Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America

Did Stacey and her children have to adapt to technology by leaving their farm, or did fracking have to adapt to the communities that preceded it? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court came down firmly in favor of individual rights and community, over the rights of the extractive industry.

Harley had decided to give up on lawn care and go to work installing residential gas pipelines. There

Range’s subcontractors pumped a total of 3,343,986 gallons of water and chemicals into the perforated pipe. Some of the chemicals were as harmless as soap; others carried greater risks. These included ethylene glycol, a neurotoxin, and elements of BTEX, the shorthand for benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene. Employing pressure approaching a s

Stacey said. She and Beth wondered if the hasty appointment and the practice of rushing them through might have been a tactic for screwing them out of percentage points.

“People who live in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia are bottom-feeders who don’t want to know where their meat or their energy comes from,” he told me. They could afford to leave people in Amity and Prosperity alone.

To lay these pipelines that would transport the primordial gas to urban markets, companies needed to dig trenches across farmers’ land.

The unknown realities of drilling for shale gas seemed preferable to the familiar toll coal mining levied.

If he was in fact a guinea pig for industry while they were cashing life-changing checks, then it followed that the landowners were making that money at the cost of someone’s health.

EPA was so unpopular. Here was a typical scenario, Day told me. When drilling started on his land, the dust from the access road was so bad that a neighbor kept complaining. The easiest solution would’ve been to pave the dirt road, but the EPA wouldn’t let Range do it. “They’d have solved all the problems if they’d just blacktopped it,” Day said. I