The End of Country (34 page)

The way Ken figured it, the whole series of events that led to the contamination of the water wells began months earlier on that singularly windy night when the drilling had stopped and no one then had known why. They later learned that Cabot had gotten one of its precious drill bits stuck in the glacial scree 1,500 feet deep. But rather than move to another site, they had simply drilled another well right
alongside the first while they struggled to retrieve their bit. The company finished drilling and cemented the well. State regulations called for the drillers to cement the pipe at the bottom of the well, and then to lay another layer of cement thousands of feet higher, in essence encasing the steel pipe and theoretically protecting the water supplies closer to the surface, and that was precisely what Cabot did. But the vast majority of that pipe, several thousand feet of it, was not encased in cement. The state did not require that.

What had happened, Ken theorized, was that gas from that higher deposit had been dislodged by the drilling and by the frantic efforts to retrieve the stuck drill bit, and the cement, unable to attach to the glacial scree, did not create a sufficient barrier. And if it had happened there, he suspected, perhaps something similar had happened at other wells in the village.

The question was, what could do they do about it?

S
OME FOUR HUNDRED MILES
away from Dimock, Ken Komorowski was already getting his marching orders from Cabot. A generally good-natured man, a solid Republican and the kind of guy you would want at your elbow during a real estate closing, though with a lawyer’s habit of parsing his words so finely that they slipped through the gaps in his teeth when he spoke, Komorowski had been hired by Cabot, as well as by Range, to do some legal work for them. But unlike Range Resources, which had spent nearly as much of its time in the Marcellus working on public relations projects as it spent on drilling, Cabot had a different philosophy. Its primary objective, as articulated to and by Komorowski, was to exact the maximum benefit to its shareholders. Period. And the way the company saw it, those shareholders’ benefits were being jeopardized by the problems developing in Dimock.

Cabot at first tried to downplay the significance of the problem. It was too early, the company’s spokesman intoned to the first few reporters who contacted him, to say for certain whether the methane that was now rushing into the groundwater at what was turning out to be an alarming rate had actually been released by the drilling. There were, he noted, a number of other ways that gas could have gotten there, and only a complex series of tests to study the isotopes in the gas could determine whether it was thermogenic—gas trapped in the ancient rocks—and which layer of rock it had come from, or whether
it was more recently created “swamp gas” that often occurs naturally either at or very close to the surface. There was, the company argued, no proof yet that its drilling had unleashed the gas. What’s more, Komorowski insisted—and the DEP agreed—that methane in and of itself was not particularly dangerous. As long as the water wells were properly vented, the gas, which poses no serious health threat, would dissipate over time. As long as gas didn’t build up in a basement or some confined space, there was little risk of the kind of explosion that had ripped apart that house in Cleveland the year before.

All the same, in what the company spokesman tried to depict as a consummate act of social responsibility, Cabot agreed to provide bottled water for the affected residents—temporarily—and also pledged to work with the DEP to find the source of the contamination and, if it turned out to be their fault, to correct it.

But back in Dimock, there was a growing sense that Cabot and the DEP did not fully appreciate how significant this first incident of contamination from the gas in the Marcellus really was, that perhaps the driller and the state did not completely understand the risks that were involved, and there was even a sense that maybe the locals hadn’t understood, either.

The group decided to make everyone aware of the incident and to prod both Cabot and the DEP to do something about it. Over the next several weeks, the group with Ken and Victoria and now Norma Fiorentino as its public face waged a full-scale battle to press Cabot and the DEP into action.

For the most part, they did it through direct action: telephone calls to the state, pressure on local elected officials, and frequent interviews with local television and newspaper reporters. They even sat down with national reporters. There was a surprising level of sophistication to their operation. It was not lost on them that the vast majority of people outside Dimock tended to view the people who live in places like Dimock in a cartoonish way, either as rustic rubes or as the luckless victims of exploitation by big companies. Such narratives are deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and Ken and Victoria were smart enough to use that mythology to their advantage. And always, they returned to the theme Ken had set in his first interview months before with the Scranton
Times-Tribune
, the theme of moderation. “I’m not going to bash Cabot,” Ken would state at the
beginning of almost every interview, before launching into a litany of missteps by the big gas company.

Ken and Victoria also understood that they had an ace in the hole. They were not the only ones who had Cabot and the DEP in their sights. Other groups, most notably Barbara Arrindell’s Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, had seized on the problems in Dimock to bolster their argument that drilling was intrinsically unsafe, that the DEP was irredeemably unreliable, and that the drilling needed to be stopped, completely and immediately.

Ken and Victoria and their group did not see it that way. Their view was that there certainly were critical risks associated with the process, and they had been forced to make sacrifices they had never bargained for. As Victoria put it, the massive disruption of the land and the constant roar of the rigs had driven away the wildlife, including a great horned owl and a howling coyote that had been among the first friendly voices she had heard when she moved up here, and now it was threatening her water supply and those of her neighbors.

But the Marcellus also offered promise, though certainly for Victoria that promise no longer seemed terribly bright. Maybe it would take a while, and maybe the ultimate payoff would not be as rich as everyone had hoped, but there was still money to be made, and in a place like Dimock, that could make all the difference in the world.

If nothing else, the very fact that Barbara Arrindell and her group were attracting so much attention was a good thing for the locals in Dimock, because it made them seem more reasonable and thus a better negotiating partner for the drillers and the DEP, and both Ken and Victoria also recognized that.

B
Y THE MIDDLE OF
F
EBRUARY
, the round-the-clock efforts of the Dimock group were taking their toll on the members, especially on Victoria and on Jim. But there was also no doubt that they were having an impact on Cabot, and on Komorowski, the man Cabot had designated to be not only its spokesman but also its envoy to the troubled north. The folks around Dimock who had benefited from the drilling and had not been adversely affected by the migrating gas, people like Cleo Teel and Rosemarie Greenwood, were not rushing to the company’s defense. They had their own lives to live. Rosemarie, for example, had paid little attention to the whole uproar, pre-occupied
as she was with finally selling off her herd of dairy cattle and preparing to begin her new life as a gas baroness.

It didn’t help Cabot’s image, either, that Ken Ely, the guy who had become the beneficiary of the most prodigiously producing well that Cabot had drilled, was one of the leaders of the opposition. It certainly didn’t make the company look good to have what amounted to a full-scale insurrection going on among its landowners, Komorowski realized, and it didn’t bode well that the group’s efforts had also prodded the DEP to take a more aggressive stance. Even other drillers were watching the developments in Dimock with growing concern. As one of them put it to a reporter, the bad taste that the gas was leaving in people’s mouths in Dimock would, if left unchecked, contaminate their operations as well. “Something like that could ruin this for everybody,” the gasman had said.

It’s not clear what, if any, pressure the other drillers put on Cabot. Drillers tend to be an independent bunch, and even the organizations that purport to represent them as an industry, such as the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which includes representatives from all the big companies in the play, tend to be more a confederacy of convenience, lacking any real power to enforce the will of the majority.

All the same, Komorowski now had his orders. It was time to travel to Dimock to try to make peace with the natives.

It’s no doubt true that the DEP would have taken action on the contamination of the water wells in Dimock had Ken and Victoria and their group not been riding them, and it is also probably true, as Cabot’s spokesman insisted, that the company would have taken steps to identify the problem and try to correct it. But it is far from clear that those things would have happened with as much alacrity had the ad hoc committee of the Marcellus in Dimock not been involved.

Even DEP officials would later admit that pressure from the locals helped spur the agency and the company into action. And they also had to admit that locals like Ken Ely had known a good deal more about the operation and its consequences than they had been given credit for. In fact, at the end of January, less than three weeks after the initial explosion, DEP inspectors and geologists had pieced together an explanation and had zeroed in on a cause for the incident. It was exactly as Ken had predicted. The gas that had migrated into Norma’s well and the others was in fact thermogenic gas, the state concluded.
But it had not drifted up thousands of feet through natural fractures in the rock. While that sort of thing had happened elsewhere in other parts of the United States, places in the western states where younger, less sturdy rock layers overlaid gas deposits, such a scenario was unlikely to occur in the hard, deep rock that lay atop the Marcellus. Rather, it was gas that had been trapped for millions of years in a layer of Devonian shale some 1,500 feet below the surface.

At a hastily arranged meeting with the group a few weeks later, Cabot, in the person of Ken Komorowski, offered an olive branch. The company continued to insist that the DEP’s conclusions had been reached in haste and that, as Komorowski put it, “it was premature” to attach blame for the contamination to the gas drilling operation. All the same, a chastened Cabot agreed to re-cement the faulty well, and also several others in the area. Four of its wells, including two of its newest and best producing units, were temporarily taken offline to do it. This time, however, Cabot would go far beyond the minimal standards set by the state, Komorowski said. The company pledged that it would squeeze cement along the whole length of the wells, a process that adds tens of thousands of dollars to the price of every well drilled. “It’s certainly a cost,” Komorowski told the group, but in a moment of surprising candor he also noted that there was another calculation that had to be made. Yes, Cabot’s shareholders demanded the best possible return on their investment in the company, but there was also a price to be paid for what had, by that point, become a constant stream of news stories about how the poor folks in Dimock were struggling against the might of a major gas company. And that price was getting way too high. “We don’t want to be the centerpiece of public attention any longer than is absolutely necessary,” Komorowski told the group.

It was not an outright victory for Ken and Victoria and their neighbors. But it wasn’t a win for Cabot, either. The two sides had battled their way to a kind of cold peace. There was, the DEP had told the group, no way of telling just how long Cabot would remain in that unwelcome spotlight. But they weren’t off the hook, either. It could take months, maybe longer, before they would know whether the steps Cabot had promised to take to mitigate the methane intrusion into the aquifer had worked, and to be frank, there was not a lot of trust among the members of the group that the company would be
as good as its word. But in the meantime, Cabot would be required to include as part of its routine tasks in the Marcellus the regular delivery of water, now to about half a dozen homes in Dimock.

Victoria believed her group had accomplished something else. It had sent a message, not just to Cabot but to all the drillers across the state, that even if the state bureaucracy lacked the resources to oversee them, even if the federal agencies had abdicated their responsibilities, somebody was watching.

It was, she realized, a small victory, and one that would no doubt have to be won again. But by that point, Victoria was ready to let someone else win it. She was exhausted, and at last she was ready to take her husband’s advice. There were still some loose ends to tie up, some additional research to be done and some follow-up calls to be made. But once those were done, she would be, too. It was a promise she made to herself. “I’ll give it until April,” she told herself one night not long after the battle with Cabot had shuddered to its conclusion.

A
CROSS THE TOP OF THE HILL
, sitting in front of the television in his little cottage with his wife, Ken Ely was also contemplating the future. He was also seething over the past. It had been five months since Crybaby had been killed and her remains surreptitiously stashed in the rocks. And though Cabot had now expressed remorse, and had even offered to buy him a new bluetick coonhound, Ken Ely still believed there was a debt to be paid. The way Ken saw it, there were a few basic rules of conduct that governed the behavior of everybody in these hills, locals and strangers alike. No one should ever threaten a man’s home or his family; it would always be a mistake to ask too many questions about a man’s guns; and above all, one should never, ever, do anything to a man’s dog. Cabot had violated that last and most sacred rule, and for that transgression, there would be consequences.