The Real Cost of Fracking (7 page)

But after examining Mr. Higgins’s medical records, which were graciously supplied by Josie, I could tell that this vet had conducted a complete exam and given Mr. Higgins a presumptive diagnosis of kidney failure with an increased level of calcium. As one of Mr. Higgins’s lymph nodes was also mildly enlarged, I agreed that a needle biopsy of this lymph node was a good idea to rule out the possibility of lymphoma, something that wasn’t uncommon in this breed. I also knew that because of the progression of the signs and the history, poisoning was a very real possibility.

After reading all of this in the record, why was I being so persistent in wanting to talk to this veterinarian? Simply because I wasn’t there to examine Mr. Higgins—I didn’t have a chance to see the color of his gums, to pinch his skin to see just how dehydrated he was, to palpate his abdomen and lymph nodes, to listen to his heart and lungs. In short, I didn’t see him. Her veterinarian did. He became my eyes, ears, and hands. I needed to talk to him.

Unfortunately, the needle biopsy was never done. Josie grew impatient and brought Mr. Higgins to a specialty clinic where he was given a poor prognosis based mostly on his breed. Josie declined further diagnostics and opted for euthanasia as Mr. Higgins had deteriorated so rapidly, was weak, and could not rise. She couldn’t bear to watch him suffer any longer.

What happened here? A young dog, less than two years old, progressed from healthy to incapacitated in a few days, with lab work indicating the possibility of cancer, but also liver and kidney toxicity. Poisoning was suspected. Two days before Mr. Higgins became ill, Josie recalled that a truck had spread wastewater on her road, and Mr. Higgins had lapped up a puddle at the end of the driveway, splashing and playing before she could call him back. What was he exposed to? Josie will never know for sure, but very likely Mr. Higgins drank a cocktail of heavy metals and radioactive and organic compounds that tasted salty and made him want to consume more.

That night, after hearing Josie’s story, I thought about my dog, Frankie, also two years old, also euthanized because I couldn’t bear to watch him suffer any longer. I thought about how hard that was, but it was a clear-cut decision compared to what Josie had to do. Frankie had uncontrolled idiopathic epilepsy, with increasingly frequent periods of status epilepticus (a prolonged seizure). It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, cut a young dog down like that, yet it was nothing compared to what Josie had endured.

And that should be the end of the story—Josie should not have had to deal with anything else, particularly with the prospect of losing more animals suddenly and without a definitive diagnosis.

During a recent conversation at her home, Josie showed me a trophy case honoring her favorite barrel racer, trained and ridden by Lindsay. “This is Amy. She was pretty special. She gave her heart to Lindsay.” Up to now, I had been impressed by how calm Josie had been while describing some of her family’s health problems—headaches, nosebleeds, rashes, gastrointestinal upset, severe fatigue, difficulty breathing and concentrating—and even those of her dogs since drilling operations began at Mr. Leverkuhn’s site. But while standing in front of this trophy case, she broke down. “It’s true, when you have a [horse with a] heart that gives heart, there’s not enough money in the world that could ever replace that horse. We turned down sixty thousand dollars for her the year before she died. All we wanted was a baby out of her. And this is Lindsay.” She pointed to a picture of a young woman, hair flowing, atop a quarter horse cutting sharply around a barrel, girl and horse moving as one. There were many trophies—several dozen. Josie was weeping quietly. “Year after year, grand champions with everything. When we bought Amy, she was a six-month-old baby. I traded a sixty-five-hundred-dollar horse and two thousand in cash for a six-month-old baby that I never . . . I just said, ‘I’m crazy. I would never spend this for a six-month-old baby.’ And my daughter said, ‘Mom, I see things in her. I want her.’ ” Josie paused and turned to look at me. “She was right. She knew. And that horse, when she broke her leg, they weren’t sure that she’d ever come back to racing. We kept her in a cast. We kept her in a hoist. Lindsay went down there umpteen times a day: before school, after school, before going to bed. We swam her three days a week for almost three months—that’s how Lindsay exercised her. And see what she came back and she did?” Josie asked. “So you tell me, that horse didn’t have heart?”

Less than three months after Mr. Higgins’s death, Amy had a veterinary examination and was pronounced healthy. A few weeks later, however, she stopped eating and began to lose weight, appearing off-balance and uncoordinated. The veterinarian thought that Amy might have an infection, and treated her with steroids, antibiotics, and antihistamines. Two days later, Amy was still not eating, and her balance problem was worse. Not certain what to do at this point, the veterinarian treated Amy for a neurological disease called equine protozoal myeloencephalitis. This disease is difficult to diagnose, but seemed to be a reasonable guess at the time. Three days later, Amy was no better. Alarmed, Josie called the veterinarian again. This time, when he came out, he treated Amy again and took blood for testing. Two days later, Amy’s back legs became so weak that it was difficult for her to stand. Unable to rise, she sunk down in her stall and began convulsing. Two weeks after she stopped eating, Amy was euthanized. Blood results received after Amy was euthanized indicated liver failure due to toxicity. Josie’s veterinarian suspected poisoning, possibly from heavy metals, but the illness remained undiagnosed because neither a necropsy nor further tests were done. Again Josie was forced to choose euthanasia so as not to watch a beloved pet suffer. And again, not knowing why.

Was the drilling company watching? According to Josie, representatives of the company appeared on the scene soon after Amy was euthanized and offered to do the neighborly thing—haul Amy away to be incinerated. In a more perfect world, Josie would have been able to afford having Amy necropsied and tested for toxins in her body, in particular her liver, to see what actually killed her. This is also true for Mr. Higgins. But those sorts of tests are quite expensive, and Josie was not in a position to have them done.

This behavior on the part of a drilling company was apparently not uncommon, as I had heard the same scenario from other animal owners living in intensively drilled areas. It left me with more questions than answers. For example, why isn’t the drilling company keeping its workers busy with drilling-related work rather than PR work? Certainly it takes time and energy to be aware of which animals are dying where and under what circumstances. More importantly, if the drilling company really wanted to be a good neighbor, as it liked to portray itself in the media, why didn’t it offer to pay for Amy’s necropsy and further testing to determine a cause of death, which could easily have cost more than $2,000? Coming on the scene at just the right moment and offering to haul potential evidence away might be perceived by some people as an admission of guilt. If unconventional gas drilling is perfectly safe and there is absolutely no reason to believe that it could possibly be associated with the death of an animal, why wouldn’t the drilling company offer to help an animal owner who not only lost her water, but was also losing her animals, her own health, and the health of her family? After all, what could it possibly have to lose?

Not long after speaking to Josie, I called her neighbor, Sarah Valdes, the single mom who was a nurse, the woman with the sick child who I had been warned not to call during the holidays. Two women in the same neighborhood, dealing with the same general trauma, but each was coping completely differently. Where Josie funneled her energies into recording and keeping exact information, Sarah poured her heart into endless patience and maintaining calm for the sake of her children—Patty, who was ten, and David, who was thirteen.

Sarah lived in a farmhouse she estimated as being well over one hundred years old and owned by her extended family for most of that time. She bought it in 1999, just before Patty was born, and lived there for over thirteen years, remodeling the house from top to bottom, with plans to replace the barn. “It was a beautiful place to be, to raise my kids,” Sarah said. “We had such a good life there. They had everything they could ever want. It was the perfect location. But it’s gone. That’s what I tell the kids. It was just a house.”

Now face-to-face, I asked the questions I usually held until the end, that I had been waiting to ask since our first conversation more than eighteen months ago, and now, after hearing how good life was before drilling started, needed to ask even more: Why did you sign a lease with the drilling company? And why did you convince Josie and another neighbor to sign with you?

Her answers surprised me, caught me completely off guard, and again made me realize that each person’s situation was unique.

“I was afraid of losing my water because we’ve always had to haul our own water.” She pointed across the street from where we sat in the rental house, to her parents’ home—where there was no water well and, until very recently, no municipal water—where she’d helped to haul water ever since she could remember. “That farmhouse was the first place I ever lived in that had water. We had an abundant supply of water. We could wash dishes, take showers, wash our vehicles, do laundry, and never had to worry about running out of water.” The water was so good and so plentiful, Sarah said, that she shared it with her parents and her church.

Ironically, Sarah, Josie, and another neighbor had all heard about water contamination associated with unconventional gas drilling before signing no-drill leases (no surface drilling or drill sites permitted on the leased premises) in 2007. But they decided to lease as a group and protect themselves with an added clause guaranteeing that if there were any problems with their water supply, the gas drilling company would supply them with water.

“And thank God we added that clause because people around us that didn’t do that, they’ve had a really hard time [obtaining water]. But it didn’t help us with the air. We had no idea about that part.”

During a tour of her neighborhood in August 2012, Sarah described her road before it was paved: “It was a dirt road, and I took a picture of a tanker truck going down the road. There was a car between me and the truck, and you couldn’t even see it [the car] because the dust was so bad.” This was back in the beginning, when Sarah and her family were trying to live in their house situated just off the road, trying to adapt to the dust, the dirt, and the noise caused by the constant drilling traffic. The deteriorating road and the dust took a toll on her car, too, as she has had numerous flat tires, a cracked rim, and a broken air conditioner.

I’d heard a lot about this house, this road, this neighborhood, and I was in the middle of asking more questions, when Sarah told me to slow my car down and stop. A large pad appeared just off the road—approximately five miles from her previous house. We were a few hundred feet away, but with a clear view of the entire pad, the first one I’ve seen from the road where there were no obstructions. To the left, there were seven wellheads, each appearing as a blue cross connected by a yellow shroud. On the right side of the pad, there were many green tanks—some shaped like long torpedoes, others like giant soup cans—and several silver cylinders connected to what appeared to be smokestacks. These wells are in production, Sarah explained, with pipelines running over the hill behind the pad and to a nearby compressor station.

As we drove away, Sarah spoke about the house again—how difficult it is to keep up with both rental and mortgage payments. We passed many well pads on the way to her previous home, but because most are at the end of no-trespass access roads, there wasn’t much to see. Along a beautiful ridge, on a narrow paved and curvy road, Sarah’s house huddled off the side at the end of a steep, short driveway. I noticed the barn first, behind and to the left of the house. I envisioned all the animals Patty and David had cared for and raised here—the pigs, rabbits, goats, chickens, cats, dogs, horses and a donkey. I spied what looked like a hutch, but Sarah told me that it was the chicken coop, and that the rabbit pens were just beyond.

“My friend wanted to build a chicken coop,” Sarah said, “and I said, ‘Come and get it!’ My barn was falling down—it had stalls in there. That’s where we kept the goats and pigs, and behind it was a lean-to, for the horses. I was planning on building a barn.” But after what happened, she’s glad she never put the money into that.

Sarah led the way to the house along a stone walkway surrounded by an overgrown lawn. She was embarrassed that the grass hadn’t been mowed, but it’s difficult to maintain the lawn when just being here makes her ill. Before climbing the steps to the porch, I turned to take in the view—it was gorgeous—across the valley to the next ridge, and because the neighbors are spread out along this road, the house gave the feeling of privacy and seclusion. The porch was big and had once been filled with furniture, now donated to a friend. A trumpet vine was growing wild, but Sarah used to weave it in and out of the railings every spring and summer. From the outside, this two-story home appeared to be in good shape, especially for one not currently lived in. In addition to the unkempt yard, the only indication that something had gone terribly wrong here was the presence of the water buffalo in the back, provided by the drilling company nearly two years ago.

Sarah unlocked the door, and the odor hit us before we could even step in. “What is that smell?” I asked. Sarah said she didn’t know. It wasn’t an old or closed-in house smell—I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I was hoping that I could figure this out before we left. I knew Sarah lost her sense of smell at one point, and now I asked her if it had returned. “Yes,” she said. “It’s back. There, for a while, I couldn’t smell. We would be here, and we wouldn’t be able to smell it. The week before we left, my girlfriend was here trying to help me move, and she could smell a horrible odor, and none of us could smell it. After being away, I can smell it.”