The Real Cost of Fracking (8 page)

We walked through a spacious kitchen and peered into the family room. Toys, boxes, pillows, and assorted household items were strewn everywhere, left behind in the rush to move out. “Part of me wants to come and sort through things,” Sarah said, “and part of me doesn’t even want to be bothered.” We climbed a narrow staircase to the second floor, where David’s room was the first to greet us. I stepped in, looking out the window from his room, the bedroom closest to Mr. Leverkuhn’s wastewater impoundment. I imagined being a child in this room, with the window open, the breeze coming off the impoundment. Sarah said that she didn’t know if that had made it worse for her son.

She asked if I’d seen the pictures of the impoundment from Google Earth. Yes, I had, and I had also seen the aerators in the impoundment. From the aerial photos, the aerators look like fountains spread on a large rectangular lagoon, misting whatever was in the wastewater into the air. Then with a mother’s guilt, Sarah admitted, “We didn’t even know it [the impoundment] was up there until after we figured out what was going on. We just thought it was a well pad.”

While still upstairs, Sarah mentioned that her great-grandfather lived in this house many years ago while her father was growing up and that when she first moved in, she planned to finish the trim in the house when the children were older. Now, it’s another thing that will never happen. I sensed sadness in her voice, for she had meant to be loyal to this house, to her father and great-grandfather.

Less than ten minutes inside her house, Sarah developed a metal taste in her mouth, which forced us to leave sooner than I’d have liked. “I knew I had a [metal] taste in my mouth,” she said, “but I didn’t realize how bad it was until we went to New York City for five days. It went away completely.” The irony of leaving her home in the countryside and feeling better after staying in a big city for a few days was not lost on Sarah. When she returned home, the taste in her mouth returned too. “If I stay here, it will come back,” she said. “We were here for a short while a few weeks ago, and I had it the rest of the day and into the next day.”

On the way out, we passed through the kitchen again, which Sarah had remodeled eight years ago. It’s large and open, windows facing out to the back with a wood stove with inlaid cherry behind and above the stove. It means a lot to her, this woodwork, made by her father from a cherry tree cut down on her grandfather’s farm years ago. But to remove it would be difficult as the cherry was literally set in stone. Just past the woodstove, there was a cupboard, partly open and full of canned and bagged goods. When I noticed the wine, Sarah said it was homemade and that she knew she should take it. “I canned, and we always had our own meat, our own chickens, our own eggs. I come over here to work, and I can’t stay for more than half hour to forty-five minutes. I start getting sick—I get a headache.”

She described how the air here used to be much worse. “The air is not as heavy now. There were times when I would come over in the morning—the air would feel dewy. You could just feel the chemicals on you. I would just try to get from the car into the house. It was so thick. It’s almost like a bug that is caught in a fogger. Now I know what a bug must feel like. I felt like I couldn’t breathe—I would get so short of breath.”

Air tests were done on Sarah’s and Josie’s properties in October 2011 through a nonprofit organization that provides testing to low-income families that have been affected by industrial drilling operations. The results confirmed the miasmic atmosphere that once surrounded the two women’s homes, the list of detected chemicals reading like an environmentalist’s worst nightmare: BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, m-xylene, p-xylene, and o-xylene); carbon tetrachloride; chloromethane; methylene chloride; tetrachloroethylene; trichlorofluoromethane; 1,1,2-trichloro-1,2,2-trifluoroethane; and 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene.

As we pulled out of the driveway and back on to this precariously narrow road, I stopped to look across the valley one last time. “If the leaves were off,” Sarah said, “you’d have a direct view of [Mr. Leverkuhn’s] impoundment.”

On Mr. Leverkuhn’s property, the first unconventional gas well was drilled in September 2009, and a few months later, the process of horizontal high-volume hydraulic fracturing on this well was completed. Within several years, three gas wells would occupy Mr. Leverkuhn’s land. The chemicals pumped down to hydraulically fracture the first well fell under five broad categories: friction reducer, bactericide, gelling agent, oxygen scavenger, and scale inhibitor. As I paged through the material safety data sheets for these chemicals, I noticed that several were proprietary mixes, meaning that only some of the chemicals making up these blends were listed. Exactly what percentage was listed varied with the mix. For example, FRW-200,
¹
the friction reducer, was made up of 17.6 to 26 percent petroleum distillates, the remaining 74 to 82.4 percent of the ingredients were anyone’s guess. Could some of these chemicals escape the cement casing and make their way into Mr. Leverkuhn’s and his neighbors’ groundwater? According to a recent survey of leaking Marcellus Shale gas wells in Pennsylvania from 2010 to 2012,
²
approximately 6 to 7 percent were reported to have cement casings with compromised structural integrity during the first year, which is consistent with data from the US Mineral Management Service showing similar failure rates for cement jobs leading to “sustained casing pressure” for wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico, cited earlier.
³

Unfortunately, numerous spills and leaks occurred on Mr. Leverkuhn’s property in 2010 and 2011, risking contamination of his and his neighbors’ water sources; in most cases, neither Josie nor Sarah were aware of these events until much later. Some of these occurrences involved the transfer of drilling fluids and wastewater between Mr. Leverkuhn’s site and other nearby sites via tanker trucks. In one case, drilling muds leaked and were spilled during transfer from tanks to trucks, and several other times, spills of wastewater occurred including discharge outside the impoundment during offloading. In another incident, diesel fuel and wastewater spilled during a transfer between trucks, and on a separate occasion, several hundred gallons of wastewater splashed from tanks onto the ground because debris blocked the outflow. Several incidents stand out in Josie and Sarah’s memory—the time wastewater spilled when a tanker truck overturned on Mr. Leverkuhn’s snow-covered access road, and another time, when a driver left a valve open and wastewater spilled from the truck, running down the access road and onto the public road before entering Mr. Leverkuhn’s cow pasture.

In addition to transferring fluids using tanker trucks, the drilling company operating on Mr. Leverkuhn’s land also moved fluids using temporary plastic pipelines that may course for miles on the ground. During transfers, pipes can crack and leak due to freezing and thawing or when fluids are run through the pipes at pressures higher than the pipes are rated to handle. During 2010 and 2011, several leaks associated with Mr. Leverkuhn’s site occurred during pipeline transfers of fracturing fluid and wastewater. In December 2010, a leak occurred directly on the Leverkuhn well site in a line carrying fracturing fluid. A few weeks before this leak was observed, lines were discovered leaking fracturing fluid and wastewater in three separate places between Mr. Leverkuhn’s well pad and another pad located approximately a mile away. Soon after these discoveries, several more leaks occurred when air-release valves and drain valves malfunctioned in lines transferring wastewater between Mr. Leverkuhn’s pad and another pad located over a mile away. At the end of January 2011, yet another wastewater leak in a transfer line occurred between these same two well sites.

On the Leverkuhn site, both the wastewater impoundment and the drilling-muds pit were open to the air above them, but below, two liners were supposed to separate the ground from the chemical-fluid mix that would eventually fill both depressions. The problem with liners is that they can rip and tear anytime, even during installation; this happened at Mr. Leverkuhn’s impoundment on several occasions. Wildlife, caught off guard while encountering pits and impoundments on well pad sites, often become entrapped and have to be removed,
⁴
even after fencing has been placed. Two deer were found in Mr. Leverkuhn’s impoundment in May 2010, along with tears in the liner, presumably from their attempts to escape, and at the drilling-muds pit, a fox was discovered clawing and biting the pit liner after becoming trapped in early November 2010. Just three weeks later, after repairs had been made to the pit liner, another fox created more holes while attempting to escape.

The first sign of a problem with the drilling-muds pit liner wasn’t revealed until an inspection in March 2010, where a leak that smelled of sewage water was reported seeping from the slope of the pad and within three hundred feet of one of Mr. Leverkuhn’s springs. Soon after, the contents of the pit were analyzed and found to contain drilling-related substituents, several of which were later detected in both Josie’s and Sarah’s water. From then on, the drilling-muds pit lived a troubled life. It would be rebuilt and relined in May 2010. It would be used to hold the drill cuttings, muds, and fluids from two more wells drilled on Mr. Leverkuhn’s property in January 2011. In May 2011, after water results indicated significant changes in both Mr. Leverkuhn’s upper spring (used for potable water) and his lower spring (used for livestock) since drilling operations began, the drilling company graciously provided a water buffalo to his family. But a suspicious eye was cast upon the drilling-muds pit. Over the coming months, the Leverkuhn pit liner would be removed and the pit would be purged of seven hundred tons of drill cuttings and fourteen hundred tons of contaminated soil and flushed with thirty thousand gallons of water before chloride levels returned to background (what they were before drilling began) and sodium levels dropped dramatically but still remained approximately twice that of background levels. The final death knell for the pit occurred in April 2012, when the company submitted plans for permanent closure, which eventually occurred in the fall of 2012.

Like the pit, the Leverkuhn impoundment did not live a carefree life. In fact, one could say that it started its life on the wrong foot. Leak detection systems on centralized impoundments using two-liner systems such as Mr. Leverkuhn’s must be placed
between
the two liners, according to Pennsylvania law.
⁵
In theory, this would allow leaks to be detected before reaching any surface or ground water. By placing the leak detection system
underneath
both liners, any leakage of the contents within the impoundment was more likely to cause contamination of water sources before detection, which is apparently what happened at the Leverkuhn impoundment. Comparison of water analyses on the fluids in the impoundment and the leak detection system demonstrated that the impoundment was leaking from November 2010 to May 2012 and possibly months before. As of May 2013, the fate of the impoundment had not yet been determined, but it is under investigation to determine the extent of any contamination and any remediation that may follow.

In July 2010, soon after the wastewater impoundment was completed, both Josie and Sarah noticed a rotten-egg or raw-sewage odor in the air around their properties. Suspecting that this odor might be hydrogen sulfide and related to the activities at Mr. Leverkuhn’s site, they promptly complained to the drilling company and the PADEP. Hydrogen sulfide is a poisonous, colorless gas that often accompanies methane gas as it returns to the surface, and could also be produced by bacteria in wastewater impoundments;
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it has a tendency to cause health problems in people living near gas drilling operations, specifically causing signs of respiratory distress and neurological effects such as incoordination, headaches, impaired memory, and loss of the sense of smell.
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Over the next few months, in an effort to reduce the odors, the drilling company treated the wastewater impoundment on Mr. Leverkuhn’s land with two biocides, acrolein and MC B-8642 (a mix that is 30 to 60 percent glutaraldehyde).
⁸
Both chemicals may cause severe irritation to the eyes, skin, and respiratory tract.
⁹

Large impoundments such as Mr. Leverkuhn’s often have aerators to decrease odors as well as to increase evaporation by misting the fluid into the air. The bacteria that produce the chemical compounds that give off the sulfur smell are anaerobic—that is, they live under conditions of low or no oxygen. One of the reasons that the aerators are installed is to inhibit the growth of these bacteria. During the time the impoundment was treated with acrolein and glutaraldehyde, additional aerators were installed, increasing the likelihood that toxic chemicals would be dispersed into the air. And because the chemicals are often heavier than air, these actions increased the chances that neighbors such as Josie and Sarah and their animals, living nearby and at lower elevations, would be inhaling the toxins coming off Mr. Leverkuhn’s impoundment.

Soon after drilling began on the first unconventional gas well on Mr. Leverkuhn’s property in September 2009, Sarah’s son David became ill with nondescript stomach pain, backache, and sore throat. Although the whole family would experience unusual illness over the coming months in the form of headaches, nosebleeds, rashes, fatigue, and gastrointestinal upset, it was David who was hit the hardest and seemed the least able to fight off whatever it was that was making the whole family sick.

When I spoke to Sarah for the first time, in February 2011, I didn’t learn how devastating her son’s illness was. Sarah wanted me to first understand what had happened to the animals—hers and Josie’s—and she wanted answers on how and why these animals died. She was very patient with my questions but very persistent, even though she was exhausted; the only time we could talk was after Patty and David were fed and in bed, and all the animal chores were done. Again, as with Josie, I asked myself, how does this woman cope? Two sick children, water gone bad, and facing it all as a single working mom—this situation seemed even more overwhelming than Josie’s because Sarah was going it alone.