The Real Cost of Fracking (21 page)

In the summer of 2012, I called Wade Davidson to schedule a meeting at his home and take a tour of his farm and neighborhood. His wife, Sharon, answered the phone; she was friendly but said that I would be speaking only to Wade when I arrived, and no one else. She was sick and tired of talking about drilling issues. Their eldest son, Wade Jr., who helped out on the farm, felt the same way, and she asked that I arrive after 2 p.m., to allow time for Wade Jr. to avoid me. She explained that her husband had been telling his story over and over again, but no one was listening. The last group of people who visited stayed longer than Wade said they would. When she had returned from work that evening, she went directly to her room, without stopping to say hello to her guests. She knew this was rude, but she couldn’t bring herself to talk to them. Still, she asked about what I was doing and why.

After I explained what compelled me to speak with farmers about fracking, there was silence from the other end of the phone. Finally, I said, “OK, I hope to meet you when I come out.”

“Yes,” she said, “and I’ll give you my two cents.”

Wade Davidson was the first person I spoke with about the impacts of gas drilling on animal health. I called him on the afternoon before a Cornell Sage Chapel Christmas concert in December 2010, and thought that calling him three hours in advance would allow us plenty of time to talk, but I was wrong. It was clear after the first few minutes that Wade had plenty to tell me, too much for this one session. We would need many more hours on the phone, as well as face-to-face meetings, and I would need even more time to study his records and results—all this before I could begin to understand what precisely happened to him and his herd.

Wade was also the first person I spoke with whose problems revolved around shallow gas wells and not unconventional wells (horizontal drilling with high-volume hydraulic fracturing)—the type I had expected him to talk about. This isn’t to say that there weren’t any of these types of gas wells near the Davidsons—there were two within a half mile of their home—but it was the drilling of the two shallow wells on their property that caused them so much grief.

Ironically, Wade was the
only
person I spoke with whose water supply was definitively determined by the PADEP to be polluted by the gas company’s drilling activities. This surprised me because this is the form of gas drilling—shallow well using low volumes of water and chemicals—that I thought was “safe” and problem-free. I would come to learn, after researching more cases like Wade’s, that conventional wells, using lower volumes of chemicals, sand, and water, can have some of the same problems as the larger horizontal, hydraulically fractured wells, such as well casing failures and surface spills. The difference is largely one of scale, with the higher pressures and larger volumes of fracturing fluids and flowback causing proportionally larger problems.

And Wade was also the first person I had met who inherited an oil and gas lease (the surface and mineral rights had been leased by the previous owner)—something that he neither signed nor wanted. For Wade, this was the monkey on his back that refused to get off no matter hard he shook.

I started with a blank sheet of paper on a clipboard and simply asked, “What happened?” Wade had been expecting me to call, waiting to tell his story again. Almost two years had passed since he had lost ten of his eighteen calves, and I would come to learn that he had told this story countless times to reporters, to the PADEP, to the drilling company, to friends and neighbors, to anyone who would listen. Wade is the guy at the top of the mountain who sees the invaders advancing and starts screaming, but the people around him act deaf. No one listens. No one responds. Nothing changes. So he keeps screaming.

In southeastern Washington County, Pennsylvania, a stone farmhouse, built in 1796, hugs the hillside at the end of a long, steep, rutted road. The Davidsons have lived and farmed here since 1988, beginning with a couple of beef cows and working the farm when they weren’t at their day jobs. Now that both are retired—Wade from truck driving and Sharon from working at the post office—they spend more time helping Wade Jr. maintain the farm. Wade owns nearly fifty-eight acres of land, the surface and mineral rights leased on all but seven acres, which is surrounded by leased land.

When I visited the Davidsons in 2012, I asked Wade if he was approached by landsmen to lease these last seven acres. He laughed and said, “Three times! ‘We’ll give you this, we’ll give you this, we’ll give you this.’ They kept going up on it. And I said, ‘Stay off my property!’ ” The seven-acre patch juts between two other parcels owned by neighbors and interrupts the path that would be used to drill horizontally from the neighbor’s farm. I wondered aloud if the gas company were to come out again, wanting to drill a third well, what would he do? “I’d fight ’em!” he said. “They’ve ruined my property once. They’re not gonna ruin it again.”

Before Wade and I toured his farm, Sharon brought me into their dining room and carefully opened a top drawer. She showed me a faded black-and-white photo, undated and unlabeled, of a man in his sixties: gray beard and hair, chiseled face, high cheekbones, and piercing blue eyes. I expected her to say this man was Wade’s father or grandfather, for the resemblance was striking. Instead she said it was a photo she recently found in the house while remodeling. She had no idea who it was, but assumed that it was a former owner of the house from the nineteenth century. For Sharon, finding this picture was a sign—to hold on to this house and land, to stay and fight for their right to have clean air and fresh water, to keep their cattle and their way of life.

Outside their home, in the back, sits a monstrous tank, round and wrapped in black plastic. It’s what I first noticed on my tour of Wade’s property—not the beautiful stonework on the side of the house or the scenery across the valley. It is this water buffalo, this thing that Wade and his family have been both lucky and cursed to receive.

“The water buffalo was always up by the barn, and Wade Junior would have to run two garden hoses from the buffalo to the tanks and old bathtubs in the cow pasture. In the winter, the hoses would freeze, making it harder to fill. After doing that for four years, we brought the buffalo down here, closer to the pasture.” The buffalo holds two thousand gallons and must be filled every four days, but sometimes Wade has to wait five or more days to receive water. “I told the delivery man, ‘What do you want me to do? Go up and have a meeting with my cows—tell ’em to wait ’til tomorrow to get a drink of water?’ ” When I asked why the water was delivered late, Wade opened his journals and read the entries:

I mused, “So swimming pools are more important than cows?”

Wade frowned and redirected my gaze to the pasture hillside. “See that black pipe?” he asked. “That’s where the water used to run when it was up there.” He pointed to a bush below the pipe where an eight-hundred-gallon tank used to sit and collect the spring water. “There was a pond on the other side of that tank. You can see where it was wet—the water used to run down to the field—all our extra water. There’s no extra water here anymore.”

As we walked to the site of the lower gas well, I stopped to admire the stonework on the farmhouse, recently repointed by Wade Jr. We crossed the driveway, where earlier, at the kitchen table, Sharon had described how in the wintertime the water pooled and froze after the buffalo was filled and the hoses were disconnected. We traversed a long, narrow barn, and halfway through, Wade stopped in front of a covered motorcycle. “This is what Sharon bought me—before the industry come here—for my sixtieth birthday.”

I don’t know motorcycles well enough to recognize that this is a Harley Fat Boy—shined up after a recent trek through Connecticut with Sharon riding behind. Wade has been motorcycling about as long as he’s had a hand in farming, ever since high school. “Somebody said, ‘You did that with the gas money.’ Somebody said, ‘You inherited your farm.’ Me, Sharon, and Washington Federal Bank [paid for these things], and we paid ’em off early ’cause we both work!”

We continued through this barn, mostly full of tractors in various states of repair. As we crossed into the lower pasture, Wade described the locations of the five water wells drilled by the gas company after his original water well—located closer to his home—was declared contaminated by the PADEP. “Up above that swing set, they [the gas company] drilled the first water well. They drilled one near where that dump truck is: they didn’t get no water. At the end of the garden, they drilled two more. That makes four. Then out at the end of these round bales, that’s where they placed the fifth water well.” A well, according to Wade, which produced water so salty his family couldn’t drink it.

I first met Wade not at his house but at mine, when he had driven up to Ithaca to speak at a conference in June 2011. At this conference, landowners from intensively drilled areas across the country came to speak of their experiences. I had asked him to bring all of his records and reports, so that I could understand what had happened on his farm. With two gas wells, four sources of water, water well contamination, and a substantial loss of calves, his situation was very complex.

In addition to his environmental test results and official correspondence with the drilling company and the PADEP, Wade also shared photos of his beef cattle and farm. The cattle looked like Angus or Hereford—some completely black, others sienna red. I later learned that three breeds were represented in this herd: Limousin, Hereford, and Angus. In one of the photos, his Limousin bull, broadside and black amid golden heifers, seemed twice as large as the harem mingling near him. This was the bull Wade had described the first time I spoke to him, the one that occasionally escaped, only to be found munching grass in his front yard. This bull was easy to handle, had a great disposition, and was the best he ever had. But this bull had been exposed, along with the rest of the herd, to the drilling fluids that shot up like a geyser during a blow-out when the second gas well was drilled in 2008. Wade admitted that just a few days ago, he had reluctantly replaced this bull, because this was the first year, in more than twenty years of raising beef cattle, in which no calves were born.

Among the documents Wade showed me, I saw that in September 2007, he received a certified letter, return receipt requested, from the drilling company, informing him of the company’s intent to drill gas wells on or near his property or water source. In that letter the driller stated, “We will, as in the past, take extended precautions to protect and preserve water sources surrounding the drilling sites.” Stapled to this letter was another one, dated two years later, from the same drilling company. This letter referenced the lower gas well, the one closest to the house, and the original water well, and without explanation, advised Wade that the drilling company would no longer provide his family with drinking-water service.

So that I could understand what had happened in these two years, Wade showed me an official letter dated March 2008 from the PADEP to the drilling company. It was an order to replace or restore Wade’s water supply, which the agency had determined was polluted by the drilling company’s activities at the lower gas well site. The dates and events clearly show that both iron and manganese in Wade’s well water had increased above the maximum contaminant levels since drilling had begun. Curiously, the letter failed to mention the two sources of water that Wade’s herd depended on (a spring and a pond) and that neither of these sources had been tested before drilling began. It also neglected to state that both the original water well and the cattle spring, the main source for the cattle and farming, virtually disappeared soon after the original water well was contaminated.

None of the letters explained that there were five wells drilled in an effort to replace Wade’s water supply, and that the fifth one produced water that while testing normal, was not being used by the Davidsons, because it tasted like salt water. But as no abnormalities were detected, the drilling company was no longer obligated to provide drinking water to this family. Most importantly, none of these letters could ever explain the stress Wade’s family has endured since their water sources were lost.

At his kitchen table, before Wade and I walked his land, I asked if the drilling company attempted to remove his water buffalo when they stopped delivering drinking water. Sharon, who was standing next to him, moved closer and began massaging his shoulders; she did this several times during our conversation, but especially when we discussed water sources. At the time, Wade said, there was talk of removing the water buffalo, but a friend made several calls to Harrisburg on his behalf, and it has remained on Wade’s property ever since.

I noticed that from the beginning of the interview, Sharon had been politely trying to leave the room. As she had warned me previously on the phone, she truly was uncomfortable talking about what had happened to their water and to their lives, but she was drawn back to comfort her husband. Before leaving, Sharon summarized how her life had changed since their water became contaminated. “When we lost our well water, we had to hook up the house spring [previously used only for bathing, laundry, flushing the toilet, etc.] to the tap water. We don’t drink this water at all. I wash the vegetables in it, but then I rinse with bottled water, too. I cook with bottled water. We drink the bottled water. We live in the country. We’ve never had a water bill—just the electric bill for pumping the water.” She paused, giving me time to take this in, to understand what it would be like to live in this way, day after day, and to wonder how much this would cost.

“We spent eight hundred dollars last year,” she said, “on bottled water alone.”

A nauseating odor—like turpentine or gasoline—greeted us as we approached the lower gas well, which was actively producing with a horsehead pump (a pumping unit that lifts liquid out of the well). Wade was not surprised by the smell. I pulled out my methane detector, calibrated it, and started moving it around the base of the well. A foot away from the base, it started buzzing, along where Wade believed the pipeline was laid. At the top of the condensate tank, the odor was strong and smelled like paint. I was feeling sick by now, so we moved on.