The Real Cost of Fracking (22 page)

Ducking under the shorted-out electric fence surrounding the well site, we began walking along the access road created by the drilling company. Wade described how his farmland is harder to work and less productive since the drillers arrived. “You can see where the pit was [for residual drilling muds, fluids, and cuttings], where the ground drops down. I said, ‘Where’s all my topsoil?’ It’s all stones and stuff now.” On site much of the time, Wade watched more than two hundred large trucks bring stones onto his property to make access roads, and he noted that precious little of the excess stones and brush were ever cleared away. So he asked the workers to clean up and place fencing around the well site to keep his herd out. When they didn’t respond in a timely fashion, Wade wrapped the site in orange cyclone fencing. “Ha! They didn’t like that!”

Besides the drilling company and the PADEP, I asked if anyone from a federal agency such as the EPA had been out to talk with him. His answer surprised me: “Just the attorney general’s office. It was a criminal investigation.”

“Against you?”

Wade nodded and explained how the events unfolded. When it was time for the drilling company to remove the drilling muds pit from the lower well site, Wade asked the company to take everything, including the liner, as he didn’t want his pasture to become contaminated. Despite his request, the muds and associated drill cuttings, fluids, and toxic chemicals were all eventually buried on Wade’s property, and the liner was ripped out and placed on the side of the access road we were now walking on, to be hauled away. Because the liner was not removed quickly enough, it kept blowing onto his hayfield. Frustrated, and afraid that pieces of plastic would remain in his hayfield and eventually be eaten by his cattle, Wade placed the liner in the middle of the access road, to remind the drilling company to haul it away. For this he was arrested for blocking and dumping garbage on the access road. I didn’t have to ask him if he would risk arrest and do this again, because I’m sure he would. But on the second well site, he didn’t have a chance. He never saw the liner and suspects that the entire contents of the muds pit, including the liner, are now buried in his hayfield.

The access road wound uphill from the site, cutting across the pasture to the edge of the farm. When the drilling company finished the road, Sharon’s response was, “Cows can’t eat grass off that road, and we can’t bale hay off that road.” The sky darkened as we continued, and Wade asked me if I wanted to turn back—I had no protection from a thunderstorm except my clipboard, and Wade had none at all—but I declined. Wade thought the herd was on the upper pasture, near the second well site, and this might be my only chance to see them. As we walked, I thought more about Wade’s cattle—this was their pasture, and now it had changed, the ground steeper, rocky, and uneven, with toxins buried in the soil.

We approached the entrance gate from the public road leading to the driller’s access road. From here, the trucks from the drilling company turned right to head down to the lower well site or stayed straight to the upper well site. I asked Wade if the drilling company ever placed locks on the gate entrances to his well sites. “Well, they was gonna do that here,” Wade said, “and I told ’em, ‘You start locking my property up, you can stay off my property.’ ”

When the drilling company first came on Wade’s land, a flimsy wire gate stood where the proper metal gate was now. “Five or six times,” Wade said, “the neighbors called me at night and said, ‘Hey, you got cows and horses on the road here.’ ” Wade suspected that metal gates weren’t initially installed, because they might slow the truck drivers down. “When they did come back, I put a stake in the middle of the road, moved my dump truck up there, and said, ‘I’m tired of chasin’ animals.’ ” The drilling company responded by installing the metal gates.

Before heading up an even steeper incline to a second gate, I turned back to look at the road and imagined the trucks going back and forth, at first to build the road and well pads, then to drill and hydraulically fracture the wells. Because I know of herds that have been exposed to wastewater, I asked Wade about dumping, leakage, and spills on his property. He explained that in 2008, when wastewater was being removed from the impoundment, Sharon noticed that the back road, leading from their access road to the stop sign, was wet when she left for work at 6 a.m. “Just that road,” Wade added. “After the stop sign, everything was dry.” This was not surprising, as I’ve seen wastewater trucks in Pennsylvania driving with open valves on back roads, presumably to decrease the volume of the wastewater for disposal. Although spreading wastewater on roads is now legal under limited circumstances in Pennsylvania—to reduce dust and for deicing—it does require a permit and some minimal testing of the waste.

Further ahead, we saw some of the calves—white faces and red faces—born during the spring of 2012, but they saw us first and most bolted before I could get a good look. They were curious about me, but because of Wade’s presence, I hoped to have a second chance. As we continued up a slope, Wade pointed to his pasture on the right. “This is where the wastewater pond [impoundment] was. You see how it’s built up real high? I am leery of cutting hay here because of all the rocks left behind, and I don’t know what’s there.”

Soon, the second well site came into view, and beyond that, a small pond that used to be a source of water for Wade’s herd. There was no odor here, but at the base of the wellhead, the methane detector buzzed crazily, making the increase discovered at the first site seem small. I asked Wade if he knew about this leak—if anyone from the PADEP knew about it, or if it had been reported as a violation. He explained that no one had been out to inspect this wellhead, but that he was surprised there could be this much leakage as the well was only four years old. Leaks such as this and those in pipelines throughout the country are rarely taken into consideration when comparing the greenhouse gas potential of using methane to other sources of energy, such as coal.

But just then—“Oh look, there’s your herd,” I whispered, so as not to scare the cattle. They had returned to get a closer look at what we were doing. According to Wade, they could sense when strangers were around and even knew when he dressed differently.

“And there’s the bull—the red Angus,” Wade said. “He’s not as big as the black one [Wade’s previous bull]; he’s only two and a half years old. Not as nice as the black one, either.”

This bull was big and beautiful. He exuded strength. Wade explained that you might find one bull in your lifetime with a good disposition, or you might not. The black bull had been one he trusted, and his son had trusted him too. “Wade Junior said he’s leery about this one. You gotta watch him. He hasn’t done anything wrong, but he’s just not like that big black bull. OK, let’s go under the fence, and I’ll show you the pond.”

Wade said this perhaps a bit too cavalierly, a bit too soon following his description of this red bull’s behavior. The only thing separating me from this bull was an electric fence. But the pond was on the other side of this line, and Wade was carefully holding up the fence for me to roll under. The herd, including the bull, was less than fifty feet away. I believe you should never trust a bull, any bull, under any circumstances, but Wade was here, calm and confident, almost nonchalant, and I respected his opinion. I rolled. The herd moved off a little distance, just out of reach. The bull was not snorting or charging, was not acting any differently than the cows and calves.

Wade has a feeder calf operation, meaning he’ll sell this year’s crop of calves next spring, when they are approximately twelve months old. Some of his big cows are twelve to fourteen years old, and he keeps them around as long as they are throwing (producing) nice calves and they have good appetites. I asked how long he’ll keep this new bull.

“I’ll keep him ten to twelve years,” he said. “The black one was only nine years old. There was nothing wrong with him except he wasn’t making calves.”

Wade, who happened to have been on the upper well site when the blow-out occurred, observed a muddy liquid shooting straight up from the well during drilling operations in early 2008. “When the geyser happened,” he explained, as we now walked the path the drilling fluids took, “the muddy water ran under the fence and into the pasture and pond. The cows were walking through it and they were drinking it.” This incident was not recorded by the PADEP as a violation, even though Wade reported it and has many photos depicting muddy water cutting through the snow from the well site to the cattle’s pond—and showing the brownish tinge the pond soon developed. But by the end of 2013, no entry for this event can be found on the PADEP’s website. Neither at the time of this occurrence nor at any time thereafter was Wade warned that the muddy fluid escaping from the well pad might have an effect on the health of his cattle. Instead, the health problems he observed in his herd were blamed on the “luck of the farmer” and
E. coli
contamination.

When I first spoke with Wade, in December 2010, what I heard on the other end of the line was a farmer who was very upset about losing so many calves, and if I didn’t know better, I would have thought this was a recent loss, not one that took place over two years ago. As I would come to learn from Wade as well as his veterinarian, this loss was highly unusual: preceding drilling operations, he lost approximately one animal out of his herd of twenty every few years to illness or accident.

During the first calving season following the drilling of the two gas wells on Wade’s property, ten out of eighteen bred cows, all of which had been exposed to drilling muds for several months either through pasture runoff or at the pond on the upper pasture, gave birth to dead calves or calves that died within twenty-four hours. Several of the calves also had cleft palate or eyes that appeared white or blue, or both problems; one calf was born with a nosebleed. A stillborn calf with white eyes is in the freezer, and the day I visited, Wade asked me if could I test it and tell him what had killed this calf.

I thought about the possible causes. Congenital defects (those present at the time of birth) such as what Wade’s herd experienced are uncommon in cattle and may have an environmental or genetic cause. Because all of the calves had the same father, it’s possible that several simultaneous spontaneous mutations in the bull’s genes caused these problems, but this would have been exceedingly unlikely. If Wade kept his calves to breed back to the bull, this may have caused problems due to interbreeding, but as mentioned previously, Wade operates a feeder calf operation and sells all his calves each spring.

Environmental factors such as infectious or toxic agents could also be to blame and, like genetic causes, cannot be definitively ruled out without testing. Bacteria, such as
E. coli
, could cause septicemia in newborn calves, with cloudy eyes being an early sign of this disease. In these cases, calves either are born with the bacteria in their blood or develop the infection soon after birth. As Wade’s calves were born with cloudy eyes, the only way for them to have acquired
E. coli
infection was in utero, either through the dam’s blood or through an infected placenta. In Wade’s case, the cows that gave birth to the stillborn calves were healthy with normal placentas, and none of the calves exhibited other signs associated with septicemia such as a swollen umbilical stump, pneumonia, enlarged joints, or diarrhea.
²
A virus such as bovine viral diarrhea could produce congenital defects, including the appearance of white eyes in newborn calves.
³
While this is possible because Wade had not routinely tested or vaccinated his herd, this scenario was unlikely because Wade’s small herd was closed, meaning new animals were seldom introduced, and because Wade had operated with little to no calf losses for the past twenty years.

The last cause to rule out was toxic agents acting directly, such as the herd being exposed to chemicals during a spill, or indirectly, by suppressing the herd’s immune systems and making the cattle more susceptible to infectious diseases. While difficult to prove, this scenario seemed the most likely because the only thing that did change on Wade’s farm, after many years of healthy calf production, was the exposure of his cattle to the chemicals in drilling fluids. Ideally, Wade’s calves should have had a necropsy to determine the exact cause of death, but that wasn’t done. Would it be possible to do it now, two years later? I asked a veterinary toxicologist and pathologist, and both said the calf had been in the freezer too long. The next time it happened, they advised—send it in right away. For now, Wade has decided to hold on to the calf, to hold on to the only evidence he has.

In June 2008, after losing many calves, and after a two-year-old cow that drank from the pond died suddenly for no apparent reason, Wade permanently separated his cattle from their only source of water on the upper pasture. In February 2009, more than a year after Wade witnessed the geyser on the upper well site, his pond was finally tested by the PADEP. For a situation in which food animals were exposed to drilling chemicals, the test was remarkably scant, including only a few minerals, metals, basic chemistry parameters, and tests for coliform bacteria, including
E. coli.
Noticeably missing from the test were the organic compounds used in drilling fluids as surfactants, biocides, and scale inhibitors, some of which may cause both reproductive problems and endocrine disruption, such as 2-butoxyethanol.
⁴
Both iron and manganese tested high on the PADEP test of the cattle’s pond. Was it simply a coincidence that these same substances were also found to be elevated postdrilling in the Davidsons’ well water? No one offered an explanation for either the elevated iron and manganese levels or the failure to test for the other chemicals. Although the upper limit on the concentrations of these specific substances has not been established in water for livestock, it is important to note that because iron concentrations in drinking water greater than 0.3 ppm and manganese concentrations in drinking water greater than 0.05 ppm are considered indicators of poor water quality for people, they may also be a concern for beef cattle. In addition to iron and manganese, the fecal coliform count was also elevated, but the higher number was expected. Because the upper well site lies at a higher elevation than the pond, when the drilling fluids erupted, they ran across the pasture, taking along anything in their wake. Since the pasture was for cattle, manure was washed into the pond along with the drilling fluids, coliform bacteria (including
E. coli
) and all.