One evening in 2019, Janice Blanock was scrolling through Facebook when she heard a stranger mention her son in a video on her feed. Luke, an outgoing high school athlete, had died three years earlier at age 19 from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.
Blanock had come across a live stream of a community meeting to discuss rare cancers that were occurring with alarming frequency in south-western Pennsylvania, where she lives.
Between 2009 and 2019, five other students in Blanock’s school district were also diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma. (The region saw about 30 overall cases of the cancer during that time.) In the video, health experts and residents were talking about whether the uptick in illnesses was related to fracking. Blanock was riveted.
“I learned that night a few things that I would have never put a connection to,” she said. The next day she called the group that had organized the live stream. “I said: ‘I want to know more, I want to understand more.’”
Four years later, Blanock helped to launch Mad-Facts – Moms and Dads: Family Awareness of Cancer Threat Spike – as a volunteer group within Center for Coalfield Justice, a local organization. Blanock and her co-founder, Jodi Borello, knock on doors in neighborhoods where new wells are planned, attend public meetings in matching Mad-Facts T-shirts and host regular information sessions. It’s a support group for area parents who, like Blanock a few years ago, are just starting to learn about some of the more serious health risks of fracking.
Blanock’s home in Cecil Township, just outside Pittsburgh, is filled with tributes to Luke: his jerseys and baseball gloves adorn his father’s office; a drawn portrait, along with a rosary, hangs in the living room; a stone bench engraved with his name sits under a rhododendron in the front yard.
It’s also just a few miles from the site of Pennsylvania’s first unconventional well, which was constructed in 2004. Since then, fossil fuel companies have drilled more than 2,000 wells in Blanock’s Washington county alone.
Fracking entails cracking layers of earth with pressurized, chemical-laden liquid to access stores of oil and gas thousands of feet underground. Many of the chemicals used in that liquid, like benzene and formaldehyde, are carcinogenic, and the extraction itself can stir up radium and other heavy metals in the shale’s subsurface, creating radioactive waste that can contaminate watersheds.
The companies that drill in the region and officials who support the industry have long insisted that fracking is safe and well-regulated. But many residents, who have seen unfamiliar sicknesses invade their community over the past 20 years, now feel misled.
“We’re seeing more rare childhood cancers and brain tumors in adults,” said Borello, a mother of three, who lives in South Franklin Township, about 20 miles south-west of Cecil. “If you knew even one person 10 years ago with a brain tumor, everybody would be rallying around that person and trying to figure it out: ‘Oh my God, this is awful. How would this person get a brain tumor?’ Well, I can tell you probably 12 people off the top of my head right now that I know with brain tumors.”
Borello lives just 1,500ft from a well pad and a pigging station (where pipelines are inspected and cleaned). When drilling on the well pad began in 2011, it vibrated knick-knacks down from their shelves, often waking her children. She installed an air-quality monitor in her baby son’s window that once recorded a particulate pollution reading in excess of 8,000 micrograms per cubic meter, nearly 900 times the level deemed safe by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Whenever workers vented methane from the pigging station, it emitted a jet-engine roar and a “thickness” in the air. She and her children developed full-body rashes, and she kept a journal to record daily symptoms of dizziness, nausea and headaches.
As old wells dry up, oil and gas companies drill new ones, which means more residents are learning what it’s like to live close to a well – the noise, the smells, the sleepless nights.
And though fracking has declined somewhat in the state in recent years, many activists and residents fear that new industries will lead to resurgent demand for gas. Those include the enormous Shell ethane cracker plant in Beaver, Pennsylvania, and the controversial proposed hydrogen hub, which will have nodes across Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Some of the health risks associated with fracking, such as asthma, pre-term births and heart problems, have been established for years. However, cancer is both rare and slow to progress, which means that it can take many years to produce a meaningful study connecting it to relatively novel environmental hazards, like fracking, said Nicole Deziel, a researcher at the Yale School of Public Health. “In epidemiology, we need a certain number of cancer cases in order to statistically evaluate a link with confidence,” she said.
But research linking proximity to unconventional wells and developing certain types of cancer is gradually emerging.
In 2022, Deziel published a study that found Pennsylvania children between ages two and seven who lived within 1.2 miles of unconventional wells at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Then in August 2023, the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania department of health released a study showing that children living within 1 mile of an active well were five to seven times more likely to develop lymphoma.
The study, commissioned shortly after Blanock and her neighbors traveled to Harrisburg to demand an investigation into the health risks of fracking, also found that pregnant people living within a mile of an active well were more likely to have premature and underweight babies, and children were four to five times more likely to suffer extreme asthma attacks.
The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, pointed to two studies that measured pollutants and emissions in air and water, as well as real-time data from a well-monitoring initiative by the gas company CNX Resources, that it says demonstrate “no impact to environmental, community and public health”. One of those studies, however, noted that “individual groundwater samples collected at one point in time may be unlikely to capture a contamination event”.
Ned Ketyer, president of the advocacy group Physicians for Social Responsibility, served on the advisory board of the Pitt-DOH study. He said that each new study “… seem[s] to confirm the same thing: There’s something about fracking that threatens human health, and the risk is higher the closer you live to fracking operations. Full stop. At the end of the day, why would anybody be surprised about that?”
The study did not find a link between fracking and Ewing’s sarcoma, which the authors noted is difficult to assess with such a small sample size. Experts including Ketyer noted that in an area with such a long history of industrial pollution, it can be difficult to isolate causes of cancer.
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Even though Blanock was disappointed that the study did not offer answers regarding Luke’s illness, she said, the conclusions were horrific. “Should you want to live within a mile of a well pad when you have two small children, now that you know that your child has a higher chance of acquiring lymphoma?”
Borello has found, months after the study’s publication, that many in her community are still largely unaware of it. “We want people to understand that that study happened, that it is from our own department of health and what the results were,” she said.
Every month, Blanock and Borello drive east to Harrisburg to advocate for legislation that would increase the required setback distance between buildings and wells from 500ft to 1 mile.
The closest existing bill, which would establish a setback of 2,500ft, is languishing in the House. Supporters of the oil and gas industry have argued that that proposed regulation would effectively ban fracking in the state. (Borello acknowledged that the proposal would “almost completely” stop new wells from being built, but said: “If something is causing cancer in children, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.”)
In the last few years, state legislators have proposed a handful of related bills, including one requiring a more strenuous permitting process, one that would make it easier to file environmental complaints, and two that would classify oil and gas waste as hazardous.
The bills face a steep road to the governor’s desk in a largely industry-friendly legislature, but Borello and Blanock are undeterred. “They’re starting to recognize us [in Harrisburg],” said Borello. “And I think that that’s the best way to do it. Because once you can put a face to these stories and see that there is a major concern, it becomes personal.”
Blanock and Borello had hoped they would find an ally in Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who as attorney general had pursued a grand jury investigation of the oil and gas industry. But in November, Shapiro announced an agreement with CNX Resources, one of the state’s largest drilling companies, in which it would voluntarily expand its setback distance to 600ft for homes, and 2,500ft for schools and hospitals.
It’s a move that many environmental groups and community activists consider a betrayal on the part of the governor, who as attorney general had spoken out against the oil and gas industry’s obfuscation of its business’s impacts on human health and whose own grand jury investigation recommended a 2,500ft setback from homes.
In an email to the Guardian, Shapiro’s spokesperson, Manuel Bonder, said the Pennsylvania governor decided to work with CNX because of “legislative inaction” to address problems related to fracking.
He added that the governor supports legislation to expand setbacks from wells and other drilling infrastructure as outlined in the grand jury recommendations.
CNX Resources’ vice-president of external relations, Brian Aiello, said the company agreed to the setbacks “to ensure public policy decisions in the commonwealth are based on facts and data rather than speculation and ideology”.
He added that the company’s monitoring and disclosure program “has been posting real-time data for months now, with more data added every hour, and we haven’t seen one substantive claim from ‘concerned citizens and public health professionals’ saying the data reflect conditions that would affect public health”.
Fracking activity and well construction in Cecil Township continue to torment Blanock’s neighbors. At a township meeting in March, a number of residents petitioned local officials to increase setback distances from homes. They complained of increased traffic, vibrations that shook their houses through the night and air that smelled of Magic Markers.
“[The well] has affected every aspect of our lives,” said Josh Stonemark, whose family lives 500ft from a well pad in the township. Blanock’s activism and awareness-raising efforts contributed to the Stonemarks’ decision to install air monitors in the backyard, which sometimes measure 10-20 times the safe level of particulate pollution, and to use a Geiger counter to measure radioactivity on the property.
“A lot of residents don’t really care about it because they don’t think it impacts them,” Stonemark said. “I’m not sure that they’re aware of the more widespread impact it can have on a community.”
