01 May 23
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From Stormy Daniels to E. Jean Carroll to Amanda Zurawski, women are finding a way past a very old trope.
This vibe has prevailed in recent decades, even when it was lightly subverted; in 1973 Ms. Magazine infamously published a photo of Gerri Santoro bleeding out after a botched illegal abortion, under the headline “Never Again.” Time and again, the stories of lily-white women generously bleeding out for justice take center stage. To be a good crime victim demands youth, innocence, tears, and a life in tatters. It pulls women out of one airless box—property/wife/daughter—and pops her into another: ruined angel.
It would be nice if we could transcend this ancient narrative. And lately, finally, the “good victim” trope really seems to be faltering, and I am absolutely here for it. Whether it’s Stormy Daniels chortling at the former president’s penis, E. Jean Carroll refusing to designate herself a rape victim (while still suing the former president for rape), or Amanda Zurawski testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week about how her inability to access health care nearly killed her, these women are not broken, defiled, ruined, or asking men to rescue them. They are, rather, pissed off, living their lives, and defying the public imperative to open a vein in public as a testament to their loss and brokenness. They are nobody’s property and nobody’s responsibility, and it is about freaking time we took them extremely seriously.
Zurawski’s testimony is particularly compelling after months spent watching the post-Dobbs reporting on all the women who must brush right up against death in childbirth before anyone can help them. It is a chilling reminder of how very much we love stories of dying women and the men who save them. But Zurawski’s testimony—that despite the fact that her pregnancy was not viable, her Texas doctors “didn’t feel safe enough to intervene as long as her heart was beating or until I was sick enough for the ethics board at the hospital to consider my life at risk”—reworked that story. Rather than center herself as a victim, she centered the men who hurt her (including Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, who didn’t show up for her testimony) and the ways in which she and her husband saved herself. It may not be a story you read in the mainstream press, but it is why abortion won the midterms and the Wisconsin Supreme Court race and will likely keep winning elections for anyone looking to preserve reproductive rights. Nobody is going back to Justice Alito’s halcyon days of witch burnings and Madonna/whore morality tales. Abortion advocates are, again, saving themselves.
Olivia Nuzzi’s recent barnstorming profile of Stormy Daniels in New York Magazine is, similarly, one for the books, not least because of the tarot card reading that opens the piece, and the open roasting of the politics-to-reality-show pipeline that constitutes public life today. But the most arresting part of the story is the grouping of several Trump “victims”—Stormy Daniels, Kathy Griffin, Mary Trump, and E. Jean Carroll—into a category Mary Trump handily describes as having “no fucks to give.” (Disclosure: As a journalist, I’ve met all of these women in recent years.) Griffin, in a quote, goes one better, describing Daniels as “like a porno Dorothy Parker,” and then goes on to describe the fantasy as “me, Mary, E. Jean, and Daniels and probably her husband and a fluffer.” I love the descriptor, and not just because each of these women is funny, complicated, and comfortable in her skin, as well as generally quirky AF, but also because it signals that perhaps the era of the wan, ruined, long-suffering victim may be well and truly behind us.
I’ve all but given up on the pollsters and pundits who will never understand the seismic change Dobbs brought about in politics. They don’t seem to actually know any women like E. Jean Carroll or Stormy Daniels, and they clearly don’t have any idea about how to pick up the phone and reach one. If you live your whole entire life in 19th-century tabloids or 21st-century Hallmark movies, you can truly fail to understand that for most women, most of the time, sexual harassment, sexual assault, internet death threats, pay discrimination, the absence of a meaningful child and health care network, pregnancy, pregnancy loss, and pregnancy complications are daily facts of life. All those things truly complicate and confound our daily lives, and still we manage to go to our jobs, and buy our yogurt, and call our moms. We’re actually, very few of us, huddled on a velvet couch palely waiting for some legislator to rescue us, or for some ethics board to deem us sufficiently wan and pale to warrant emergency lifesaving medical care. As Zurawski testified Wednesday, she never expected the senators who favored the abortion rules that nearly killed her to show up at a hearing to hear her story. They are as wholly invisible to her as she was to them. She just wants the rest of us porno Dorothy Parkers to be forewarned.
So, too, Carroll sat before a jury that already understands why women don’t report sexual assault the day it occurs, and told Donald Trump’s lawyer, “You can’t beat up on me for not screaming. One of the reasons [some women] don’t come forward is they are asked why they didn’t scream. Some women scream; some women don’t. It keeps women silent.” Indeed, she said, she now fully understands why women don’t report sexual abuse—because they won’t be believed (which is, paradoxically, what Trump’s lawyer kept saying: that she wasn’t believable). But this jury got to hear from a three-dimensional Carroll, who happily went into a changing room at Bergdorf’s with a guy because she was a journalist and he was a story. Her testimony was deeply hilarious and complicated and highbrow and ambitious and not at all designed for anyone’s fainting couch. “I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault,” she testified. “It was high comedy, it was funny, and then to have it turn …”
Welcome to the life of a woman.
It is worth noting here that Donald Trump’s defense in every case involving a female accuser is one-dimensional: She wanted his fame, she wanted his money, she wanted revenge. Women exist solely to steal his light, to cash in on his importance. In this Victorian telling, women are nothing until they can gouge a man.
But so many of the women presently in the world don’t actually believe that Trump is the source of their future greatness. With the exception of his wife and his daughters and some hapless attorneys, most women are smart enough to stay far away from him. To wit: What Stormy Daniels reports wanting from Donald Trump was principally to be left alone. When E. Jean Carroll’s friend Carol Martin advised her not to tell the police she’d been raped, it was because she wanted to spare her from being doubly injured by him. As Carroll put it on cross-examination: “I was afraid Donald Trump would retaliate, which is exactly what he did. He has two tables full of lawyers here today.”
Victims of persistent narcissistic misogyny, whether it emanates from Trump or Tucker Carlson or Harvey Weinstein or someone much less famous, always end up having to be “good” victims. In order to get anything like justice, they have to perfectly embody the trauma of what happened to them as the main plotline of their own life. The narratives always put their attacker, his wants and needs and actions, at the center of the story. Even when the attackers become incidental, or ancillary, or just tiresome, we have to keep behaving as though they are the beginning and the ending of the story.
But these new porno Dorothy Parkers keep making the choice to center themselves, their friendships, and their intricate lives. As Carroll testified Wednesday, “I’ve regretted this 100 times, but in the end, being able to get my day in court finally is everything to me. So I’m happy!” Like so many Trump accusers, she just wants to unstick her life from the sprawling miasma that is Donald Trump. She wants her voice back and her career back and her reputation back. Like Daniels, she just wants him to go away.
The notion that men own the law and women own their pain is so deeply ingrained in our legal system that nothing—not Anita Hill or #MeToo or decades of true crime and decades of obsessing over true crime—has fully shaken it loose. But in this post-Dobbs moment, we may finally have the potential to understand the cost of treating women as mere bodies, vessels, and victims, either perfect or ruined. Because unlike the women who bled out in random hotel rooms or died of infection, these women are surviving their mistreatment, and organizing around it. And they are finding a new way to talk about it—they are making these stories about them.
It is fitting that Trump most likely isn’t going to show up at E. Jean Carroll’s trial. It’s her story, after all. He’s just a bully she met along the way.
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A Ukrainian trench in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on March 5, 2023. (photo: John Moore/Yahoo! News)
The UK Ministry of Defence posted an update on Twitter Monday morning, noting the presence of trench networks "well inside internationally recognised Russian territory including in the Belgorod and Kursk regions."
The UK update noted that the defenses far from the front line might be more of a propaganda effort to harden the population's resolve by making them think the Ukrainian military could come close to their homes.
"Some works have likely been ordered by local commanders and civil leaders in attempts to promote the official narrative that Russia is 'threatened' by Ukraine and NATO," the update said.
The UK update noted that Russia has also been fortifying defensive lines inside occupied Ukrainian territory, much closer to the fighting.
Some of those, including the town of Medvedivka in Crimea, have been documented in photographs, including those analyzed in an April 3 article from The Washington Post.
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A demonstrator during an Amazon Labor Union rally outside an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, on April 11, 2023. (photo: Paul Frangipane/Bloomberg)
This May Day, don’t hang your head for the labor movement’s defeat. US unions are weak, it’s true. But there’s more excitement, more of a spirit of militancy and experimentation, and more hope in today’s labor movement than there has been in a long time.
Also last week: the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) went to federal court seeking an injunction to reinstate fired Starbucks worker Jaysin Saxton, and the board wants a nationwide cease and desist order against Starbucks for firing union supporters. Workers at a Manhattan Barnes … Noble filed an NLRB petition for a union election; they are not the first location to do so. Some 5,700 graduate students at Stanford University also filed with the NLRB, the largest union election petition of the year thus far; University of Minnesota graduate students won a union by a landslide, with 2,487 votes in favor of unionizing and a mere 70 against; and University of Michigan graduate students continued to strike even in the face of police harassment and arrests.
That’s a far from comprehensive look at the US labor movement activity last week, but it is a revealing snapshot of contemporary working-class organization on May Day 2023. The reform movements in both the UAW and the Teamsters, while each distinct in their character, have the wind at their backs. And while union leaders tend to use fiery rhetoric no matter what their actual plans may be, all signs suggest that the two unions, representing a powerful set of manufacturing and logistics workers, are starting to change the way they operate.
Both unions are also preparing to negotiate their largest contracts and vowing to strike if necessary. The Teamsters’ nearly 350,000-worker contract with the United Parcel Service (UPS) expires on July 31, and the UAW’s 150,000-worker contract with the Big Three automakers expires on September 14. As newly elected UAW Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla put it at a recent New York fundraiser for the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, “United, the entire labor movement is going to get what we deserve.”
Another agenda item for the reformers both in the UAW and the Teamsters is new organizing in workplaces where a lack of unions not only means low wages for those workers but also poses an existential threat for their unionized counterparts. At the UAW, the priority is electric vehicle (EV) plants, which automakers have largely managed to keep nonunion; where workers have unionized EV plants, they still receive lower wages and less benefits than the majority of workers covered by the union’s Big Three master contract.
For the Teamsters, the priority is Amazon. While the Palmdale, California, delivery workers are the first formal bargaining unit to result from the Teamsters’ vow to organize the tech behemoth, the coming year will likely see new unions emerge — and not only among delivery drivers but at warehouses or Amazon’s smaller delivery stations, too. The Teamsters cannot evade the challenge of organizing Amazon, no matter how complicated it may be, or the company’s nonunion drivers will continue to undercut the union’s hard-won compensation and standards.
More generally, Amazon organizing has hit foreseeable walls. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which won an NLRB union election at JFK8, a massive warehouse in Staten Island, New York, has not yet forced Amazon to the bargaining table. The union has suffered setbacks elsewhere, too, losing NLRB elections at LDJ5 (a smaller warehouse next to JFK8) and ALB1 (a warehouse in upstate New York) and withdrawing an election petition at ONT8 (in Moreno Valley, California). No other existing unions have filed for an NLRB election at an Amazon warehouse after the loss in Bessemer, Alabama.
As for other new organizing that has inspired workers across the country and captured public attention, it continues apace: campaigns at Chipotle, Ben … Jerry’s, REI, Trader Joe’s, and Apple. So, too, does organizing in higher education and health care. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that the key force behind Brandon Johnson’s win in the Chicago mayoral election was the Chicago Teachers Union. But new organizing, particularly in the almost entirely nonunion private sector (2022 unionization rate: 6 percent) faces the same obstacle as JFK8 and Starbucks workers: retaliatory firings and employers’ refusal to bargain.
How can workers not only force employers to the bargaining table but win a first contract? No one has an easy answer. Those on the Left of the labor movement often speak of strikes for recognition as a more militant means of forcing an employer to stop fighting unionization, but some workers, especially those at Starbucks, have been striking to reinstate fired coworkers and to pressure the company to come to the bargaining table, too. While they’ve had some success in the former aim, there is little progress thus far in the latter. The coffee giant continues systematically violating labor law, going so far as to fire several union supporters, including one who many consider the union campaign’s founder, a mere two days after Howard Schultz testified at a Senate hearing chaired by Bernie Sanders, the title of which was “No Company Is Above the Law: The Need to End Illegal Union Busting at Starbucks.” Who will stop them?
Similarly, it’s hard to imagine what it will take to force Amazon to sit down across a bargaining table with the ALU — a spate of new organizing campaigns at other Amazon facilities, paired with a credible strike threat at JFK8, at the very least.
And there’s another concerning trend. Conservatives are engaged in a campaign that uses bigotry to accelerate the decimation of public sector unions. The strategy is most obvious in the wave of book bans and more general hysteria over the possibility that teachers and librarians might reveal to students that there is such a thing as being gay or trans or black, banning discussion of “identity politics” and “critical race theory,” both of which are rarely defined. Such fearmongering works as a wedge, a way in to stripping workers of funding, union security, and workplace democracy.
It is an attack on unions and the public sector in general. This is made explicit by many of the strategy’s architects. As Kelly Craft, a Republican candidate for Kentucky governor, put it in a bizarre campaign ad that features purple-haired “woke bureaucrats” parachuting into a public school to force students to learn about pronouns, “I will dismantle the Kentucky Department of Education.”
Will the heightened interest in union organizing, particularly among young people (and especially among those who supported Bernie Sanders, some of whom are at the heart of the biggest labor stories of the past few years) translate into a revival of working-class organization, a reining in of capital’s near-absolute rule? Will we figure out how to surmount the obstacles to organizing so that some of the millions of Americans who say that they want to join a union have an opportunity to do so? Can a militant spirit among the rank and file and reformer leadership at the top reverse the decline in the UAW and the Teamsters, much less transform them into leaders of working-class movements more broadly?
We can’t know unless we try. Fortunately, as I often tell younger socialists wondering how best to contribute to the Left, never in my life has there been a more exciting time to devote oneself to building working-class self-organization. And it’s been a long time since the US labor movement was this open to experimentation. Plus, don’t forget: film and television writers nationwide are poised to strike as soon as tomorrow. If you want to form your own opinions about the state of the US labor movement, walking a picket line is a good place to start.
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Peter Washington was arrested for voter fraud before charges were ultimately dropped. (photo: Zack Wittman/WP)
The Orlando resident lost his job supervising irrigation projects, and along with it, his family’s health insurance. His wife dropped her virtual classes at Florida International University to help pay their rent. Future plans went out the window.
“It knocked me to my knees, if you want to know the truth,” he said.
But not long after, the case against Washington began falling apart. A Ninth Judicial Circuit judge ruled the statewide prosecutor who filed the charges didn’t actually have jurisdiction to do so. Washington’s attorney noted that he had received an official voter identification card in the mail after registering. The case was dismissed in February.
One by one, many of the initial 20 arrests announced by the Office of Election Crimes and Security have stumbled in court. Six cases have been dismissed. Five other defendants accepted plea deals that resulted in no jail time. Only one case has gone to trial, resulting in a split verdict. The others are pending.
In its first nine months, the new unit made just four other arrests, according to a report the agency released earlier this year. Critics say the low numbers point to the overall strength of Florida’s electoral system and a lack of sufficient evidence to pursue further charges. Nonetheless, as he gears up for a possible presidential run, DeSantis is moving to give the office more teeth, asking the legislature to nearly triple the division’s annual budget from $1.2 million to $3.1 million. The Republican governor also pushed through a bill ensuring the statewide prosecutor has jurisdiction over election crime cases — an attempt to resolve an issue several judges have raised in dismissing cases.
Voting rights advocates and defense attorneys say the expansion of the statewide prosecutor’s role to include elections enforcement is alarming. The office was created in 1986, and its portfolio typically includes offenses like extortion, racketeering and computer pornography involving two or more judicial circuits. The statewide prosecutor is appointed by the attorney general, Ashley Moody, a political ally of DeSantis, and also submits an annual report to the governor.
Defense attorneys say DeSantis is using the statewide prosecutor’s office to circumvent the role of local prosecutors, who have declined to pursue such cases.
“This cannot be what the framers of the Florida Constitution had in mind when creating this state’s system of justice,” Palm Beach County public defender Carey Haughwout wrote in a motion as part of the defense against one of the felons charged.
Neither Statewide Prosecutor Nicholas Cox nor Secretary of State Cord Byrd returned requests for comment. Cox has served in the role since 2011, predating DeSantis.
DeSantis has continued to defend the unit’s work. But the governor’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, recently said that investigators won’t go after voters who are simply confused about Amendment 4, which restored voting rights for most felons. He would not comment on whether the policy represents a reversal from the administration’s earlier stance, referring a reporter to Byrd’s office, which did not respond.
The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the judicial track record of the Office of Election Crimes and Security.
Those who eventually had their cases dismissed said the personal damage was still far reaching. Some lost jobs and are now struggling to pay bills. Others who had fought to rebuild tarnished reputations after past crimes saw their mug shots end up splashed on television. For Washington, the arrest also brought something else.
He no longer believes in America’s electoral system.
‘They’re going to pay the price’
All of those arrested in August had been convicted in the past of murder or a felony sex crime, and that disqualified them from voting under a recent constitutional amendment that gave most formerly incarcerated people the right to vote.
Washington pled no contest in 1996 to attempted sexual battery of a child and was initially sentenced to probation, according to court records. But records show the father of four violated the terms of his probation by failing to register with the state. He spent the next 10 years behind bars.
“It took me a long time to rebuild my name,” Washington said on a recent afternoon. “It was slow, but I was working on it. I got a job, then I got a better job. Then I met a wonderful woman, and I got married. Things were looking up more and more every day.”
Registering to vote felt like the next logical step toward restoring his status as a full citizen. Florida had just passed an amendment restoring the rights of many former felons. Washington said he was unaware his conviction on a sex crime charge disqualified him. The Florida Department of State in Tallahassee and the local election supervisor signed off on his application and issued him a voter ID card, as they did with the other felons who were later arrested, according to their attorneys.
In 2020, Washington and his wife stood in line for 45 minutes to vote for Joe Biden. Then they went out to a celebratory meal at Chili’s.
“It was a proud moment for us,” his wife, Sholanda Jackson, recalled.
More than 11 million people voted in Florida in the 2020 election — the highest turnout in nearly three decades. DeSantis praised elections officials, saying at a news conference a day after the vote that, “The way Florida did it, I think, inspires confidence.”
Nevertheless, DeSantis pushed for the creation of the nation’s first election crime unit, saying the next year that more reforms were needed to ensure Florida’s vote was secure.
That eventually led Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers to Washington. Nearly two years after casting his ballot, FDLE agents showed up at his home and arrested him in his driveway. Most of those charged that day were people of color, and police body-camera footage shows several looking baffled as they are taken into custody, asking why they are in handcuffs for voting.
Washington and the others arrested were charged with providing false information on their voter registration forms and voting as an unqualified elector. Each charge is a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
At a news conference that same day, DeSantis praised the election crimes unit for having “hit the ground running,” making the arrests within six weeks of opening.
“They did not get their rights restored, and yet they went ahead and voted anyways,” DeSantis said, surrounded by sheriffs deputies in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom. “That is against the law, and now they’re going to pay the price for it.”
A ‘power grab’ in the legislature
The arrests spurred anger and swift pushback. Defense attorneys began filing for the cases to be dismissed, noting the state had given those arrested permission to vote and questioning the role of the statewide prosecutor.
Several judges agreed, ruling the statewide prosecutor did not have the jurisdiction to bring the cases because the alleged offenses happened in only one county.
“These are cases that should have been brought by the local prosecuting authorities, except DeSantis can’t control them, and make them take these cases that are weak, against individuals that did not intend to break the law,” said Michael Gottlieb, a Democratic state representative from Broward County who is also representing one of the defendants.
The state legislature — where Republicans hold a supermajority — offered a solution: In February, lawmakers quickly passed a new law stating the statewide prosecutor indeed has jurisdiction in alleged voter fraud cases.
An attorney who helped organize the statewide prosecutor’s office when it was formed in 1986 said the new powers over election cases would have been hard to fathom back then.
“At that time, it was about organized crime,” said attorney Barbara Linthicum, who also served on the state’s Elections Commission. “I can guarantee you that it never came to anybody’s mind that they would be prosecuting election laws.”
The law passed easily over objections from Democrats and voter rights advocates. The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida decried it as an “unnecessary and harmful expansion” of the statewide prosecutor’s office. Another group, All Voting is Local, criticized it as a “power grab” meant to take cases from “impartial state attorneys and give them to a subservient prosecutor.”
Backers of the bill, including Rep. Juan Alfonso Fernandez-Barquin, a Republican from Miami who sponsored the legislation in the House, argued it was necessary to ensure election fraud cases are prosecuted — mirroring a DeSantis criticism that local authorities were failing to act on concerns of election fraud.
State prosecutors contend few voter fraud cases are ultimately brought forward because they don’t meet the bar necessary to levy charges. Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, a Democrat, noted prosecutors need to show evidence of both a voter crime and intent.
If that bar is met, he said, “We’ll pursue it.”
Many referrals, few arrests
In its first nine months, the Office of Election Crimes and Security referred hundreds of alleged illegal voting cases to local law enforcement for possible charges — but few resulted in any arrests.
A third of the cases sent to law enforcement for possible criminal charges were detected through the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a data-sharing consortium of more than 30 states, the office acknowledged in a January report.
The election crimes office noted the consortium helped detect 1,177 cases of individuals who appear to have voted in both Florida and another state. Nonetheless, Secretary of State Cord Byrd recently decided to join several other Republican-led states in withdrawing from ERIC. He cited concerns about the system’s “partisan tendencies” and said it would help protect voter information.
Critics of ERIC, including some aligned with former president Donald Trump’s false stolen-election narrative, have claimed the group is actually a left-wing organization sharing voter data with liberal groups. ERIC’s leaders have denied those allegations. Elections experts and state lawmakers from both parties say the system helped keep voter rolls clean and also enabled states to more easily detect voter fraud.
“In the short term there will be some additional legwork that will have to go into those processes, but it doesn’t mean we can’t do them,” Byrd said at his confirmation hearing in late March.
For voter rights advocates, the election crime unit’s few arrests and failures in court are signs there is little voter fraud in Florida.
“That’s just clear evidence that Florida created this new election crimes office to root out a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Patrick Berry, a lawyer with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, which researches and advocates on voting rights issues. “While a tiny fraction of those cases have led to an arrest, the majority of those arrests were people who were very likely confused or misled about their eligibility to vote.”
Statewide prosecutors have already moved to exercise their expanded authority under the new law granting them the ability to pursue election fraud cases. They have filed motions in both dismissed and pending cases - citing the “remedial legislation” - and arguing the charges should be adjusted to reflect the change. It’s unclear whether the legislation can be applied retroactively, but defendants and their attorneys are on guard. Washington’s lawyer said the state is appealing his case.
‘It’s a trap’
Washington said he began to feel free again when his case was dismissed after six months. But he remains on edge over whether authorities might find another way to charge him with an election crime through the newly empowered state prosecutor.
“It’s like they just won’t leave you alone,” he said.
A few months ago, he found a new job. But it meant taking a 10 percent pay cut. And now, instead of supervising irrigation projects, he said, “I’m back to digging.”
A long-planned cruise is off the table, and extras he and his wife once budgeted for — the occasional dinner out, traveling to see family in Louisiana, tickets to gospel concerts — are not in their plans for the foreseeable future.
Others arrested in the August round-up find themselves in a similar predicament.
A jury in Tampa found Nathan Hart, 49, guilty in February of making a false statement on his voter registration form but not guilty for voting as an “unqualified elector," a split verdict. He was sentenced to two years probation.
After his trial, Hart lost both a part-time job at a retail shipping center and his longtime job driving a street sweeping truck at night because his probation included a nighttime curfew. He said he was unemployed for a month and a half, and now has a job cleaning parking lots. Meanwhile, his attorneys are appealing the guilty verdict.
“My daughters need to see me never giving up,” Hart said.
Last year, he took one of his daughters camping in the mountains of northern Georgia. Now, he said, “I can’t even afford to take her out for an ice cream.”
Another defendant, Romona Oliver, pleaded no contest to the charges but faced no jail time. Her attorney, Mark Rankin, said she “basically just walked away.”
“She didn’t admit she did anything wrong. She got no probation, no fine, no cost of investigation,” he said. “What she suffered was the stress of being arrested for no good reason, and worrying about court dates and about possibly going back to prison.”
For Washington, the lesson of it all is clear: Voting is dangerous.
He knows now he can’t vote — unless he applies for and receives clemency — but he’s telling others they should be wary of it, too, even if they don’t have a criminal record. One of his adult children has already decided he won’t be casting a ballot. A friend is doubting it, too.
“I told him I wouldn’t advise it,” he said. “Because it’s a trap.”
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Dustin and Jaci Statton in an engagement photo from 2021. Jaci found out she had a partial molar pregnancy and couldn't get the abortion she needed in Oklahoma. They traveled to Kansas for care. (photo: Rachel Megan Photography/NPR)
She's 25 and lives in central Oklahoma with her husband, Dustin, and their three kids — two 7-year-olds and an 8-year-old. They are a blended family with two kids from Jaci's previous marriage and one from Dustin's.
"And I have two dogs — I gotta throw that in there, too," she laughs. She's a stay-at-home mom, and Dustin is an oil field technician. They also have a fishing guide business — she says she and her family go fishing every day.
Six weeks: Picking out baby names
Jaci and Dustin were using birth control but took an "if it happens, it happens" attitude towards pregnancy, she says.
Then, in mid-February, she started to feel really sick — nauseous and dizzy and weak. The first few pregnancy tests came back negative, but after several trips to the hospital, a blood test confirmed it: She was pregnant.
"We got excited — picked out baby names, bought baby stuff," she says.
8 Weeks: 'You could bleed out'
Jaci Statton was in her kitchen, weeks later on Feb. 28, when she felt like she was going to faint. "I just looked down and there is blood everywhere," she says. "My husband grabbed the kids, grabbed me, went to the emergency room."
The hospital staff did her blood work several times and told her the results were confusing. They said she was probably having a miscarriage, and that she should follow up with her doctor.
She soon learned her situation was even more complicated. At an appointment with her OB-GYN the next day, she was told she actually had a partial molar pregnancy. Jaci says her doctor told her: "It is non-viable. It is potentially cancerous."
On the ultrasound, the doctor showed Jaci how the pregnancy tissue was bean-shaped and surrounded with cysts. "One of them had ruptured, causing me to bleed, and she explained, 'If more rupture, you could bleed out,'" Jaci recalls.
Cancer risk
Partial molar pregnancies happen when something goes wrong during fertilization — either two sperm fertilize the same egg or an egg is fertilized by one sperm that later duplicates. A nonviable embryo with too much genetic material develops, along with abnormal placental tissue. In a complete molar pregnancy, there's no embryo at all, only abnormal placental tissue. With both types, there is a risk of heavy bleeding, infection, and a life-threatening condition called preeclampsia that can lead to organ failure. There's also a risk that cancer will develop.
In Jaci's case, there was a problem. The treatment is a dilation and curettage or D…C — an abortion procedure that clears pregnancy tissue out of the uterus. Even though Jaci's pregnancy was not viable and the embryo would never develop into a full-term infant, there was cardiac activity. Jaci's doctor said she couldn't treat Jaci at the Catholic hospital where she works.
Jaci was transferred to the University of Oklahoma Medical Center. Doctors there confirmed the partial molar pregnancy diagnosis and were ready to do a D…C, but Jaci says an ultrasound tech from the emergency department objected because he detected fetal cardiac activity. The D…C didn't happen. Instead, she was transferred yet again, this time to Oklahoma Children's Hospital.
Jaci says, through all of this, sometimes it was hard for her to follow what was happening — she was so sick and weak. "At this point, I had not eaten in about three weeks," she says, due to terrible nausea she was having. With molar pregnancies, patients have extremely high levels of the pregnancy hormone hCG, which can cause debilitating nausea — Jaci's levels were at one point 400,000, much higher than the level during a normal pregnancy at that stage. "Whenever I could eat, I would eat two or three bites and pray it would stay down, and most of the time, it wouldn't."
"Wait in the parking lot."
At Oklahoma Children's Hospital, she says the medical staff told her that her condition was serious. "You at the most will last maybe two weeks," she remembers them telling her. But still, cardiac activity was detectable, and the doctors would not provide a D…C.
"They were very sincere, they weren't trying to be mean," she says. "They said, 'The best we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we will be ready to help you. But we cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.'"
At the hospital, Dustin was beside himself, Jaci says. He requested a meeting with the hospital ethics board, she says, but was refused. "I've never seen him just come apart and cry — he had his head in his hands, this huge six-foot guy," she says. "He was like, 'I'm going to lose you. I'm going to lose our baby and I'm going to lose my other two kids'" — the children from Jaci's previous marriage. "He's like, 'I'll lose everything — I'll lose my family,'" she remembers him saying.
Jaci says Dustin was also trying to argue with the hospital that the family shouldn't be sent home because they live an hour away from the hospital and might not be able to make it back in time in an emergency.
OU Health, which runs both University of Oklahoma Medical Center and Oklahoma Children's Hospital, did not respond to NPR's questions about the hospitals' policies on abortions for life-threatening conditions. The institution did not confirm or deny specific questions about whether doctors told Jaci she would need to be in more danger of imminent death before intervention or if an ultrasound technician's objection changed the course of her treatment.
In a written statement, spokesperson David McCollum said:
"OU Health remains committed to providing the highest quality and compassionate care for women and children of all ages and stages of life. The health care we provide complies with state and federal laws along with health care regulatory and compliance standards. OU Health will continue to monitor state and federal legislation and ensure full alignment with the law while ensuring patients get the care they need."
Nine Weeks: The long drive to Wichita
The days wore on. Jaci says, by March 8, one doctor at the hospital began to talk about the need for her to travel out of state — to Kansas, Colorado, or New Mexico. Someone connected the family to Trust Women, which runs a reproductive health clinic in Wichita, and she was able to get in for an appointment two days later, on Friday, March 10.
She drove there with her husband and mother-in-law, hoping she wouldn't bleed on the drive. "It was probably the longest three hours of my life, in that vehicle," she says.
At the clinic, after being in so many hospitals, her veins were difficult and painful to access. "There was a lady in there, and she came over there and just held my hand while they were trying to find [a vein for the] I.V. because it hurt so bad," she says. Jaci was grateful for that.
"They took me back to the procedure room," she says. "I sat in there by myself, and I think that was the first time that I had cried. Finally, all the emotions, all my thoughts, caught up with me right there, and I sat in there by myself and just cried and cried."
When the doctors and nurses came in, they sat with her, held her hand, and assured her that the D…C was her only option. "I knew that, but they made me feel comfortable," she says. "I'm really appreciative of all of them."
The physician who treated her that day was Dr. Shelly Tien. "I remember that she is a lovely, sweet patient with great sadness because this was a desired pregnancy," she says. "She was navigating the loss of a very much wanted child, the complexities of a rather rare medical diagnosis, and then also the insult of not being able to be cared for by her own physician in her own home and familiar surroundings."
Jaci was put under general anesthesia for the D…C procedure. She also had an intrauterine birth control device placed, since it's very dangerous to get pregnant in the months after a molar pregnancy.
After the staff made sure she was stable enough to leave, she went back out to the car where Dustin and her mother-in-law were waiting. As they drove past the front of the clinic, they covered Jaci's face with a blanket so she wouldn't see or hear the anti-abortion protesters. "My husband still has nightmares about it," Jaci says.
Confusion remains even after state Supreme Court rules
Most states that ban abortion have exceptions for medical emergencies or the "life of the mother." But in the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there have been many examples of cases where doctors weren't sure how to apply those exceptions.
In Oklahoma, the legal picture is especially confusing. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt pledged to sign "every piece of pro-life legislation that came across my desk." He has kept that promise, and there are currently three overlapping abortion bans, each with different and sometimes contradictory definitions and exceptions. One of the bans comes with criminal penalties including felony charges and up to five years in prison for anyone who administers, prescribes, or "advises" a woman on an abortion, so the stakes for interpreting the laws correctly are high for doctors and hospitals.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said he believes doctors can use abortion to protect a pregnant person's health and his office said that doctors should have "substantial leeway" as they make these decisions, The Oklahoman reported.
Additionally, at least 15 bills directly related to abortion, some that would have clarified the exceptions, did not advance ahead of Oklahoma's legislative deadlines, according to The Oklahoman.
It can be hard for physicians to keep track of it all, says Dr. Dana Stone, an OB-GYN in Oklahoma City who was not involved in Jaci Statton's care, since new laws that regulate abortion are being introduced and passed by the Oklahoma legislature all the time. Physicians in the state also have to navigate laws that allow people to bring civil charges against doctors for "aiding and abetting" abortion, which can make it hard to know what doctors can say about abortion in the exam room. "It really keeps us from giving full information to our patients," she says.
One big issue has been how to understand the exception for when someone's life is in danger. The Oklahoma Supreme Court in late March struck down a law that required a patient's life to be in danger and for there to be a medical emergency, bringing the number of abortion bans down from four bans to three. Jaci Statton's situation happened two weeks before that decision.
"The court said [in its ruling], you can't force doctors to wait until a patient is crashing or going into sepsis to provide care," explains Rabia Muqaddam, a senior attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, which brought the court challenge.
The problem, she says, is that the same "emergency" exception language is in two other Oklahoma abortion bans that were not struck down by the state's high court.
"While those two other bans remain in effect, the decision doesn't have a practical impact," she says, in terms of allowing doctors to intervene earlier, providing abortions when someone's life is in danger but they are not yet in crisis. "What happened to Jaci could be happening right now to other patients."
Stone thinks that strict "emergency" exception language in Oklahoma's abortion laws is probably why doctors at OU Health felt they could not provide an abortion procedure until Jaci became sicker. "Which is just a horrible thing to tell someone," she says. "We would never tell someone with a heart attack, 'It might not be that bad, come back when you're really in bad trouble.'"
An obligation to act?
Doctors are bound not only by state law, but also federal law and their professional ethical obligations not to harm patients. Some bioethicists have argued that — even when state laws provide very narrow or confusing abortion exceptions — if a patient is in danger, doctors have an ethical obligation to act.
Stone says that is a hard thing to ask of physicians. "You have studied for years, you've trained through specialty training, you have an established practice, you have obligations to your family — it's hard to say, 'I'm going to put all that on the line and possibly go to jail and possibly get sued by her family for doing the right thing,'" she says.
Hospitals also don't seem to know how to navigate these laws. The Oklahoma State Board of Medical Licensure provided guidance in September for doctors in the state on how to navigate the abortion bans, but declined NPR's interview request, citing ongoing litigation.
The state legislature is considering new exceptions to the abortion ban, and more court challenges are underway. Stone says some groups are trying to organize a voter petition to change the abortion laws in Oklahoma, but she does not think significant changes to the state's abortion laws are coming soon.
"Already, the United States has the highest one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world, and Oklahoma has one of the highest maternal mortality rates within the United States — all of these things that we do that further endanger pregnant women are only going to increase that," Stone observes. "We're already bad at this. We don't need anything that ties our hands and keeps us from caring for our patients."
'This needs to change'
Seven weeks after her ordeal, Jaci Statton is still recovering. She will have to keep having her hCG levels checked for weeks — maybe as long as six months — to make sure no cancer is developing. Physically, she still feels weak and tired, and mentally it's been rough, she says.
So, at the age of 25, when she has her IUD removed, she's decided to get a tubal ligation this month. "I don't think mentally I would be okay if I were to get pregnant again."
She says she is "pro-life," but she's decided to speak publicly about her experience because she doesn't want anyone else to have to go through it. "I think something needs to be done" about the state abortion laws, she says. "I don't know how else to get attention, but this needs to change."
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Francisco Garduño remains in his post as head of the National Institute of Migration. (photo: INM/EPA)
The head of Mexico's migration authority, Francisco Garduño, has been charged in connection with a deadly fire at a migrant centre in Ciudad Juárez on 27 March.
CCTV footage appeared to show the guards walking away as the fire spread without opening the locked cell door.
Mr Garduño is the most senior official to be charged over the fire.
The deadly blaze caused outrage and raised questions about the handling of the treatment of migrants by the Mexican authorities.
A court in Ciudad Juárez ruled on Sunday that there was sufficient evidence to charge Mr Garduño with "unlawful exercise of public office".
The 74-year-old has not been arrested but has been ordered to regularly report to the authorities.
Prosecutors argue that his failure to act led to the death of the migrants who were being held at the centre run by the National Institute of Migration (INM) just south of the US-Mexico border.
The prosecution has been given four months to build its case against Mr Garduño before the trial starts.
Mr Garduño said he could not comment on the ongoing case.
Last week, more footage of the minutes leading up to the fire were shared by local newspaper El Diario de Juárez.
In it, guards appear to walk away from the room which is quickly filling with smoke without seeming to take any action to free the migrants who were locked in the cell where the fire started.
Mexican officials say a migrant caused the fire by setting a mattress alight in protest at the poor conditions they were being held in.
The migrant suspected of starting the fire and as well as four guards have been arrested and are being investigated for possible homicide.
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A drilling rig constructed by Range Resources gas company in Washington County, Pennsylvania. (photo: Scott Goldsmith/Inside Climate News)
A grand jury and the EPA have cited potential disposal problems, and activists are fighting new injection wells. Yet the gas industry claims fracking is essential for the state’s economic health and that most of its wastewater is safely recycled.
She started reading everything she could find about the boom in harvesting gas from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. She soon concluded that she was concerned not just about the drilling itself but also about its toxic byproducts. In the fracking process, millions of gallons of water are tainted first by chemicals used to extract the gas and then by potentially dangerous substances that had been safely sequestered in the shale for millions of years until drillers washed them up. Add to that tons of solid waste that can also be toxic. Wells can produce wastewater for decades.
“Holy cow. This is worse than we thought,” she recalls musing after an expert talked to her nascent group of protesters in Trafford, Pennsylvania, about fracking waste.
Considering what to do about drilling waste is not for the faint of heart, Graber soon found. A daunting array of agencies regulate the process, but important loopholes remain. Scientists say they need more facts. Activists who fear fracking and seek cleaner energy collide with neighbors who want jobs, and with a powerful industry that provides a lot of them.
“It’s an extremely complex web of risk and technology, and there’s a need for very strong regulations and enforcement,” said Amy Mall, a senior advocate on the National Resources Defense Council’s dirty energy team who has studied fracking regulation.
The water that comes from gas wells in the Marcellus can contain a long list of substances you’ve probably barely heard of along with poisons like arsenic and naturally occurring radioactive material like radium 226 and 228. It is far saltier than the ocean. That alone makes it deadly to most plants and freshwater life.
Some experts and activists fear that an industry producing a trillion gallons a year of wastewater nationwide—2.6 billion gallons of that were churned out in Pennsylvania last year—is heading for a disposal reckoning.
Drillers in Pennsylvania, second only to Texas in natural gas production, have taken some pressure off by reusing most of their wastewater to drill new wells. But they still took almost 234 million gallons of wastewater last year to injection disposal wells, according to an analysis of state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) data by FracTracker Alliance.
Another 90 million gallons of liquid waste was in “surface impoundment,” most of it waiting to be reused, according to industry reports to the DEP.
Pennsylvania has only 12 active injection disposal wells for wastewater that drillers can’t recycle. Ohio had 228 in 2021.
Minutes taken at a DEP Oil and Gas Technical Advisory Board meeting in 2021 alluded to a study from Tetra Tech, a consulting firm, saying that Pennsylvania would need between 17 and 34 extra disposal wells to handle the current amount of oil and gas wastewater produced in the state.
In an interview, David Yoxtheimer, a Penn State hydrogeologist who chairs that committee, said that three-quarters of Pennsylvania wastewater destined for wells is trucked to Ohio, where activists are now demanding stricter regulation.
Scientists urge caution about loosening the rules around disposal when they still don’t know everything that’s in fracking wastewater, which is also called produced water.
Some of the nasty chemicals and metals have been studied for toxicity one at a time, but scientists have yet to pin down what they do to people, animals and plants when the exposure is to a rich stew, not one ingredient. There are also questions about what kind of compounds form when all these ingredients meet underground, under pressure, at high temperatures.
“It is toxic,” Radisav Vidic, an environmental engineer at the University of Pittsburgh, said of the wastewater. “I wouldn’t drink it or spread it. I wouldn’t use it for irrigation or livestock. I wouldn’t do anything with it, because it’s bad.” He is trying to develop cheaper ways to clean the water. Current costs are too high to compete with disposal, he said.
A grand jury that investigated problems with the natural gas industry and its regulation in Pennsylvania in 2020 called managing wastewater an “extremely challenging problem” and added, “The fracking industry has never had a good solution for this problem, and it persists today.”
The grand jury, convened by the state attorney general’s office, recommended requiring that trucks carrying wastewater, which now simply say they hold “residual” waste, be emblazoned with a sign indicating where their waste came from. It also said the industry should be required to publicly disclose all of the chemicals it uses to hydraulically fracture or frack wells. It is allowed to keep some secret now.
A report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency after a study of the industry also listed disposal as a looming problem and said that some industry and government leaders favored loosening restrictions. The EPA said some gas company representatives were worried that injection well capacity would eventually be insufficient and noted that regulators might limit use of current wells in the future.
People in arid parts of the country in particular “are asking whether it makes sense to continue to waste this water,” and “what steps would be necessary to treat and renew it for other purposes,” the report said.
The idea of rebranding wastewater from fracking as “a potential valuable resource” was a common theme, it added.
The EPA said it has no “activities planned” in response to its report. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office said no public action has been taken as a result of its grand jury’s report.
However, Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was attorney general when the fracking report was written, said that Shapiro “supports implementing the report’s key recommendations” and believes “we must reject the false choice between protecting jobs and protecting our planet.”
Richard Negrin, acting secretary of the DEP, has established an internal team to review the grand jury report and “determine the best policies to protect Pennsylvanians’ constitutional rights to clean air and pure water,” the governor’s office said. It is considering a new criminal referral policy to improve “collaboration and efficiency” between the DEP and the attorney general’s office.
A spokesman for the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents drillers in Pennsylvania, said he had seen no evidence of disposal capacity problems. In a written statement, the group’s president, David Callahan, said that drillers reuse most of their wastewater, minimizing their need for freshwater and reducing truck traffic.
The American Petroleum Institute Pennsylvania also emphasized the industry’s recycling efforts. “Operators across the country are investing significant time and resources to creatively reuse produced water, use lower-quality water in place of freshwater and build new infrastructure for treatment and conservation purposes,” it said in a statement.
In its 2021 economic impact report, the API said that the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania directly provided 480,000 jobs and $14.5 billion in labor-related income and contributed $39.4 billion directly to the state’s gross domestic product, providing the gas that powers legions of furnaces, stoves and water heaters that consumers are loath to replace.
“The state’s short- and long-term economic outlook depends on policies that support natural gas and oil development and critical energy infrastructure,” said Stephanie Catarino Wissman, API PA’s executive director.
Dan Weaver, president and executive director of the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association (PIOGA), which represents many drillers of older wells, said his members were not finding it hard to dispose of their waste but would welcome more economical options.
To further complicate matters, gas drillers are not the only ones who need space underground. Gas itself is sometimes stored in porous rock during warmer months when demand is low. Companies may also want to store hydrogen or sequester carbon dioxide. Kristin Carter, assistant state geologist in the Pittsburgh office of the Pennsylvania Geologic Survey, said she has been saying for years that the state needs to test its deepest potential storage formations because “the competition for pore space is going to ramp up.”
Graber, the “accidental activist,” co-founded Protect PT, a regional environmental group, and has fought a plan to put wastewater on barges and transport it on rivers near the Ohio border. She has worried about tanker trucks that haul wastewater to deep injection disposal wells in Pennsylvania and Ohio. They could crash and spill their toxic cargo. The wells themselves have caused earthquakes in some parts of the country, including Ohio (though not Pennsylvania).
She has allied with people fighting the addition of a second injection well in Plum Borough, a town of about 27,000 near the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Monroeville exit. Some residents there say the first disposal well has ruined their well water and created air-quality problems.
Ben Wallace, an engineer for Penneco, the well operator in Plum, said that the facility has not harmed anyone’s drinking water. “The state could use a hundred of these,” he said.
Because recycling used fracking water requires a steady supply of new wells, experts said the need for disposal alternatives will become more obvious if lower prices lead to a slowdown in new drilling.
“What happens when the party stops, and there’s a huge glut of produced water?” asked Seth Shonkoff, an environmental scientist who is executive director of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers (PSE) for Healthy Energy. He said disposal of waste is “an Achilles heel of the industry.”
So far, good, safe alternatives to deep injection, such as effective treatment of the wastewater, are limited by price or regulatory rules.
Many activists want the country to go even further than strictly regulating new wastewater injection wells, by closing the hazardous-waste loophole that allows drillers to dispose of their wastewater with fewer precautions than other industries take. How much fracking waste would qualify as hazardous is not clear, but Mall, the NRDC advocate, said that much of it would.
Maya van Rossum, who leads the four-state Delaware Riverkeeper Network, based in eastern Pennsylvania, wants fracking banned. “There’s no way,” she said, “to make this industry safe.”
Pennsylvania’s extractive history, from coal mining to fracking
Pennsylvania has a long history as a rich source of fossil fuels. Coal mining started in the state in the late 1700s, and the state later became the birthplace of oil production. The first well was drilled in Titusville in 1859.
When commercial gas drilling began in the Marcellus Shale formation in 2004, it was a game changer. The 95,000-square-mile formation extends across New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky. Deep underground, it traps a huge cache of methane—the primary component of natural gas—that was hard to harvest with older techniques.
In 2008, Terry Engelder, a Penn State geologist, and Gary Lash, a geologist at the State University of New York, calculated that the Marcellus contained between 168 trillion and 516 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. They believed the technology of that time could extract at least 50 trillion. That set off a drilling boom that, in the view of some critics, prioritized the rapid capture of a new source of natural gas over methodically studying the environmental impact of fracking or regulating the new industry effectively. Many safety lessons were learned the hard way, and fracking’s reputation suffered.
Pennsylvania, Engelder said, is the “crown jewel” of the Marcellus, the place where more than 80 percent of the formation’s natural gas resides. Drillers have already removed far more than his purposely conservative initial estimate.
The Marcellus was once the bed of a salty, inland sea. As the continents shifted and mountains rose, it wound up far beneath the surface in a distinct layer that is 50 to 400 feet thick in Pennsylvania. Transformed by heat and immense pressure, bits of quartz, mineralogical clay and organic matter became soft, coal-black rock layered like baklava. Small, primitive life forms like algae and plankton became methane, the simplest hydrocarbon, and it lodged in pockets in the rock about 100 nanometers wide, said Engelder, who is now an emeritus professor. For comparison, a human hair is 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide. The pores are so small that geologists couldn’t find them with light microscopes. They needed scanning electron microscopes to see them.
Drillers have long known that “fracturing” the rocky storage cells that housed petroleum products increased a well’s yield. Back in the 1800s, Engelder said, drillers would drop nitroglycerin into a well and “blow the living hell out of the rock around it.”
Today’s hydraulic fracturing—fracking—is a remarkable feat of engineering. But the oil and gas industry’s lexicon is studded with turbid jargon that makes it maddeningly difficult for non-engineers to understand the complex interplay between water, drilling and waste.
There are two types of natural gas wells: conventional and unconventional. It is the type of geologic formation, not the type of drilling, that determines which category a well is in.
Conventional wells are drilled straight down into formations of rock such as sandstone or limestone that make natural gas or methane extraction relatively easy. Unconventional wells, which now predominate among newly drilled wells, use more advanced techniques to access gas trapped more tightly in layers of hard rock like shale. These wells are known for their long, horizontal pipes.
Fracking uses a solution of water, sand and chemicals—some of which are toxic—to free the gas. Nowadays, the technique is used in both types of wells, although conventional wells can be fracked with just unadulterated water.
Both types of wells produce wastewater that contains dangerous chemicals and metals and can also be radioactive. The unconventional wells use much more water and produce much more waste. Their waste is often, but not always, saltier and more radioactive.
The wastewater is called “flowback” and “produced water.” The industry also euphemistically calls liquid waste “saltwater” if it’s as salty as the ocean and “brine” if it’s much saltier.
The fracking process starts at the surface, where a drill mounted on a platform begins boring straight down for about 6,500 feet, Engelder said. The hole at the top is 20 inches in diameter, big enough for an 18-inch casing or pipe.
For the first 1,000 feet, the drill is driven by air, like a jackhammer. Air pushes the rock cuttings out of the hole. As the hole deepens, drillers drop in interlocking, watertight segments of steel pipe, most of which are 30 feet long. Like nesting dolls, they become narrower as the well deepens.
No water is used until the drill is below the aquifer—underground water often used for drinking. Aquifers in Pennsylvania are usually 200 to 500 feet below the surface but can be as deep as 1,000 feet. Well below the aquifer, drillers can use a mixture of plain water and thick, viscous drilling mud, a relatively safe concoction, to cool the drill and lift debris. Drilling the entire well requires 50,000 to 100,000 gallons of water.
Once the vertical pipes are placed, workers send a slurry of cement down the hole that then rises to encircle the outside of the pipe. Yoxtheimer, the Penn State hydrogeologist, said that the top 2,500 to 3,000 feet of a new well are encased in at least two layers of cement and pipe, a measure meant to protect drinking water that exceeds precautions taken when the boom began.
At 6,500 feet down—500 feet above the Marcellus—drillers add a bent pipe at the end that introduces a gradual curve like an elbow in an extremely long straw. Steel pipes hanging from a drilling platform, Engelder said, are flexible like spaghetti and can bend over the next 500 feet until they reach the Marcellus and level out roughly perpendicular to the vertical shaft. The process of adding section after section goes on for about 10,000 horizontal feet, almost two miles. (In 2008, lateral pipes were just 2,000 to 3,000 feet long. Some modern wells extend five miles laterally.) By the end, the pipe is just six inches in diameter.
The Marcellus introduces a challenge at this step because it is not perfectly perpendicular to the vertical casing. How do the crews keep their drill inside this layer? The answer lies in one of the Marcellus’s characteristics that makes wastewater dangerous. Unlike harder layers above and below it, it’s radioactive, thanks to deposits of thorium, uranium, potassium-40 and radium, and the gas is richest in areas with the most radiation. A device that measures gamma rays guides the drill.
Once the horizontal pipe is finished, it’s time to perforate the horizontal casing using a device that shoots bullets through the pipe, leaving holes a little smaller than a dime, Engelder said. It makes clusters of 12 to 16 holes every 50 feet.
All this takes about a week of round-the-clock work.
Finally, the fracking, which takes another week or so, begins. The drillers pump 15 to 20 million gallons of water and fracking chemicals into the casing under pressure so intense that, if you aimed it at your house, “it’d just blow right through it,” Engelder said. Water shooting through the holes in the pipes fractures rock 500 or more feet away, Yoxtheimer said.
The added chemicals, which constitute about 0.5 to 2 percent of the mixture, are what make environmentalists start to worry. Engelder said the known ingredients usually include an acid, a biocide or disinfectant, ethylene glycol to prevent scaling or forming hard particles, latex polymer to make the water more slippery, ammonium bisulfate to inhibit corrosion and guar gum, a thickening agent that’s also used as a food additive.
During the first week or two after fracking, operators let water known as flowback drain from the well slowly so that sand, used as a “proppant” to hold the rock apart while the methane escapes, doesn’t come up with it, Vidic said. Gas can’t escape while water fills the well.
This flowback contains the initial additives plus chemicals and minerals it picked up while coursing through the Marcellus. Once the well starts producing gas, the water that comes from deep underground is called produced water. Because it has had more time to dissolve elements of the shale and percolate in the Marcellus, it contains a higher concentration of chemicals.
Only about 5 to 10 percent of the water used to frack a well initially comes back to the surface. In this sense, Pennsylvanians are lucky that the Marcellus is a dry formation that absorbs much of the fracking fluid.
In some other parts of the country, drillers get back more water than they put in. However, Yoxtheimer said the wells produce water for decades, until they are plugged with cement. Eventually, they will yield about half of the fracking fluid while the rest, Engelder said, settles into the pores in the Marcellus that the methane vacated.
The wastewater and gas are collected—and separated—at the drill pad. Liquid is usually stored in onsite tanks until it’s reused or trucked somewhere else. Gas companies often drill multiple wells 10 to 20 feet apart on one pad. One drill pad with six wells can drain a square mile, Engelder said.
In fracking’s wastewater, toxins present unknown risks
In Pennsylvania, drillers report most of their fracking ingredients to FracFocus, a website the industry began using for disclosure after activists demanded more information. The formulas are different for each well, and hundreds of different additives may be used.
Late last year, for example, the operator CNX Gas reported on 17 specific chemicals and three “trade secrets” added to more than 16 million gallons of water it used to frack a well in Westmoreland County. Some of the chemicals are considered hazardous or flammable. Some are toxic to aquatic animals or people under certain circumstances. One, methanol, may cause birth defects with chronic exposure.
Scientists said they know that there are often dangerous constituents in produced water, but ingredients vary by well and by part of the country.
“Frankly, what most concerns me is what we don’t know,” said Bernard Goldstein, an emeritus professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Pittsburgh and a former EPA official. For years, he has asked, “Hey, what’s the rush?”
The oil and gas industry benefits from a 1988 federal EPA decision to exempt the politically powerful oil and gas industry from hazardous waste provisions of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and a 2005 federal law that allows drillers to keep some of their drilling chemicals “proprietary” and exempt from public reporting. (Pennsylvania requires them to disclose the secret ingredients to the DEP but doesn’t tell the public.)
The wastewater may include radioactive materials from the shale as well as other naturally occurring substances such as arsenic, barium, strontium, chloride, bromide, iodide, iron, manganese, calcium and magnesium, said John Stolz, director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University. Methane itself is not toxic to people, but it is flammable and a potent greenhouse gas.
Yoxtheimer said a modern Marcellus well could also generate as much as 400 tons of salt during the flowback period. Fracking wastewater, he said, must be tested before disposal for 52 different compounds including radioactive radium. “It’s literally everything from arsenic to zinc,” he said. Representative samples from a county are taken at well pads and sent to a lab for analysis “at least annually,” he added.
While some researchers have found that fracking safety in Pennsylvania has improved markedly in recent years, any process is subject to human error. Equipment can sometimes fail, so operators must be vigilant. “Any time people are involved, all bets are off,” the University of Pittsburgh’s Vidic said.
In its 2021 report on fracking, the DEP said it found 8,663 compliance violations among oil and gas operators. Of those, 2,826 were administrative, 1,323 were for unconventional drillers and 4,514 were for conventional drillers. The report said there were 5,898 health and safety violations that year.
The department recently issued a strongly worded report on a rampant failure of conventional drillers to report required information on time, poor performance that DEP attributed to a “culture of noncompliance.” It said it would need more money to police the conventional industry.
The report said that, from 2017 to 2021, 11.7 percent of conventional wells inspected had violations. Less than 30 percent of operators reported production or mechanical integrity assessments on time. The most frequent health and safety violation was improper abandonment of oil and gas wells.
“People should be screaming about that,” David Hess, a former DEP secretary who now writes an environmental blog, said of the poor reporting. He noted that self-reported data from drillers in Pennsylvania has never been audited.
Weaver, the PIOGA leader, said the state had major problems with its reporting system.
In DEP’s 2022 oil and gas data, operators reported 28,193 tons of soil contaminated by wastewater spills. Conventional drillers also reported that they had spread 5,460 gallons of liquid waste on roads. Hess said road spreading was long allowed and has been found to result in soil contamination. It is not technically banned now, but he knows of no drillers with permits to do it. Sources tell him that the practice has not stopped.
“That stuff is running into a ditch,” he said. “That ditch goes to a stream.”
While lay people often focus on potential problems with the wells themselves, experts have broader concerns. Yoxtheimer worries about spills from storage tanks. Most reported spills at fracking well pads are small, what he called “mosquito bites.” Five to 10 gallons spill on the drill pad and are vacuumed up. But something like a broken valve can cause a much bigger spill. He said he hasn’t heard of one of those incidents for at least five years.
Isabelle Cozzarelli, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, studied the aftermath of a 2.9-million-gallon wastewater leak from a pipeline in North Dakota in 2015, so pipelines are always top-of-mind for her. The liquid is not only toxic itself, she said, but can also cause secondary reactions in soil and streambeds that release other dangerous substances, such as arsenic, from rocks. She is now studying the illegal dumping of wastewater on Bureau of Land Management land in New Mexico.
Stolz, the Duquesne University expert, worries that the salts, heavy metals and radioactivity in drill cuttings and other solid fracking waste could be “turning landfills into potential Superfund sites.”
He is also among those who want stronger labeling for trucks that haul wastewater. He said he had seen tanks on drill pads that hold produced water labeled with placards that say it poses a health and fire hazard. But when operators need to move that water, he said, they use a “magic hose” to put it in a truck that gets only a “residual waste” sign.
Many activists and the attorney general’s grand jury have said that such low-key signs downplay how dangerous the waste could be to first responders to a truck accident.
Yoxtheimer said many emergency personnel have been well trained in how to handle the waste.
Matt Kelso, manager of data and technology for FracTracker, said that the data currently reported make it difficult to know when trucks carrying fracking waste have accidents that involve spills.
Yoxtheimer said trucks can roll over, spill their load and contaminate soil. “It’s not widespread,” he said, “but it has happened.”
A murky disposal picture. Are injection wells the solution?
Assessing the wastewater disposal situation is difficult, at least in part because state rules on disposal are a mishmash, activists said. For starters, operators of newer unconventional wells face tougher regulation than those who drill conventional, vertical wells. Numerous experts interviewed were unaware of any measures of the capacity of current disposal wells in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The DEP did not respond to most questions about wastewater disposal and other issues related to fracking.
In the early, wild west days, unconventional frackers sent much of their water to municipal water treatment plants as conventional drillers had done for decades. It soon became apparent that the municipal plants couldn’t handle the extra volume and salts, and that practice was banned—but only for unconventional drillers. There are a handful of specialized treatment facilities that could clean some fracking wastewater, but observers said they are not widely used by unconventional drillers.
In the early fracking years, drillers often stored wastewater in big, lined pools known as centralized impoundments. Because of leaks, the old ones had to be “closed out,” Yoxtheimer said.
While the pools are still legal, most companies don’t use them now because of tougher regulation. Companies are more likely to use storage tanks now.
Recent data on disposal is confusing and incomplete.
In its 2021 report on the fracking industry, the DEP said that 93 percent of wastewater was being recycled or reused at new wells. This liquid could require some treatment, with the wastewater mixed with freshwater before it is reused. Seven percent of wastewater was being sent to injection wells, the state agency said.
Data reported to DEP for 2022 and analyzed by FracTracker showed that only about 50 percent of the wastewater for both conventional and unconventional wells was definitely being recycled. Another 38 percent was assigned to categories where most of the water is reused or recycled. DEP did not respond to a question about how much of the water in those categories, which include liquid sent for waste processing and surface impoundment, is reused. The report showed 8.8 percent of wastewater going to injection wells.
For now, most experts view injection wells as the safest disposal alternative.
“The best thing to do is to put [the wastewater] underground, but to put it back underground in places that are deeply informed by hydrogeologic conditions,” Shonkoff said.
Injection wells can either be newly drilled specifically for waste disposal or old conventional wells that are refurbished for disposal. Expert opinion on which type is better is divided. The EP did not respond to a question about how many of its wells were created just for waste, but records show that at least half are converted older wells.
Pennsylvania’s disposal wells are 1,940 to 7,500 feet deep, according to the geological survey’s Carter. What’s most important for safety, experts said, is for these wells to be in the right place and engineered and maintained properly.
First, the wastewater must go to rock that is porous enough to accept it. That layer needs to be well below any underground water and bounded at the top and bottom by hard rocks that will hold the wastewater in place. The well itself needs to have uncorroded metal at its core with solid cement around it to further protect the aquifer.
Waste is only allowed to go into the well at a certain rate and pressure. Drillers are required to monitor for signs that wastewater is escaping. Operators need to know about other wells in the area because wastewater can migrate underground and it seeks places with low pressure. “Water will follow the path of least resistance,” Stolz said. For that reason, unplugged, abandoned wells can be a hazard.
The University of Pittsburgh’s Vidic said he thinks it’s best for disposal wells to be deeper than most old conventional wells. Injecting waste into the same formations that old wells tapped increases the risk that wastewater will find a route to the surface, he said.
By the time Pennsylvania learned that its unconventional drillers needed more injection wells after being turned away from municipal treatment facilities, residents were less enamored with fracking and more frightened of its waste.
Some of the few attempts to create new injection wells in the state have met with opposition. In one notable instance, Grant Township in Indiana County has been fighting a proposal to repurpose an old gas well since 2014. That case has now gone to the state Supreme Court.
In Plum Borough, outside Pittsburgh, residents who did not stop the town’s first injection well are fighting Penneco’s proposal for a second. Robert Teorsky has filed a lawsuit alleging that the first well, named Sedat 3A, led to contamination of his water. In his suit, he said his property line is 1,500 feet from Penneco’s “operations.” His lawyer did not return a call.
Katie Sheehan, a 36-year-old nurse who lives 500 feet from Sedat 3A, has been one of the most vocal opponents. Her house once belonged to her grandmother, who used well water. Her father, who gets his water from a spring, also lives nearby.
She said water quality at both houses suffered after the injection well began operating. Her water turned cloudy and orange. She hired a testing firm that found impurities. She filed numerous dead-end complaints.
Sheehan, who sounded weary and frustrated, now trucks in clean water and said she is afraid to have children because of air and water problems she believes come from the injection well.
“I understand that it has to go somewhere,” Sheehan said of the well. But she thinks injection wells should go to less populous areas.
Wallace, the Penneco engineer, said he understands why neighbors often have qualms. But he thinks injection wells are safe and said that the permitting process is so detailed in Pennsylvania that it costs about half a million dollars. “We’re highly regulated,” he said. “We’re inspected on a regular basis.”
Wallace said Penneco did pretest neighbors’ water before its existing injection well began operating. Sheehan had not yet moved to her house and her family declined the testing, he said. He said that DEP testing found no evidence that his well had contaminated her water.
Pennsylvania needs far more disposal space for its gas wastewater, which is why so many trucks now head to Ohio from Pennsylvania, Wallace argues. “The state of Pennsylvania is woefully behind in injection wells,” he said.
Because Ohio never allowed drillers to use water treatment plants, demand for injection wells was much higher there from the beginning of the fracking boom. It was also cheaper to create injection wells in Ohio, because layers of suitable rock there weren’t as deep as they are in Pennsylvania, said the geological survey’s Carter.
Getting a well approved in Ohio or West Virginia is also simpler, requiring only a go-ahead from state governments because both have “primacy.” A new well in Pennsylvania must be approved by the EPA and then by the DEP. A DEP official said in mid-March that Pennsylvania was considering applying for primacy as well. So far, it has given notice only that it will seek primacy for wells able to sequester CO2 underground.
But in part because of that more streamlined regulatory environment, opposition is mounting among residents of Ohio as well. A group of environmental and civil rights organizations is now calling for tougher regulation of injection wells and enforcement of violations. James Yskamp, a senior attorney with Earthjustice who was involved in a petition to the EPA seeking tighter oversight, said Ohio’s citizens have been “bearing the brunt of waste disposal” while largely being cut out of the approval process.
The disposal wells, he said, are “deeply unpopular” in communities—even more unpopular than the fracking wells themselves.
The petition, submitted by Earthjustice in October, said the wells disproportionately affect low-income communities and that Ohio failed to properly map underground sources of water that could be affected by injection wells. It said wastewater has migrated underground from an injection well to conventional oil and gas wells as far as five miles away and surfaced there. One of the wells where wastewater surfaced was abandoned and unplugged, like many in Pennsylvania.
In January 2021, wastewater spurted from an idle well 2.5 miles away from two injection wells. “For four days, the idle production well spewed more than 40,000 barrels [a barrel equals 42 gallons] of waste across the ground and into a nearby stream, killing approximately 500 fish and aquatic species,” the petition said. “These incidents all could have seriously impacted Ohioans’ drinking water.”
The petition also says that seismic activity associated with the wells has “increased dramatically” in Ohio over the past 15 years.
Activists want Pennsylvania to stop playing ‘catch up’
What happens next depends to some extent on whether natural gas is seen as an imperfect but necessary transition to greener energy or a big speed bump in the fight against climate change.
Natural gas is cleaner than coal, notes Engelder, who runs his property outside State College on solar energy most of the time but still needs to buy electricity at night. Doing entirely without fossil fuels, he said, would have people living like they did before the Industrial Revolution. “All of us enjoy a lifestyle,” he said, “that is largely a consequence of burning fossil fuels.”
Vidic, the University of Pittsburgh environmental engineer who is trying to develop ways to clean the wastewater, thinks energy independence is good foreign policy for the United States.
But van Rossum, head of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, wants fracking banned, as it has been in New York.
Since there’s no indication that fracking in Pennsylvania is going away anytime in the immediate future, activists and academics say more research is needed on what is in wastewater, how to clean it up, and how to dispose of the liquid and solid waste safely.
Cozzarelli, of the Geological Survey, said that if people don’t know what’s in the wastewater, it’s hard to make it safer. Goldstein, the emeritus Pittsburgh professor, thinks more high-quality research should be done on how fracking and wastewater disposal affect people near wells over time.
Some talk of harvesting valuable components of wastewater like lithium, a move that could change the economic calculus for wastewater treatment.
On the policy side, Penneco’s Wallace is a voice for streamlining applications for new injection wells in Pennsylvania. And the Marcellus Shale Coalition’s Callahan said in a written statement that the industry already has a “strong regulatory environment.” The group said it would continue working with regulators “on advancing frameworks and best practices aligned with our shared goal of developing natural gas responsibly.”
Many activists, on the other hand, want stricter, more consistent regulation with more enforcement.
“We should be very vigilant about produced water of unknown toxicity being discharged to the surface, and water that is injected into the ground should be proven not to intermingle with our drinking water,” Shonkoff said. “That is probably the best that we can do right now.”
The country could go further, activists said, by closing that hazardous-waste loophole for oil and gas waste. That would trigger tougher regulation for the most dangerous fracking waste and restrict it to different types of disposal wells and landfills.
State Sen. Katie Muth, a Democrat who represents parts of three counties near Philadelphia, has introduced three bills this year that would “update the state Solid Waste Management Act to hold the oil and gas industry to the same waste regulations as other industries and would keep harmful radioactive toxins out of Pennsylvania’s air, groundwater, waterways and drinking water supplies across the state,” a spokesperson said.
A fourth bill to be introduced later this year would require trucks carrying drilling wastewater to be “labeled appropriately.”
Hess, the former DEP secretary, argues that self-reported data from both unconventional and conventional drillers in Pennsylvania needs to be audited by regulators. “They could say anything,” he said of the drillers.
Regardless of how the waste is labeled—residual or hazardous—the state could make it safer, he said, by requiring “cradle-to-grave tracking.” He would also require more testing before transport. “Any time you’re transporting stuff that you may not know what’s in it, it presents a risk,” he said.
Hess said Pennsylvania regulators are always playing “catch up” as drillers change their techniques. He pointed to a “frack-out” last June in Greene County in southwestern Pennsylvania. Lisa DePaoli, communications manager for the Center for Coalfield Justice, said residents had reported that water came out of an abandoned, unplugged well in the hamlet of New Freeport “like a geyser.”
They later learned that a well where the gas producer EQT Corp. was fracking a mile away was “communicating” with the abandoned well. A spokesperson for the company said that this information came from a DEP inspection and that EQT was still investigating whether the two wells are connected.
Twenty to 30 households live near the abandoned well, and many get their water from wells or springs. Some said their water changed after the event and that they have since used bottled water only. The EQT spokesperson said that “water sampling and well monitoring have shown no other areas of concern at this time.”
Under Pennsylvania law, Hess said, drillers are assumed to be responsible for contamination of private wells within 2,500 feet of a wellhead. But lateral wells are now longer, and the New Freeport residents lived well beyond 2,500 feet from the site.
Hess also maintains that conventional and unconventional drillers should play by the same rules. “The only reason they don’t have the same regulations is political,” he said.
Activists acknowledge that tougher regulations might increase costs for drillers. That’s not a bad thing, they argue, if you want to even the playing field with greener energy sources.
Mall said the gas industry can afford to pay more. “It’s an industry that’s quite profitable,” she said, “and they can afford to take responsibility for their own dirty waste.”
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