The Real Cost of Fracking (25 page)

Claire Wasserman’s health has changed dramatically since unconventional drilling hit her part of Pennsylvania. Although currently in remission from leukemia, she first developed it soon after shale gas operations arrived, and months later, she was also diagnosed with grand mal seizures, renal failure, and hyperaldosteronism. Although none of these diagnoses were specifically associated with any known exposures, one incident stands out in her mind. In August 2011, after Claire noticed a metallic taste to her water and a black stain on her dishes, the drilling company and the PADEP ran more water tests. As these showed no obvious contamination, the Wassermans returned to drinking their well water. Coincidentally, Claire’s white blood cells spiked and her leukemia returned. After that, the family stopped using their well water except to flush the toilet; Claire’s leukemia went back into remission.

Regarding Jason’s health, I knew he had suffered a sudden massive aneurysm in his nose and sinuses in April 2010 unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, but I didn’t know the details of how or why it happened. “They were flaring a well over here, and this happened during a big flare.” Claire explained. “It was ungodly hot when they were flaring that off. It was, like, ninety-eight degrees. We were coming down the road, and Jason said, ‘Oh, my nose is bleeding.’ ”

Jason interrupted Claire. “You gotta understand—I’m outside all the time.”

I recalled pulling into their driveway—Jason was tinkering in the yard. He had more exposure than Claire did to whatever was in the air, because Claire was inside most of the day.

Claire continued, “I said, ‘Pull over.’ We were in the car, right below where the well was being flared. We got it [the nosebleed] stopped and came home. The next morning, [after] he woke up, he was standing in the bathroom, and he said, ‘Oh my God, Claire, come here.’ Blood was just pouring out of his nose. I said, ‘Hold it up here, hold it up here!’ ”

To demonstrate, Claire tilted her head back and pinched her nostrils. “When he was holding it like that, blood started coming out of his eyes. I said, ‘Close your eyes, close your eyes!’ and it started coming out of his ears. I thought, ‘This is it . . .’ ”

Recalling this episode, Claire was distraught and on the verge of tears. In the emergency room, the doctor kept asking Jason if he had been exposed to chemicals, and Jason said he had not.

After much research, the Wassermans realized that the occurrence of Jason’s major bleed during a flaring event was most likely not a coincidence. The process of flaring a gas well releases many chemicals into the air, including volatile organic compounds such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (a group of compounds dubbed BTEX). In addition to affecting the neurological and respiratory systems, BTEX compounds can be toxic to blood cells, causing changes in, and the destruction of, red blood cells (anemia), white blood cells (leukopenia and leukemia), and platelets (thrombocytopenia).
³
Platelets are important in clotting, and when their numbers fall, bleeding is more likely.
⁴

Nearly two years after Jason’s exposure and after many more flarings and medical rechecks, the Wassermans’ air was tested. A number of chemicals were detected, including benzene, toluene, carbon tetrachloride, and methylene chloride. As in most cases, their air was not tested before shale gas operations arrived in their neighborhood, so it is impossible to know the source of these contaminants. But Jason reminded me that he lives in the country, in a very rural area, and that these chemicals shouldn’t be in the air he breathes—shouldn’t even be on the radar. He shouldn’t have to think about them, he said, and we shouldn’t have to talk about them. There is anger in his voice. And I realize that I am angry, too.

During my meeting with the Wassermans, I noticed cases of gallon jugs and bottled water stacked halfway to the ceiling at one side of their small trailer. This water represents their ration from church donations—twenty gallons per week.

“For everything?” I asked, shocked that this could ever be enough for drinking, washing, and cooking. Later I learned that the Wassermans’ allotment is low even by the American Red Cross Guide for Shelter Managers, which recommends five gallons of water per person per day for all uses.
⁵

Claire pointed to her water allotment. “This is nothing,” she said. “I deliver water every Monday to my neighborhood. Depending on your family’s size, you may get an extra five gallons—we just don’t have the donations to supply the demand.” Claire redirected my gaze to a far corner of the trailer. “This is special water for the babies in the neighborhood. And those two boxes over there and the one on the bottom is distilled water for people who are on oxygen.”

Claire explained that the jugs that I saw on the railing of her front porch as I entered are for washing today’s dishes. “I get those from my mom and my brother—refilled at their house. And this side,” she says, pointing to more jugs on the back porch, “are for bathing for today. They heat in the sun. At eleven a.m., noon, and one p.m., I rotate the jugs—the ones in the middle come out to the edge, so that we can take a shower. I mean, this is our life.”

She says this almost apologetically, almost as if she were embarrassed, as if she should have to explain to anyone, least of all someone like me, who is not facing water loss, why they have to live like this. I imagine she said this because of the surprised look that was probably on my face. But I am in awe of Claire and Jason’s survival skills, for thinking, OK, let’s use the heat from the sun so our shower won’t be cold (I later notice a camp shower in their bathroom). Let’s keep the jugs separated. Let’s keep exact count for each day, because this is all the water we have.

By March 2012, the drilling company removed all the water buffaloes from the Wassermans’ neighbors, forcing this small, quiet community to ask for help. Claire led the water drive with the assistance of local churches and organizations, even though she was being treated for leukemia, seizures, and renal failure. When I asked how she managed this, she replied, “Somebody has to. They are hurting as much as I am.” By late 2013, thirty-six families were receiving water donations; when the drive began in March 2012, only twelve families were receiving water. I recalled an update from Claire in June 2012. At that time, a neighbor had become very ill after drinking her well water; Claire brought her bottled water and said that the woman was feeling better within twenty-four hours.

But there is another motivation for Claire. “I’m becoming bitter because they [the drilling company] did this to my community, and how dare they? My community—if someone dies, we gather food or clothing or vouchers. Fire—we do the same thing. That’s our community. But how dare they do this to us? How dare they cut off our water?”

Claire had remained calm throughout our discussion, but now was outraged. “I was getting very angry, very bitter, and I channeled myself into this water problem. A lot of people have asked me, ‘Why do you do it?’ and ‘How can you do it? You know, you’re living without water yourself.’ I tell them, ‘I wake up every morning thinking about water. From my coffee in the morning, until sleep at night, every waking second of my day is consumed by water. But two hours a day, when I leave my house, bringing water to my neighbors and listening to what they have to say, it is so therapeutic.”

I asked Claire if it’s true what I read in her local newspaper, that she not only distributes water but also pays for water for others when donations are low. “I got a call the other day from a neighbor in need of water,” she said. “I just paid for it, and this neighbor said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ I said, ‘Because you wouldn’t accept it from me. That’s why I gave you a hug and walked away.’ They know I’m sitting here without water. There are people in this community—if someone is out of water before water day, they give up their water for somebody else. That’s just the way this community is. Unbelievable. We get beyond people helping other people. This is beyond that.”

As Claire and I left her home to view shale gas operations in the neighborhood, Jason warned us to watch out for the tanker trucks because most have an associated chaser vehicle—an unmarked white pickup truck. According to Claire and Jason, both of them have been chased from public roads for stopping to look at nearby well pads—either by the neighbors who have leased their land or by drilling company workers. Although I have never experienced such harassment while touring drilling areas, others have told me that it’s not uncommon to be chased off the side of the road for simply stopping to take photos or look at well sites.

Claire began the tour approximately 3.5 miles from her home—her plan was to start from this distance and work backward, showing me as many well pads and processing plants as possible. The roads were narrow and hilly, and as we left her community, she pointed to houses with water quality or quantity changes since drilling began. For these residents, this meant that either the water could not be used, there was a scarcity of water, or filters had to be changed much more often. Claire knew each home, each neighbor, because of her community’s participation in an ongoing water study at a nearby university. Results so far indicated that more than a third of her neighbors have been affected.

Soon we arrived where Claire wanted to begin. She stopped abruptly, asking me to gaze into the distance. It was a postcard view of hills and valleys, but eventually I saw the well pads tiered in three locations at three levels: a few wells not far from where we sat in the car, several more behind these, and a few more on the hill—all in a line. Claire, constantly on guard, moved a little way up the road and around the corner, where there are more tiered wells, this time on both sides. She asked that I look quickly, take photos quickly; we had to move on so as not to arouse suspicion, to reduce the chances that we might be chased.

About ten minutes into this tour, Claire asked me, “How many have we come across?” A quick calculation gave me more than twenty gas wells on just a few roads. She slowed to an open area, and again there was a beautiful view of hillsides and valleys. She stopped the car and asked me if I saw the haze. “Isn’t that fog?” I responded.

“No. It’s constant. It never leaves, no matter the weather. You can drive to the next town, four miles over, and look back—and you’ll see it clearly because it’s not in the other towns around here.”

Pulling into the driveway of a neighbor whose water has been affected, we triggered what sounded like a kennel full of barking dogs. The house was perched on a ridge, its property surrounded by large fields of pumpkins and squash. To the right and in the distance, there was a panoramic view of a massive L-shaped impoundment and a compressor station with many green condensate tanks. These were the two well pads closest to Claire, with six shale gas wells approximately one-half mile from her home. On these pads, a casing failure occurred at one well and drilling muds spilled into a creek at another well; both events occurred during hydraulic fracturing. To the left, an access road snaked to another pad within a mile and a half of Claire’s home.

I wanted to stay longer and take more photos, but Claire began to cough and said she couldn’t take it anymore: headaches and a burning throat come on quickly and severely limit her time outdoors. As we looped back toward her home, Claire braked suddenly again within a mile of her home. On the side of the road was a well pad with a large, unlined impoundment, its liner recently removed, Claire explained, as she drives by this way often and would have noticed it before. The liner lay crumpled just off the road, while large puddles of brownish water filled bulldozer tracks left in the mud at the base of the impoundment. The pad was guarded by three sets of four large brown tanks representing the twelve wells drilled at this site. The air here smelled as if we were enclosed in a sewer and seemed to worsen the longer we stayed. Directly across the street sat a house, and as we drove away, I wondered what it would be like to live there, to sleep there, to breathe there, day in and day out. I wondered how anyone could live there at all.

Fields of vegetable crops surrounded this well pad, along with other pads we passed as we continued on this road. Much of this land was leased, Claire said, and owned by farmers who sold their vegetables at a local market, some as organic. Soon, we stopped again: two large tanks of production water—fluid that returns with the gas after the first few weeks following hydraulic fracturing and during production—occupied the roadside. We were close enough to see that the cap on one of these tanks was open, allowing the volatile compounds to escape into the atmosphere. Here, corn is king, not only surrounding these tanks, but also on both sides of the pad access road. Was the corn absorbing these volatile compounds? Could there be residues of wastewater chemicals in the corn kernels? To the best of my knowledge, no one knew and no one was testing.

Besides well pads and fields of vegetables, the next most common things I observed in Claire’s neighborhood were abandoned homes: no water, no sale. She stopped in front of a tidy little ranch with stonework, wraparound deck, garage, front yard, and backyard. “This guy thought he was getting a good deal,” she said. “He bought this house, but it has no water.”

“Didn’t he check into the water situation before buying?” I asked.

“No, because he paid cash. He works inside the garage. The kids play outside. They can’t do anything with the house. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Claire slowed to a crawl as she pointed to houses on both sides of the road where well water has turned color or slows to a trickle within a minute of turning on the faucet. It was clear that the river running beneath this community—the aquifer—was disturbed coincident with the arrival of shale gas operations. It’s not difficult to connect the dots—to believe that the millions of gallons of the chemical-sand-water mix pumped into the earth at very high pressure under this community could easily disrupt the flow of the aquifer these people depend on, the aquifer that feeds their water wells and provides them with drinking water. It’s not difficult to believe that this disruption could have displaced substances in the abandoned oil and gas wells present in this neighborhood, causing contamination of water wells. And it’s not difficult to believe that this disruption could have brought toxic substances from the shale or fracturing chemicals into the aquifer and into homes via casing failures, naturally occurring faults, or human-made fractures that extended too far. But as long as testing remains incomplete, as long as the exact chemicals being used are not known and not tested for in advance of their use, there is little hope of finding proof of a direct link, a connection between the devastation underground and that above the ground.