Eva Telesco, a local kindergarten teacher, helps lead a training organized by Lancaster Against Pipelines.
It is an unbearably humid morning for late September. Eva Telesco sits lightly on the end of a picnic table bench, her dark hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. People are wandering around, making lunch, exchanging news. Telesco’s six-year-old son, Pike, races in circles around us and through the tables. A door slams. None of this disturbs Telesco’s thoughtful focus on our conversation. Being a kindergarten teacher requires certain gifts, including being able to stay calm amid chaos.
Still, she says, nothing prepared her for the pipeline.“My life is dramatically different,” Telesco admits with a laugh. “Three years ago, I had a normal life. I watched TV at night.” In early 2014, word began to spread that an Oklahoma-based energy company, Williams Partners, was planning a monumental natural gas pipeline project that would cut through farming communities across central and southeast Pennsylvania. The Atlantic Sunrise pipeline would connect two existing Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Company lines, also operated by Williams, in the northeast and southeast corners of the state. Hundreds of property owners along a nearly 200-mile long stretch were about to learn that their land sat right in the pipeline’s path.Three years later, fences are going up. Trucks sporting out-of-state license plates are hauling heavy machinery along roads not built for the burden. Landowners who refused to settle with Williams and took their cases to court have been forced to settle, one by one. Opposition has sprung up all along the Atlantic Sunrise route, but nowhere has the resistance been as relentless as in Lancaster County.
Opposition has sprung up all along the Atlantic Sunrise route, but nowhere has the resistance been as relentless as in Lancaster County.
Like many of her neighbors, Telesco was there at the beginning. She never expected it to get this far.“We tried to work within the system,” Telesco tells me. “We really tried all those avenues that you think, ‘Oh, if they know this they wouldn’t do it’—but they just don’t care.”Soon after the pipeline was announced, local parents, teachers, retirees, and ministers created an opposition group, Lancaster Against Pipelines, to rally the community and collaborate with neighboring towns. They took all the right steps. They dutifully made calls, wrote letters, filed comments with the right agencies, attended town halls, even went to court. But the pipeline was approved anyway. An uneasy air of collective anticipation weighs heavily on the small group gathered this Sunday morning.
On Friday, Williams had announced its intention to break ground as soon as possible on land owned by an order of Roman Catholic nuns who have worked closely with locals to fight the pipeline. After three long years, Lancaster residents are facing a terrible truth: The pipeline is on its way. “It’s hard to know how to feel about all of it, now that it’s finally come to this,” Telesco says. “It’s really overwhelming.”She glances at the other tables; everyone around us now munching on chips and sandwiches has spent the morning rehearsing techniques for forming a human barricade. Like Eva, few have any experience as activists. Nervous laughter broke out at regular intervals as neighbors linked arms and practiced shielding one another from anyone who might try to separate them, role-playing interactions with police and construction crews.
The gravity of the situation is never far from anyone’s mind. Becky Lattanzio looks on quietly. A lifelong Lancaster resident who grew up on her family’s farm and stayed to raise her own kids, Lattanzio doesn’t see herself or any of her neighbors as radicals. The farmland here, she explains, is some of the best in the country, and those who call Lancaster County home have been “shut out” of a decision that could put their land at risk.“If you drive through some of the areas in northern and western Pennsylvania,” Telesco adds, “there are areas that have just been ruined by this.”
“There are areas that have just been ruined by this.”
The current fracking boom along the Marcellus Shale, an immense geological formation stretching from north of the Canadian border as far south as Tennessee, is just the latest chapter in Pennsylvania’s long and fraught history with fossil fuels. In 1859, former rail conductor Edwin Drake struck oil in northwestern Pennsylvania, sparking this nation’s first major oil rush. By 1863, Drake had fallen victim to the same vicious boom and bust cycles that have built, and destroyed, towns throughout the Appalachian basin. Bankrupted, he died in poverty. Pennsylvania remained the country’s leading producer of oil until the Texas oil boom started in 1901. The Marcellus Shale has revived the state’s formerly prominent role in the oil and gas industry, but gas companies’ profits have come at a steep cost for many communities.
Today, there are an estimated 6,800 miles of interstate natural gas pipeline blanketing Pennsylvania, mostly in northern and western counties. Another 4,600 miles of interstate pipelines, including the Atlantic Sunrise,could be completed in Pennsylvania by 2018, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The urgent demand for expansions to existing natural gas infrastructure has outpaced the state’s ability to create a regulatory system capable of rigorously scrutinizing each mile of proposed pipeline. Meanwhile, community and public health advocates worry that the potential impacts of the state’s sprawling natural gas infrastructure are only beginning to be understood, particularly regarding potential links to respiratory illnesses. And regulations to protect residents from those possible health risks are insufficient. Companies are not even required to disclose exactly what chemicals, in what concentrations, are present in their fracking fluids.
Pennsylvania legislators are also struggling to regulate and monitor methane emissions from the compressor stations positioned every 40 to 100 miles along each pipeline’s route to keep the gas at the right pressure. The lack of convincing safeguards has left people feeling betrayed and abandoned by the agencies they look to for protection. “You just realize the system doesn’t work; it’s set up to support the industries, not the community,” Telesco says, a sentiment echoed by many in Lancaster. In fact, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the agency charged with approving interstate gas pipeline projects like the Atlantic Sunrise, has rejected only two proposals out of hundreds submitted for review in the last thirty years. Between 2011 and 2015 alone, FERC approved 104 new pipeline projects,including thirty-four in Pennsylvania. Once FERC backs a pipeline, the project can move forward whether landowners cooperate or not. Energy companies insist their own internal review processes weed out subpar proposals before they even hit the desks at FERC. But Pat Lemay, an environmental advocate and retired theater professional from ManorTownship, Pennsylvania, sees it differently, calling the federal overseers “just a rubber stamp.”
Land owned by an order of Roman Catholic nuns has become the center of resistance in Lancaster Pennsylvania.
“You just realize the system doesn’t work; it’s set up to support the industries, not the community,”
Back in Lancaster County, the fight has come down to one single piece of land: a cornfield owned by an order of nuns. The Adorers of the Blood of Christ have been in Pennsylvania since the early twentieth century. In 2005,the order adopted a strict land ethic opposing destruction of land and the environment, including the expansion of climate change-inducing infrastructure. This past summer, the Adorers allowed Lancaster residents to build a small, open-air chapel on their property, which sits right in the pipeline’s proposed path. Together with Lancaster Against Pipelines, the Adorers have been holding regular services in the chapel. The nuns say Williams will have to tear it down.In September, the Adorers became the last landowners in Lancaster County still holding out against Williams in court.
They’re challenging the pipeline on religious freedom grounds, relying on the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act invoked most famously by Hobby Lobby in its landmark Supreme Court case. The Adorers’ complaint was initially dismissed, with a federal court saying it lacks jurisdiction to hear the case until other avenues are exhausted. The Adorers’ request for an injunction to prevent Williams from beginning construction on the nuns’ land until they have their day in court was also denied. On Monday morning, October 16, construction crews moved in. By the end of the day, twenty-three protesters were arrested. Many were held until the next day, told that if they are re-arrested at the construction site before their hearings in early December—when the pipeline may already be in the ground—they will be found in contempt of court and jailed until their court date. (One of the arrestees, eighty-six-year-old Barbara VanHorn of neighboring Duncannon, told me she’s “already in contempt.”)
In early November, in response to a motion filed by the Sierra Club, Lancaster Against Pipelines, and other advocacy groups, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an administrative stay against the pipeline, bringing construction work to a temporary halt. But Williams immediately challenged the stay and the court allowed construction to resume, pending a final decision.
This isn’t the first time Williams has taken a scorched-earth approach to seizing privately held land. In 2016, Pennsylvania regulators approved the Constitution Pipeline, a joint venture between Williams Partners and three other energy companies. The pipeline is meant to run from Susquehanna County in northeast Pennsylvania into New York. But New York has refused to let the pipeline in, and a federal court has agreed New York can deny those permits. Local communities and environmental groups are hailing New York’s decision as a major victory. But it comes too late for some landowners in Susquehanna County. One couple, Cathy and Tom Holleran, refused to voluntarily grant Williams an easement through their land, an active maple farm.
They took their case to court, and lost. U.S. marshals were soon escorting construction crews onto the Hollerans’ property. Within days, nearly three acres of trees were gone, including productive maples. Now, with the pipeline’s New York permits on hold, the Hollerans’ land sits empty and unusable. A week after the first arrests, I head back to Lancaster. Crossing the state line into neighboring York County, half of a rusted, towering “Welcome to Pennsylvania” billboard appears as acres of golden farmland and towering grain silos roll by. As I pull off the highway, a procession of eighteen-wheelers rumbles past, too large for the winding side roads, glaringly out of place. Each truck has an identical pair of massive, hollow pipes strapped to its bed. Over the next hill, the Adorers’ land comes into view. The construction fence has been draped with green tarps to obscure the view. But I can still see pipeline segments placed end to end along the trampled, barren ground.
But I can still see pipeline segments placed end to end along the trampled, barren ground.
Just around the corner, I turn onto a residential street. Only a few hundred yards from where trucks are unloading pieces of a gas pipeline large enough for most kindergartners to play in, homes sit cozily tucked between their neighbors on either side. Basketball hoops dot the street. Almost every yard boasts a bright red “Lancaster Against Pipelines” sign. What was once the Adorers’ cornfield sits right behind the neighborhood playground. You can watch the pipeline construction from the swings. The chapel is still standing, not far from the playground. Residents mill around it, including many of those who were arrested earlier that week. People are chatting, sharing coffee, tying prayer ribbons to the construction fence. Barbara VanHorn sits with the sweater she wore during her arrest folded on her lap, ready to read reporters the first section of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights printed on the back. Eva Telesco and Becky Lattanzio pore over sheets on a clipboard; Pike is gleefully racing around the playground.
Opposite sides of the fence: a construction fence roughly splits the distance between private homes and the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline in West HempfieldTownship, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Telesco is as determined as ever. “There’s a lot of, ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering, it’s going to happen anyway,’” she tells me, shaking her head in disbelief. “Something wrong is happening, and your argument is,‘Well, it’s going to happen, so I’m not going to say or do anything’?” For Telesco, that isn’t an option. “Even if our fight is just the foundation for the next fight that does win,”she says, “it’s all important.”
Jenna Ruddock is a journalist and illustrator based in Washington, D.C.