Inside the 14-Year Battle to Secure a Water Line for Fracking’s ‘Ground Zero’

This is part two of a two-part series on the fracking saga that overwhelmed the small town of Dimock, Pennsylvania, and how the gubernatorial election could affect its long-suffering residents. The first part is available here. 

Victoria Switzer could not have predicted just weeks ago that she would be standing beside Pennsylvania Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro to celebrate a natural gas company’s acceptance of legal responsibility for environmental crimes in her neighborhood. 

But that’s what she did on Nov. 29, just minutes after Coterra Energy Inc. pleaded no contest to criminal charges for fracking-related water pollution in her community going back more than a decade. The company moved in here more than a decade ago and its natural gas drilling was first tied to methane pollution in residents’ water wells in 2009 — at the time, it was Cabot Oil & Gas, which combined with Cimarex Energy Co. to form Coterra in 2021.

Some residents still do not have easy access to potable water, residents and scientists tell Capital & Main.
 

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As part of the plea bargain — which the Attorney General’s Office shared with Dimock residents a week prior to the hearing — the company will pay $16.29 million to drill a series of clean water wells and a water line connecting Dimock homes to this supply. The company will also give each affected household $58,000 to cover its water bills for the next 75 years and, during the estimated three- to four-year construction period, water treatment systems or bottled water while the households await the water line.

“I think it’s the best we could have asked for,” Switzer told Capital and Main on Nov. 30, the morning after the hearing. A 19-year resident of an area once considered “ground zero” in the fight against fracking, Switzer and her husband moved here in the early aughts and built their home from the ground up. She hasn’t ingested her well water since 2009, instead relying on bottled water to drink, wash dishes, make coffee and brush her teeth. The outcome of the plea agreement, after years of watching her neighbors get creative with their water supply, is welcome news.

“It’s a huge win,” says Switzer, expressing relief that the company, and not taxpayers, would pay for the water line. 

Capital & Main reached out to Coterra for comment and did not hear back by publication time. 

The November plea hearing lasted no more than 30 minutes in all — a swift resolution to a 14-year struggle for clean water and a two-and-a-half-year wait for residents who were promised justice by Shapiro in June 2020 when, as the state’s attorney general, he charged the company with nine felonies and six misdemeanors after methane escaped from its natural gas wells into nearby private water supplies. (Cabot pleaded no contest to one felony charge, which was dropped to a misdemeanor. The judge at the hearing was Susquehanna County President Judge Jason Legg, who has ties to Cabot; Legg disclosed those ties at the hearing and neither party opposed.) 

“For too long, the good people of Dimock have waited to have the clean water that our constitution promises restored to them,” Shapiro said at a news conference following the hearing, standing beside Switzer and her neighbors, Ray Kemble and Scott Ely, who both testified at the hearing that the water line was appreciated but long overdue.
 

“You’ve got contaminated water, it’s clear where it came from, you at the very least have a moral obligation to rectify the situation.”

~ Zacariah Hildenbrand, research professor, University of Texas at El Paso

 
For many in Dimock, the result represents the long-awaited culmination of a plan drawn up more than a decade ago that, until days before Shapiro’s election, seemed out of reach. For years, residents felt twice cursed: They lacked easy access to clean water since their water wells were polluted due to fracking activity by Coterra, one of the largest gas producers in the state, which then resisted paying for a municipal water line when the plan was initially introduced, according to interviews and documents shared with Capital & Main. And while a water line cannot undo the environmental damage caused by natural gas drilling, for some residents it would eliminate the hassle of making lengthy treks every few days just to access clean water.

It also represents an about-face by the Attorney General’s Office, which previously floated the idea of installing water treatment systems on private wells in Dimock after years of opposition to that solution amid multiple instances of malfunction. Capital & Main reached out to the Attorney General’s Office to inquire about this change of approach and did not hear back by publication time. 

“These treatment systems are generally designed to handle mildly contaminated water,” said Zacariah Hildenbrand, professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at El Paso. “One month of treatment and then the full system goes kaput, and then there’s no follow-up.” 

“One of the ideas that was floated within that community was, ‘We want you to pipe in the municipal water. We don’t want to treat bad water into decent water. We want good water to begin with,’” Hildenbrand said. “You’ve got contaminated water, it’s clear where it came from, you at the very least have a moral obligation to rectify the situation.” 

But some residents are only cautiously optimistic: A plan like this one has fallen apart here before. As part of the plea bargain, Coterra must supply residents with household water treatment systems should its plan for a water line fail — despite widespread hesitation about these systems, the plan does not require the company to continue supplying bottled water if the water line cannot be completed. Switzer and Kemble both said they won’t accept a water treatment system if offered, given their poor track record.

But Switzer feels hopeful that that won’t be necessary — that the water line, with renewed backing, will come to fruition as promised. But, she said, “I’m not naive anymore.” 

“All the things that have to happen before water is flowing into the faucets of this home, there’s a lot of things that have to happen,” she said.

“We were assured it’s going to happen or that there’s a legal will to make it happen,” she said. “I don’t feel like we’re debating that anymore.”

*   *   *

The saga began back in 2006, when Cabot land men arrived and knocked on the doors of Dimock residents to ask about signing leases to the mineral rights beneath their properties. 

Ray Kemble, a 30-year Dimock resident, said he resisted for years, despite being told he could earn anywhere between $5,000 and $15,000 a month in royalties. Under pressure from his family, he finally signed a lease; the first annual royalty check he received was nowhere near the hundreds of thousands promised. “Everything they do is a lie,” Kemble said. “They did anything to get these leases signed.” 

Around the same time, many of his neighbors in Dimock were getting the same offers and signing similar leases. The company offered $25 an acre, plus royalties.

Some felt they had no choice but to hand over their land: They were told by Cabot land men that the minerals beneath their land would be developed regardless of whether they signed leases or not. 

In 2008 came the first signs that the natural gas boom wasn’t all it was cracked up to be: Two Dimock residents notified regulators that their water wasn’t running clear. Then, on Jan. 1, 2009, another resident came home to find her water well had exploded, breaking through a concrete slab that sat over it. 

The state ultimately determined that stray methane migration — in which gas travels through pathways underground, sometimes created by the bores that fracking wells create underground — was the cause of the explosion. While drinking water aquifers typically sit hundreds of feet underground, horizontal drilling sends fluids thousands of feet underground, piercing through aquifers along the way. If present in water at volumes high enough, methane can be explosive.
 

On Jan. 1, 2009, a Dimock resident came home to find her water well had exploded, breaking through a concrete slab that sat over it.

 
Neighbors began to learn that methane was in their own water supplies. And, all the while, they noted a sharp increase in truck traffic on otherwise quiet country roads, causing road conditions to worsen, as well as bright lights and loud noises at late hours.

By the end of that year, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) stepped in, issuing a consent order that required Cabot to repair groundwater quality and establish a 9-square-mile fracking moratorium around the region where families with polluted water wells lived — a perimeter that still exists today, 13 years later, since the baseline water quality in Dimock has yet to return to its pre-fracking conditions, DEP officials told Capital & Main. 

Cabot pushed back, repeatedly denying that it caused the pollution, claiming instead that methane existed in the Marcellus Shale formation prior to its drilling in Dimock. The order was later amended three times within just over a year of its initial filing because Cabot had failed to restore polluted water supplies to their initial condition.

The official behind the consent orders, former DEP Secretary John Hanger, recalled vividly how the first consent order was “unfortunately not followed by Cabot,” he told Capital & Main in a phone interview. “That’s when I became personally involved.”

The first updated order filed the following April required the company to deliver Dimock residents potable drinking water or gas mitigation systems, which were to be attached to their wells and were intended to strip it of pollutants. The second updated order, signed that July, acknowledged residents’ claims that those water treatment systems did not work. This was followed by a separate announcement that the DEP would facilitate the building of an $11.8 million water pipeline to bring municipal water to Dimock, where residents had been relying on private water wells. The last consent order would deal a blow to this resolution, pulling the plug on the water line and offering families cash settlements instead. 

It’s been more than 10 years since the last order was signed. The families in Dimock have now been splintered by settlements with Cabot, nondisclosure agreements and divisions over the best way to clean up their water. Some have died, others sold their land and moved on. Two families won millions in a judgment against Cabot, only to have the verdict vacated the following year. The parties eventually settled. 

Over the years, the residents of Dimock have been offered water treatment systems to rid their water of methane — at least one believed accepting the system was mandatory based on the language of a DEP consent order and communications with the gas company. Cabot facilitated the installation of one of these systems, which, according to documents shared with Capital & Main, used a process called “air stripping,” in which water is pumped through a sprayer to vent any methane it contains into the air; the water is then treated with ozone to kill any bacteria.
 

“It is now 14 years later, and our water has never been permanently restored or replaced as DEP regulations state will be done.”

~ Dimock resident

 
As early as 2010, residents complained that the systems were not working — and the DEP reversed its requirement that Cabot provide them to affected households. But some residents had already accepted them, including one who spoke with Capital &  Main on the condition of anonymity. After their water first showed signs of pollution two years prior, the family put faith in a treatment system that would end up requiring constant maintenance over the course of the next seven years.

The wastewater treatment system sits in a storage shed outside the home today, a maze of machines that’s only grown more complex over time. Additional parts were added and moved around, and the whole thing required frequent visits — at the worst times, twice per week — by Cabot officials the family had once worked hard to avoid in negotiating the terms of a no-touch lease (in which the gas company’s staff were not permitted on the property while they drilled underneath it). The shed that houses the system often flooded, required temperature maintenance by a heater that is now rusty and was maintained by a slew of staff who signed in on a clipboard of dozens of pages that has since grown moldy. 

Despite once promising to maintain it “as long as the system is needed,” Cabot told the residents in 2017 that it had “done more than was required” and would stop tending to it. Around this time, the DEP sent a cease and desist letter to the residents, asserting that their ongoing issues with the treatment system had been resolved and that reupping the issues was a waste of “valuable department resources.” The department concluded that it would stop responding to complaints about their residential water supply, and, upon later follow-up, refused to return to the matter, documents shared with Capital & Main showed. In one email, Scott Perry, former deputy secretary of the DEP’s office of Oil and Gas Management, told the family that it was “not responsible” for the system, despite being the entity that initially proposed it. Neither Perry nor the DEP responded to Capital & Main’s request for comment on this charge by publication time.

The family took the system offline shortly thereafter. 

“It is now 14 years later, and our water has never been permanently restored or replaced as DEP regulations state will be done,” the resident told Capital and Main. “No permits, inspections, useable warranties, recourse, etc. Nothing involving the so-called treatment system.”

*   *   *

It’s a distinct possibility that water treatment systems could be reintroduced if the water line fails, an option that both Switzer and Kemble say they will reject.

In the final days leading up to the announcement of the water line in 2010, Cabot was urging regulators not to change course but to allow the company to continue installing water treatment systems in residents’ homes as a remedy for methane pollution.

Two days before Hanger announced his plans for the municipal water line in September of 2010, Cabot sent him a letter alleging that the move was made “in pursuit of political advantage” while arguing that there was “no legal basis or support” for the company to install a “wasteful and environmentally disruptive community pipeline.” 

“Whole-house treatment systems remain the appropriate solution,” the letter said. 

Even so, the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority, the agency that provides loans for infrastructure projects across the commonwealth, voted 9-2 about a month later to provide funds to Pennsylvania American Water Co. for an $11.8 million, 5.5 mile water main from Lake Montrose treatment plant to Dimock. 

The plan split residents between supporters and opponents who were misled into thinking that taxpayers would be left on the hook for the water line. 

Some staged protests against Cabot. Others who sided with the company joined a coalition that dubbed itself Enough Already and jammed “No water line” signs into their front lawns. Hanger blamed Cabot for dividing the community on the issue, he told Capital and Main.

“You don’t get 100 people protesting the DEP secretary showing up at the home of somebody whose water was getting impacted without somebody stirring it up,” Hanger said. “And Cabot stirred it up.” Coterra did not respond to Capital & Main’s request for comment on this claim.

Between his Sept. 30 water line announcement and the Nov. 9 vote, Hanger found himself fending off a barrage of “misinformation” concerning “who will end up paying for” the water line, he said in an open letter to the citizens of Susquehanna County in October. “Since that announcement was made, Cabot has launched a public relations campaign,” Hanger said. 

“The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will … aggressively seek to recover the cost of the project from Cabot,” he said. “No one in Dimock or Susquehanna County will pay for it and local taxes will not be increased as [a] result of it. Residents along Route 29 will have the option to tap into the line if they so choose. No one will be forced to hook up to the new public water supply. The new water line will also boost the value of homes and businesses near it.”
 

“Three to four years before we see water? I think that can be done faster.”

~ Dimock resident Ray Kemble

 
This grassroots opposition was met by similar opposition in the state Legislature, notably by then-head of the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, Mary Jo White (R – Butler), and PENNVEST board member and Sen. Don White (R – Indiana). In 2010, an election year, both senators received donations from K&L Gates LLP and Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC, the law firms that represented Cabot in a 2009 class action lawsuit filed by Dimock residents. The latter firm represented Coterra in its case against the attorney general. (The former firm represents fossil fuel industry opponents of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative Inc., an air pollution mitigation effort, in an ongoing case against the DEP.) Capital & Main reached out for comment to the former district offices of both Whites and did not hear back by publication time. 

On the same day Hanger announced the water line, a Cabot staff member told DEP staff to “speak sense” to Dimock residents who were at the time suing the company, calling water treatment systems “the obvious solution to alleged water quality” issues, according to documents shared with Capital & Main. 

Hanger stood firm. “Back then, those [water treatment] systems had sort of a mixed record of success or failure, and I was not comfortable in their ability to deliver clean water,” Hanger said. “My judgment at the time was that it wasn’t an equally effective means of delivering clean water to those families.”

But less than two months later came the 2010 election of Republican Gov. Tom Corbett. Anticipating that the red wave overtaking the executive branch would kill his hopes of a water line, Hanger drafted up a settlement. On Dec. 15, Hanger signed his final consent order with Cabot, which required the company to drop a cumulative $4.2 million into a series of separate escrow accounts for 19 Dimock families who’d lost clean water. The settlements were predicated upon the death of the water line, “bitter” news for families who were “looking forward to the secure supply of clean water,” the Scranton Times-Tribune reported at the time. The resolution was also $7 million less than Cabot was estimated to be on the hook for should the water line be installed and, residents noted at the time, not enough to pay for a lifetime’s supply of water.

By the following year, Cabot stopped delivering free potable water to 11 Dimock families at the DEP’s guidance. According to one resident, the company quickly offered to start the service back up after halting — this time, for $100 per day. 

*   *   * 

Doing the math on how long she’ll have gone without clean water, Switzer nears two decades. In that time, she’s lost neighbors — some have died, others moved, neither camp able to see justice from the Nov. 29 hearing. Now, her community is looking at another three to four years, per estimates by the Attorney General’s Office, before the water line is constructed.

“I can’t do anything about the time that we lost,” she said. What could happen in the years between now and when the water line is complete? Supply chain hiccups, transportation difficulties or the election of a Republican successor to Shapiro, she said.

Kemble is cautiously optimistic but dismayed by the timeline. “Three to four years before we see water? I think that can be done faster,” he told Capital & Main the day after the plea hearing. Even so, he feels vindicated by the resolution. “They’ve been denying this and calling us liars and everything else for decades,” he said. 

Switzer, too, feels hopeful. “I’ve had a pleasant reversal of feelings,” she said. 

Just months ago, she told Capital & Main she’d had to step back from anti-fracking activism to protect her time and sanity. She is getting ready to put her house — a hemlock timber frame with floor-to-ceiling front windows and a wraparound deck — on the market as she and her husband relocate to be closer to her family. This task feels less daunting with the possibility of clean water in sight. And after watching Coterra attorneys plead no contest in court, she feels a sense of renewed vigor for her other environmental advocacy work — notably around halting a fracking waste treatment facility that would dump brine into Burdick Creek, which flows through her backyard. 

“This isn’t done,” she said. “This doesn’t mean it’s all over.”
 

Some Dimock residents who live outside the moratorium area but still firmly in the center of a shalefield will not receive clean water.

 
“I want to leave knowing that Burdick Creek is OK,” she continued. “I’ve looked into the eyes of the bear in the creek and all the critters that live along the creek. I would have a really hard time walking away from that knowing that we hadn’t saved the creek.” 

Switzer is reminded of the fragility of the environment within her mostly fracking-free 9-square-mile box — she hopes that, should the water line offer water supply to her area, regulators will not opt to loosen the terms of the first consent order that established this zone. 

State regulators have issued Cabot and Coterra hundreds of violations since 2008, six of which were reported near the 9-square-mile fracking moratorium zone in the week before the hearing. Some Dimock residents who live outside the moratorium area but still firmly in the center of a shalefield will not receive clean water and could face an uphill battle should they ever need to secure it. 

Shapiro, asked about this during the press conference after the hearing, deferred to state regulators. “Certainly it’s an issue that we will review upon taking office,” he said. Capital & Main reached out to the DEP for comment on the matter and did not hear back by publication time.

This possibility concerns Switzer. But, she said, “We won’t be here to see that.” 

On this forested property, tucked behind a hill separating her home from the road, Switzer tends to a family of deer and at least one bear. She keeps an eye on Burdick Creek, which trickles through her backyard. If she leaves, she will leave this seemingly idyllic plot behind; but she will also leave behind the roar of heavy-duty trucks and the “slow down” sign she felt obliged to put in front of her lot as a result. She will leave behind the water jugs she relies on. She will leave behind her neighbors, some of whom joined her in years of accidental activism that she never wished for. 

“We have a goal, and it’s a positive goal,” Switzer said. “But it sure is a shame that we had to live the last decade like this.” 

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