The Real Cost of Fracking (9 page)

I asked Sarah if her water level had dropped like Josie’s had. No, she said, but she wished it had—then they would have stopped drinking it. Sarah’s family initially continued to drink the water because the changes, such as a faint odor, were so subtle at first. But when the smell worsened and the sediment became obvious, they stopped drinking the water altogether but continued to use it for bathing, dishes, and laundry. Later, Sarah felt as guilty about giving her children the well water to drink and use as Josie felt about giving her horses the spring water.

Sarah mentioned Mr. Higgins and asked whether Josie had told me about David’s dog, Quinn. It was very likely that both dogs were poisoned by wastewater—Mr. Higgins after drinking from a puddle at the end of Josie’s driveway, and Quinn after running around Mr. Leverkuhn’s well pad and being exposed to the runoff from the well site and directly from the impoundment, which at that time was not fenced off. Surely enough animals had died, but Sarah still wasn’t telling me what happened to David. Was there more?

As I would soon learn, Josie, as a part of her dog-breeding business, was caring for pregnant animals at this time. Her boxer bitch, Bessie, experienced dystocia
¹⁰
and lost two puppies at term. One was born with a cleft palate and died the same day, and another was stillborn. Josie was unprepared for this because Bessie was in good health up to and during the pregnancy, and she had whelped three healthy litters before this. It would take a fifth litter and the loss of fifteen pups (seven stillborn and eight dead within a day, all the pups afflicted with congenital hypotrichosis, that is, they were born with the complete or partial absence of normal hair) before Josie moved her dogs to the homes of friends and family who lived in parts of Pennsylvania that still had clean air and water.

By November 2010, Josie and Sarah had lost animals, had lost their water, and were beginning to suspect that they were losing their air. Maybe it took the loss of this many beloved pets, dying mysteriously, for Sarah to make the vital connection between what was happening to them and what was happening to her son.

Then she told her doctor about it.

By then, David had been in and out of the hospital and had missed approximately a year of school, innumerable hours in after-school clubs and sports, and time with his friends. He’d missed more than he could ever think about. He was fourteen and a half, nearly fifteen, and he was more familiar with his mom’s nurse friends than he was with his own friends. Essentially he was missing being a teenager. And all because his doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. The tests that were run—the complete blood count, the strep throat screen, the Epstein Barr virus AB panel—gave no answers. On hearing what had been happening to the animals in Sarah’s neighborhood, David’s doctor snapped into action, ordering many basic tests (again) but also a screen to look for heavy metals—including thallium, cobalt, mercury, cadmium, lead, and arsenic—in David’s urine.

On David’s medical report, arsenic was the last metal listed, but it was in boldface. Across from this entry, a few inches over and also in boldface, were the words “85 micrograms/gram” next to an
H
, also in bold, for “high.” The report also included a biological exposure index, a reference value that is used by engineers, industrial hygienists, nurses, and physicians to help assess and prevent injury of industrial workers exposed to chemicals.
¹¹

But David wasn’t an industrial worker.

If he worked in the metal smelting, glass manufacturing, microelectronics, or semiconductor industry, then his high level of arsenic would be understandable. But he was just a teenager who happened to live next to an industrial gas drilling operation. He was being poisoned. And Sarah could not do anything about it. She hired a hydrogeologist and a toxicologist. Over the next months, she would spend thousands of dollars on water tests and consultations. She would spend countless hours in the hospital with Patty and David while the whole family was tested. They would lug around jugs for twenty-four-hour urine samples. They were living a nightmare. These were the things they had to do—were expected to do—if there was any hope of escape.

In early November 2010, Josie and Sarah filed complaints of poor water quality with the drilling company and the PADEP. This was not the first time the women had taken this course of action, but now the message was stronger because both families were suffering from many of the same symptoms observed in people living near gas drilling operations around the country: headaches; nosebleeds; burning of the eyes, nose, and throat; rashes; severe and debilitating fatigue; and gastrointestinal symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. And their complaints held a special urgency because in both cases, otherwise healthy animals had been lost coincidentally and suddenly, since the onset of drilling operations.

This time, their requests were taken seriously and the drilling company arranged for testing of their water sources. Ideally, their water should have been tested
before
gas drilling operations ever began on Mr. Leverkuhn’s land; without predrill testing, it is difficult to know if contaminants detected later were present initially. But Pennsylvania Act 13,
¹²
which would require drilling companies to offer predrill water testing to all Pennsylvania residents within twenty-five hundred feet of a proposed wellhead, hadn’t yet been passed; in 2009, when operations were ramping up on Mr. Leverkuhn’s land, the law only required testing to be offered to those residents within a thousand feet of a proposed gas well. As Josie lived just beyond one thousand feet, and Sarah even further, their water had never been tested.

As would later be determined by a consulting hydrogeologist, both Josie and Sarah shared the same water table as Mr. Leverkuhn’s pad site, as well as a neighbor who lived, like them, downgradient from the site (that is, the groundwater flows down from the pad site to the homes), and Mr. Leverkuhn, who lived upgradient from the well pad named after him (that is, the groundwater flows from his home to the well pad). In light of the leaking that occurred from Mr. Leverkuhn’s impoundment into the groundwater they all depended on, the shared aquifer was certainly not good news for anyone’s drinking water. However, because predrill testing was done on these neighbors’ water sources, their samples could serve as a baseline for both Josie and Sarah. It came as no surprise to either woman that these predrill water tests indicated no significant contamination.

Because the drilling company had recently drilled a replacement water well for Josie’s family in October 2010, this well was tested along with her spring water in November 2010. Sarah’s spring and well water were also tested in November 2010, and pending results of the water tests, the drilling company provided Sarah’s family with a water buffalo at this time. While a long list of unsavory chemicals was detected in the water sources of each family, many were the same. These included fracturing fluid additives such as ethylene glycol, propylene glycol, ethanol, butanol, and propanol.
¹³
They included the trihalomethanes such as chloroform, bromodichloromethane, and dibromochloromethane, all considered carcinogens and all uncommon detects in unchlorinated private water sources such as Josie’s and Sarah’s.
¹⁴

Mr. Leverkuhn’s wastewater impoundment and its leak detection system, also known as the manhole, were also tested at the same time that Josie’s and Sarah’s water sources were tested, in November 2010. The first set of tests done on the manhole and the wastewater impoundment on November 10 signaled that both sources had similar levels of minerals and heavy metals such as chloride, barium, iron, manganese, sodium, and strontium as well as fracturing fluid additives, including propylene glycol and surfactants. That both the manhole and the impoundment had similar levels of these chemicals positively indicated that the impoundment was leaking or had been leaking for some time. Repeat testing done on November 19 confirmed not only that the impoundment was leaking, but also that the leak was worsening.

In short, the chemicals detected in both Josie’s and Sarah’s water sources clearly represented what one would expect from water contaminated by a nearby unconventional gas drilling operation. In particular, several chemicals leaking from Mr. Leverkuhn’s wastewater impoundment were also detected in Josie’s and Sarah’s water sources; these chemicals included propylene glycol, propanol, and ammonia. And as stated above, several chemicals detected in Mr. Leverkuhn’s drilling-muds pit following a liner leak were later observed in Josie’s and Sarah’s water sources and included barium, chromium, 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene, ammonia, oil, and grease.

Nevertheless, after reviewing the water results, the drilling company sent letters to both Josie and Sarah in January 2011, cheerfully pointing to its responsible practices and lack of responsibility for the women’s water-quality problems. With concurrence from the PADEP, both families were advised by the drilling company that their water deliveries would soon cease.

David’s arsenic level was elevated, but the question on everyone’s mind was how it came to be that way. Arsenic levels were negligible in Sarah’s water when it was tested, but because no testing was done when David first became ill in the fall of 2009—approximately one year before the water was tested—it is difficult to know exactly what the levels of arsenic may have been in the water just after drilling began.

As a nurse and a mother, Sarah was devastated by not knowing what the long-term health effects of arsenic would be in her children, especially David. She could not run away from this problem, get it fixed, or get it reversed. It meant that her children, because of where she chose to live, might be carrying traces of this poison in their bodies for months. But because children exposed to arsenic may suffer the same health effects as adults—increased risk of bladder, kidney, liver, lung, skin, and prostate cancer
¹⁵
—David and Patty might be dealing with its consequences for the rest of their lives.

When Sarah told me this, I thought, haven’t these people endured enough?

I was receiving updates from Sarah every month or so, sometimes more often. What happened next, in December 2010, when David’s urine was rechecked for heavy metals, was actually good news: David’s arsenic level dropped very low and continued to stay below the cutoff—the magic number of fifty micrograms per gram—in the coming months, as did readings on Sarah and Patty. By that time, Sarah had switched to bottled water for drinking and a water buffalo for everything else (washing clothes and dishes, showers, baths, brushing teeth, flushing the toilet) and was providing her animals with drinking water from a water buffalo after the drilling company refused to do so. Things were looking up, and I thought they would just keep heading in that direction. After all, what else could go wrong?

We think of water and air as synonymous with life, yet while we can sometimes change our water supply, we cannot do so with the air we breathe. In some locations, we can switch from well water to city water. In rural areas of Pennsylvania, the only other option besides a well might be a water buffalo. Although inconvenient and expensive, a water buffalo is a choice that can be made for those who can afford it and can temporarily replace a contaminated water supply. But providing a new air supply because the air has become tainted is not practical. Three months after she found out that her son was suffering from arsenic poisoning, Sarah learned that she, Patty, and David tested positive for phenol, which is a metabolite of benzene. David’s level was especially worrying, as it was consistent with chronic exposure to benzene at levels of 0.5 to 4.0 parts per million (ppm) in the air. So now it was the air, and another poison. This time, it was benzene, a known carcinogen.

Many volatile organic compounds, including benzene, were escaping Mr. Leverkuhn’s wastewater impoundment and entering the air, as would be evidenced by a test done months later. Benzene is everywhere in gas drilling country: drilling companies use it as a component of drilling muds and hydraulic fracturing fluid, and it is also found naturally in the layers of shale containing the gas. When the gas comes to the surface, benzene comes along with it, eventually being separated from the gas during processing at compressor stations. But it doesn’t stop there: benzene is a component of diesel fuel, which is used by compressor stations and the huge trucks that, in drilling country, wallpaper the landscape and make a simple bicycle ride a life-threatening experience. Nothing can match the thrill of a quiet bike ride periodically interrupted by forty-ton trucks speeding by two or three feet from your ear. Worst of all, benzene is extremely volatile—it can escape into the air from any open surface and can vent from leaky condensate tanks. Since it is a component of the wastewater, the sprawling surface area of the impoundment and the action of the aerators pump benzene into the air for miles around. Likewise, benzene that is brought to the surface with drilling fluids, muds, and cuttings and subsequently dumped in pits, also ends up in the air. And benzene is released into the atmosphere when gas wells are flared.

But it didn’t end there. David and Patty also had trace levels of hippuric acid in their urine. When toluene enters the body, it is converted to hippuric acid, so finding hippuric acid in the urine may indicate an exposure to toluene. Now toluene, like benzene, is a volatile organic compound that is a component of diesel and other products used in hydraulic fracturing fluids, and is found in the condensate produced at compressor stations. Also like benzene, it is regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and is listed as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
¹⁶
And, like benzene, toluene is a found in the wastewater.

Sarah now wondered how she could continue to live at her home and protect her children and herself. She knew that benzene could cause leukemia and anemia, and that children were particularly susceptible.
¹⁷
She also discovered that both benzene and toluene could affect their vision
¹⁸
and sense of smell
¹⁹
and that toluene could cause loss of hearing.
²⁰
But the other symptoms she had read about—the fatigue, sore throat, nosebleeds, nasal and eye irritation, drowsiness, dizziness, nausea, headache, and chemical taste in their mouths—these things they had been dealing with for months. Maybe if she kept the children and the animals inside with the windows closed and play dates scheduled elsewhere? But David and Patty were adolescents, and they desperately missed spending time with their friends in their own rooms, in their own house. Sarah wondered if the drilling company would be a good neighbor and at least pay for air testing.