr. Jameson, you’ve had a lot of complications. We’ll put it on your neighbor’s ground. Thank you!’ ” Charlie laughed at the thought of this, as if this could, or would ever happen.

Air. Water. Soil. These are the three things I think about when associating exposures with how people and their animals become ill. In the Jamesons’ case, the exposure seemed pretty clear-cut: wastewater leaked into the cow pasture, hoofprints were found in the flooded area, and as cows are attracted to salt, and the wastewater was heavily laden with salts, state health officials assumed the cows drank the toxic water.
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But there was more: there were interactions that I hadn’t considered initially, and they would become important once I received all the known test results.

After talking inside, Charlie invited me to tour the pad, to see the pasture and the cattle, to get a lay of the land. As we walked up the hill to the pad, we stepped over a metal grate between the shed and the Jamesons’ big red barn, placed by the drilling company to direct runoff from the pad. We then climbed steeply and continued up the bank to the pad area. In stark contrast to the photos taken during hydraulic fracturing, the pad was deserted except for two red pickup trucks parked side by side, and two men. The men waved to Charlie and headed out toward where pipeline was being laid; Charlie said that they were inspecting the line. According to Mary, Charlie was always up on the pad, watching the workers, talking with them, asking questions. Nothing slipped by him. I watched Charlie, still cheerful and friendly to these workers in the face of all that has happened on his farm and all the losses he has taken as a result of their disruption of his land, and I understood why they respected him.

The wellhead, condensate tank, and compressor stood silent, like soldiers guarding the pad. Because the well was not actively producing, the pad was deathly quiet. At the far edge of the pad, Charlie pointed to where the drilling muds pit had been located, the liner now ripped out and removed, the top layer of soil extracted. We stood at the edge of the pad facing the cow pasture, the lower barns and a long view of this peaceful, picturesque valley. The cattle, their numbers dropped by seven since drilling began, grazed at the far end of this twenty-acre pasture that will be divided and gated after the pipeline is placed. I asked about the cattle’s water sources, and the Jamesons pointed to the creek that originates from springs lying above and below the well pad, and to a pond below the well pad, which also spills into the creek. Between where we stood and where the cattle grazed, the bank of the pad drops down to a level one-acre rectangle of uncut grass before the land crosses under a fence and gently slopes down into the pasture and to the creek and the pond.

This rectangle began its life on the Jameson farm as a freshwater impoundment, a place to store millions of gallons of water used during high-volume hydraulic fracturing, but was quickly transformed into a holding pond for wastewater—whatever flows back to the surface during and after hydraulic fracturing operations have occurred. Amounts returning to the surface may be less than 30 percent to more than 70 percent of the original fluids injected into the shale,
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and are contaminated by chemical additives as well as naturally occurring substances normally found in the shale such as heavy metals, volatile organics, and radioactive compounds.

A few months before they reported the wastewater leak to the PADEP and the drilling company, Mary and Charlie had noticed several dark spots on the bank of the impoundment alongside the pasture. At first they thought it was groundwater seeping into the pasture, but over the coming weeks, they noticed the spots expanding and the adjacent grass dying. By the time they ventured onto the pasture, hydraulic fracturing had ended and there was no one on the pad. It was May Day 2010, and the farmers found themselves ankle-deep in wastewater and surrounded by burnt grass. Hoofprints covered the flooded area, estimated by Charlie and Mary to be more than one-half acre. The water was as deep as twenty inches in some spots and would eventually take the drillers three days to pump and remove. The Jamesons later learned that the liners of both the wastewater impoundment and the drilling muds pit had torn, and that the rupture in the impoundment liner had caused the contaminated waste to burst through the wall and into the pasture where their cows grazed. Except for their two bulls, the Jamesons’ entire herd was exposed to the wastewater leakage for as long as it had been occurring, likely two months or more.

On the PADEP website, I skimmed the Notice Of Violation dataset until I found the Jamesons’ records and, in the process, discovered that ruptured, torn, and leaky liners are not unusual. Under each of the four violations issued, there were comments, which shed more light on what had happened. According to the record, because it was the Jamesons’ daughter who first contacted the PADEP, the drilling company was charged with failure to notify the agency. The company also failed to line the impoundment properly: subsequent pressure testing of the liner revealed a failed patch, which meant a loss of the liner’s integrity. Because the spring and farm pond were located downgradient from the leaky impoundment, creating the potential to pollute these surface waters, this was a violation of Pennsylvania’s Clean Streams Law. Finally, because the drilling company had mismanaged its residual waste, allowing the wastewater to contaminate the cow pasture, the company was charged with violating the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Act 223.
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To Charlie and Mary’s credit, they didn’t wait for the water flooding their cow pasture to be tested and confirmed as contaminated with “dangerous chemicals and metals” (according to the PADEP press release)
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before they quarantined their herd. Of all the known contaminants to which the Jamesons’ cattle were exposed, strontium was of most concern to the PADEP and was the reason the quarantine was placed. Strontium can be toxic to both animals and people because it replaces the calcium in bones, especially those of the young, and it may take years to be eliminated from bone tissue.
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The quarantine hold times (the length of time the cattle are held before going to slaughter) were based on estimates of how long strontium would remain in a cow’s body. Of greater concern, however, are the
unknown
chemicals to which these cattle may have been exposed, including toxic substances used as fracturing fluid additives, such as 2-butoxyethanol, glutaraldehyde, and tetramethylammonium chloride. Neither the public, who would consume the meat from these cows, nor the Jamesons, who would subsequently pay for necropsies to determine what was killing their cattle, were told what chemicals were used during drilling and hydraulic fracturing. For unknown reasons, testing for organic compounds was not done on the wastewater to which these cows were exposed.

When I asked the Jamesons if their tap water has been affected, they told me that initially it ran cloudy, then would clear immediately. But lately it has been staying cloudy longer. Despite that, Charlie and Mary were more concerned with the cattle’s water than with their own. Tests done on their well water before and after drilling yielded no significant findings, although no testing was done for organic compounds. However, the cattle’s sources of water—the spring, the creek, and the pond—were not tested before drilling began, and if it were not for the leaky impoundment, testing may never have been done on the cattle’s water. Like the Jamesons’ well water, no abnormal results appeared.

In addition to water tests, the PADEP also ordered the soil to be tested, but again failed to check for organic compounds. When compared to background samples, soil tests done on the contaminated cow pasture revealed high levels of chloride, sulfate, sodium and strontium. In an attempt to return the cow pasture to what it once was, approximately twelve inches of topsoil were removed, according to Mary and Charlie. On retesting, the sulfate concentrations in the confirmation sample remained stubbornly high—nearly the same as before the attempt at remediation—literally three times higher than the sulfate normally found in the soil.