Stacy Long, on her property in Grant
Township (right), has been fighting to stop her town from being used as a toxic
waste dump. Mike Belleme for Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
By Justin Nobel
22 May, 2017
Grant Township, Pennsylvania,
population 741, has became the front line of a radical new environmental
movement – and they're not backing down
On October 24th, 2012, several agents from
Pennsylvania General Energy, an oil-and-gas exploration company, met privately
with local officials from the rural western Pennsylvania community of Grant
Township. Fracking was booming in Pennsylvania, and PGE had been trucking tens
of thousands of gallons of fracking wastewater to faraway injection wells in
Ohio. Developing an injection well somewhere in Pennsylvania could save the
company around $2 million a year, and Grant Township, a swath of woods and
hayfields slightly larger than Manhattan and populated by a mere 741 people,
seemed like an especially good spot.
Most of the meeting's attendees – which included the
three Grant Township supervisors, a rep from the local state senator's office
and an official from the county's office of planning and development – will not
speak about the event. But about 10 months later, one of the supervisors passed
along a notice to a retired elementary-school teacher named Judy Wanchisn. In
lettering so small "you need a magnifying glass to read," says
Wanchisn, the notice declared that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
"plans to issue an Underground Injection Control (UIC) permit to PGE . . . to
construct and operate one class II-D brine disposal injection well." Wanchisn
had no idea what that meant, but she could tell it was bad.
Wanchisn, now 74, lives about a mile from the proposed
injection-well site, in a modest white ranch house overlooking East Run, a
creek that's popular with anglers and home to an ancient salamander species
called the hellbender. She was born and raised in Grant Township and taught
elementary school for 20 years in the neighboring community of Purchase Line.
When she received the EPA announcement, she was enjoying her retirement,
spending days with grandkids and girlfriends, gardening and taking care of her husband,
who has a heart condition. But she soon found herself spending more time in
front of the computer, researching injection wells.
Fracking involves sending millions of gallons of
chemical-laden pressurized fluid into deep layers of rock, creating fractures
that release trapped oil and gas. In the past decade, Americans have been
enjoying the cheap domestic energy resulting from the fracking boom, which now
produces two-thirds of the country's natural gas and half of its oil. But
fracking has also created its share of unwanted byproduct. Some 36,000
oil-and-gas wastewater-injection wells – disposal sites for the fluid that
seeps to the surface after a well is fracked – lie sunk across our land.
Pennsylvania presently has only eight active injection wells, but several are
in the process of being permitted. And as the incredibly gas-rich Marcellus
shale layer is developed, along with another massive shale layer a few thousand
feet beneath it called the Utica, there will surely be more to come.
Fracking wastewater is a toxic brew containing some of
the carcinogenic and flammable chemicals left over from the fracking process,
as well as heavy metals and radioactive elements like radon and radium that
seep out of deep rock layers. Between 2005 and 2014, America pumped
approximately 189 billion gallons of fracking wastewater down injection wells,
the equivalent of letting the full force of Niagara Falls gush directly into
the earth for 14 and a half days. "They started drilling without having
any idea what they are going to do with the waste," says Penn State
ecologist William Hamilton, who writes a blog about western Pennsylvania.
"To me, pumping it into the ground seems like a very foolish way to
dispose of a toxic material. There are going to be gigantic, unknown and
long-term consequences to this."…
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