Her voice cracking with emotion as she stood under the fluorescent lights, Janice Blanock asked her local legislators in southwestern Pennsylvania to take a moment and leaf through the photos of her son that she’d handed them.
“There’s really nothing different that I can say to you that I haven’t said already over the last several months,” she told supervisors for the tiny township of Cecil outside Pittsburgh. “I can, however, share these photographs. These are just a few of the many pictures we have of our son Luke, from the time he became ill until before he died.”
The supervisors were gathered to vote on a zoning ordinance amendment that would greatly increase the required buffer zone between oil and gas drilling operations and homes and schools. The proposed rule mandating a setback of 2,500 feet — five times the distance of the current law — had originally been proposed as a statewide requirement by Gov. Josh Shapiro when he was Pennsylvania’s attorney general. A bill based on that recommendation later stalled out when introduced in the state House of Representatives.
Blanock, a 30-year resident of Cecil, had a reason to take the issue seriously. Her son waged a three-year battle with a rare type of bone cancer known as Ewing sarcoma and died in 2016 at age 19.
A growing body of peer-reviewed research has linked living near natural gas drilling operations to cancers and respiratory, reproductive and neurological damage.
Many believe, though there’s yet to be demonstrable proof, that his cancer could be tied to oil and gas drilling’s many carcinogenic pollutants, some that are radioactive. In 2019, a cluster of Ewing sarcoma cases was identified in Washington County, where Cecil is located. Cecil’s school district was hit particularly hard. The county is home to more than 2,000 natural gas wells and was the 2004 birthplace of the state’s fracking industry. (Fracking is a process in which sand, water and chemicals are blasted into the earth to free fossil fuel).
A growing body of peer-reviewed research has linked living near natural gas drilling operations to cancers and respiratory, reproductive and neurological damage. In 2023, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the state Department of Health linked fracking exposure in the region encompassing Cecil to increased risk of asthma and lymphoma.
“Will you look at the damn picture, Darlene,” Blanock urged one supervisor after handing her a photo of Luke.
Around an hour later, the zoning ordinance passed and the room erupted with applause.
With that, Cecil — a town of just 15,000 residents and no outsized political power — became the first jurisdiction in Pennsylvania to adopt such a restrictive measure, even as similar efforts at the state level have failed.
But already it is facing legal challenges from two natural gas companies active in the area — Texas-based fracking company Range Resources, and Colorado-based gas pipeline company MarkWest Liberty Midstream.
Under current requirements, natural gas wells in Pennsylvania must be at least 500 feet from buildings and water wells, which environmentalists and medical experts say is not far enough. In 2023, a bill that would have required all new natural gas wells in the state to be located at least 2,500 feet — nearly half a mile — from buildings and water wells was slated for a committee vote, but was abruptly killed at the request of Democratic leadership in the state House of Representatives.
Three years before that, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro released a grand jury report calling for a statewide 2,500-foot buffer between human activity and natural gas production. “There is one point that is impossible to deny,” the grand jury report stated. “The closer people happen to live to a massive, industrial drilling complex, the worse it is likely to be for them.”
While that plea failed to get political traction, environmental groups continue to urge action. For their part, natural gas industry groups have minimized concerns about health risks associated with fracking exposure and have resisted proposals for setbacks or no-drill zones.
But despite industry efforts, Cecil has gone its own way. The township’s updated oil and gas ordinance prohibits new oil and gas wells from being drilled within 2,500 feet of “protected structures,” which includes homes, businesses and religious institutions, and within 5,000 feet of schools and hospitals.
Though the ordinance does not call for an outright ban on new drilling, Range Resources contends it would limit fracking in Cecil in such a way that it violates state law. The township argues otherwise: Wells located outside Cecil can still be drilled under the town. The ordinance also imposes additional restrictions on the industry that have generated less debate: It prohibits retention ponds for water used in the fracking process, places new noise restrictions on drilling and limits work hours on well pads.
“I was not sure for the longest time that this was going to go this way,” said Sarah Martik, a Cecil resident and executive director of the Center for Coalfield Justice, a southwestern Pennsylvania-based nonprofit environmental justice organization. “This one thing is as far as we’ve ever gone, as far as regulating this industry in a way that is protective of our communities.”
But the road to this outcome was fraught.
Documents obtained by Capital & Main through right-to-know requests reveal an up-close look at life in the shale fields, with citizens largely fed up with living alongside the natural gas industry. Noise, bright lights and shaking at all hours were among the complaints emailed to supervisors in the months ahead of the vote. “Here I am once again trying to prepare for another sleepless night,” one resident wrote to the supervisors in May. “My whole house shakes, my children are disturbed from sleep, my pets are afraid to be out in the yard — can you please help us.”
At least one Cecil Township supervisor has financial ties to fracking company Range Resources.
“I have SUFFERED from vertigo for years,” another resident wrote in June, referring to vibrations from drilling at a nearby well pad that she felt in her home. “You know in some places they torture people with this kind of low res hum and vibration. Torture — because that is what it is.”
Documents also offer a look at the playbook the industry followed to curry favor among Cecil residents. Over the five years before the ordinance was adopted in 2024, Range Resources, the township’s only active natural gas well operator with 34 active wells per state records, donated nearly to $300,000 to the community. The money was disbursed throughout the township, the encompassing school district and local volunteer first responder organizations, and it was spent on festivals, children’s sports teams, a science fair and CPR training sessions, according to a spreadsheet obtained by Capital & Main through a right-to-know request.
Range Resources did not immediately respond to Capital & Main’s request for comment.
At least one township supervisor has financial ties to Range Resources. Records show Supervisor Darlene Barni has, for many years, maintained an oil and gas lease with the company; she ultimately recused herself from the final ordinance vote but participated in earlier stages of its development and routinely shares pro-oil and gas posts on Facebook.
The company also weighed in at multiple stages during the drafting of the ordinance, using experts to testify against existing science that ties fracking to poor environmental and health outcomes and urging town leaders to refrain from enacting a setback as large as 2,500 feet. “At least 92% of Cecil Township’s surface property would be excluded from future oil and gas development,” an attorney for Range Resources told supervisors in a letter. This would have the effect of limiting residents’ oil and gas royalty payments, he wrote. The attorney said the setbacks were “exceedingly restrictive and inconsistent.”
Though the company currently has no permits under consideration for new well pads, Range Resources is challenging the ordinance with the township’s Zoning Hearing Board. This process could take months, and the challenge is opposed by the township, residents and several local environmental groups.
At issue is whether Cecil’s ordinance is legal.
“It’s a very, very specific question,” said Kara Shirdon, who chairs the Cecil Zoning Hearing Board but recused herself for Range Resources’ legal challenge to eliminate the appearance of bias (Shirdon has been publicly supportive of the setback ordinance.) Though she said she’s confident the ordinance will survive, she believes it will strain the township’s resources. “I think, honestly, the whole entire thing is because they’re pissed and they want to drain as much money as possible out of the township as punishment for not letting them do what they want to do.”
Michelle Stonemark moved to Cecil township in 2012 after her parents bought around 30 acres there with the intent of housing their children and grandchildren. Her parents, sister and family friends all built homes next to one another, in succession.
“And then it was my turn,” Stonemark told Capital & Main. “Just as I had gotten the drawing … we find out that Range Resources had applied to put a well pad in right behind my new house.”
With around 30 days’ notice, she recalled, Stonemark and her family found legal help and learned “everything we could about fracking,” in order to oppose the project. But their effort failed. “We didn’t have enough time. We were starting from nothing,” she said. Drilling at the pad began in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown, as Stonemark, her husband and three children were stuck at home.
Today, the well pad, known as Augustine George, sits just over 500 feet from her home, she said, and routinely rattles the walls and windows and sends fumes into the air. She said she and members of her family often experience headaches, nausea, nosebleeds and earaches. They can feel vibrations from the well pad in their chests, she said.
“Flaring would go off at any and all times, during the day, at night,” she said. Flaring, which involves burning off excess methane, has been linked to asthma and other respiratory conditions.
In response, Stonemark launched a Facebook page she uses to serve as an industry watchdog: She posts photos, videos and documents relevant to the oil and gas industry’s indiscretions, and publicly mourns the future she once envisioned for herself in Cecil. “As I stand outside on this beautiful morning I cannot enjoy the day,” she wrote in one post in May. “A foul odor lingers in the air, and the constant low noises pulsate through my ears and head.”
Stonemark and her husband are also now attempting to intervene legally and become a formal party against Range Resources’ challenge to the setback ordinance.
Michelle Stonemark shot this cell phone video of the Augustine George well pad from inside her home at 1:35 a.m. on March 26, 2024.
Shirdon said she first caught wind of Range Resources’ plans for a well pad in 2017, less than a year after moving into her home. Since then, she said she’s experienced headaches, sinus and respiratory issues, difficulty concentrating and sleeping, and irritability.
“The part that people underestimate, I think, is how much anxiety it causes,” Shirdon said. “Every time you feel the rumble, or every time you get stopped on the road, you start to worry, ‘Are my kids being adversely affected by what’s going on here?’”
Merle Lesko has lived in his house nearby for nearly 30 years. Lesko said he and Stonemark often jokingly spar over who lives closer to the Augustine George pad. Salmon pink sound walls, dozens of feet high, poke through a line of trees behind his property. Lesko first urged the township to adopt a new buffer ordinance in early 2024, after regularly recording the decibel level emitted by the Augustine George pad at different locations in his house. He moved his bed and the desk where he works based on the lowest noise reading he found in his residence — his basement — just to escape the vibrations that would rattle his house.
“The noise was so bad, you could hear or feel the noise over a running lawnmower,” he said. “They’ve taken so many summers from me.”
As of 2022, more than 10% of Pennsylvanians lived within a half mile of an active oil and gas well.
Though it took months of often impassioned debate, the adoption of Cecil’s ordinance has added fuel to a fight at the state level, where climate justice organizations are urging environmental regulators to increase the statewide oil and setback of 500 feet. In October, the Protective Buffers Pennsylvania campaign filed a petition with the state’s Environmental Quality Board, pushing for the adoption of an executive rule that would require a 3,281-foot buffer between fracking wells and buildings and water wells — a setback nearly 1,000 feet wider than in Cecil’s ordinance.
“There should be a baseline floor of protection for everybody in the commonwealth,” said Lisa Hallowell, senior attorney at the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental nonprofit that helped author the petition.
More than 10% of Pennsylvanians lived within a half mile of an active oil and gas well as of 2022, the petition notes. Many share medical symptoms — rashes, cancers, sleep disorders — and have seen their water supplies affected by fracking, the petition states.
Protective Buffers Pennsylvania has been involved in previous attempts to pass tougher statewide setback rules, including the 2023 bill that died in committee, Hallowell said. These efforts never got far. “The Legislature has not had an appetite for that,” she noted.
Indeed, around the time that the 2023 setback bill was circulating through the Legislature, state Sen. Gene Yaw (R-Williamsport), Republican chair of the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, questioned the need for the measure at all, saying in a public hearing that he had “not heard” of any links between fracking and cardiovascular, reproductive or nervous system damage. Yaw has, separately, disclosed personal income from oil and gas companies EQT and Equinor, and won his reelection to the senate in November after accepting thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry.
A group of Democratic senators has announced that they soon plan to reintroduce the 2,500-foot setback proposal. But that bill will face an uphill battle in a divided Legislature.
After helping cement the setback proposal as law in Cecil, Blanock now wants to see other communities protected.
“We’re hoping this movement goes far and wide,” Blanock said the day after the ordinance passed. “I think, just the fact that that happened last night, people will learn about it, [and think,] ‘If they can do it, why can’t we?’”
Several months later, as legal challenges threaten Cecil’s hard-won victory, Blanock remains resolute. She still chokes back tears when she talks about Luke, and still resents having had her concerns about health risks associated with fracking exposure denied by the industry. “It’s not just about Luke,” she said. “This is about my other children, my grandchildren, my community, my family, friends, neighbors.”
“They can appeal it,” she said of the natural gas companies challenging the ordinance. “And then we can appeal it. We’re as strong in our resolve to win this as they are.”
