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his story is published in partnership with DeSmog, the climate investigations site.
As Janice Blanock peered through the chain link fence running along a popular bike and walking trail near her home in the Pittsburgh suburbs, she wondered if she was looking at something connected to her teen son Luke’s death from a rare cancer a decade ago: a large oil-and-gas-industry storage yard filled with used pipes and discarded hoses, the ground strewn with flakes of rusting metal. “I thought, ‘Is it possible that this could be radioactive?’” Blanock says. “Then I figured, ‘No, they wouldn’t do that … People are riding bikes and taking walks with their infants.’
“I look at this site and I wonder if this has any connection to my son’s cancer, and could it happen again to other innocent kids playing in the creek and on the fields?”
The seven-acre yard is part of a larger industrial site in Cecil Township, a community of around 15,000 located in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania’s Washington County. The fence, which runs for nearly half a mile, separates it from the Westland Branch of the Montour Trail, a 60-mile rail trail system that weaves through Pittsburgh’s suburbs.
The entire region sits on the Marcellus Shale, a geological formation of sedimentary rock containing deep deposits of gas that runs beneath Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
The Cecil yard was owned for more than 20 years by Weavertown Transport Leasing. During the 1990s, the company transported hospital waste to the site for temporary storage and processing. In the mid-2000s, when new drilling technologies made it possible to get at those deep gas deposits, Cecil and the surrounding countryside became a particularly valuable sweet spot for extraction — and handling radioactive oil and gas waste became a booming business.
In 2007, and again in 2013, Weavertown Transport Leasing asked the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to modify its permit for the Cecil facility, “situated on 50 acres with a rural population,” to accept more waste. Each time, the DEP complied.
During this era, Cecil was changing, too: from an Appalachian mining community into a blossoming Pittsburgh suburb, which in 2011 Bloomberg Businessweek named “one of the best places” in Pennsylvania to raise a family.
Cecil’s first case of Ewing sarcoma, a pediatric bone cancer, appeared in 2008, when a local teen was diagnosed with the rare and highly aggressive disease. Six years later, Luke Blanock and his parents learned he had Ewing sarcoma, as well. By 2019, three years after Luke’s death at the age of 19, six kids in Cecil’s school district, Canon-McMillan, had received the same diagnosis — including the catcher on Luke’s baseball team — according to an investigation by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The Cecil waste yard is part of a facility that handles radioactive oil and gas waste.
Justin Nobel
Research to date has turned up no links between Ewing sarcoma and exposure to radiation. Still, the ways in which the oil-and-gas industry in this area has dealt with its most dangerous waste, combined with the other proven harms of radiation, have raised alarm bells for the Blanock family.
Weavertown Transport ceased operations at the Cecil facility in 2019, and for several years it sat empty. Then in 2022, a locally-based company named 5D Field Services applied for a permit to take over the property. In May 2025, the DEP gave 5D a permit to temporarily store, handle, and process radioactive oil-and-gas waste at the facility, operations conducted in a series of buildings and pads located on a hill above the storage yard. The permit allows 5D to accept 1,500 tons of waste a day. “The benefits of the project to the public clearly outweigh the known and potential environmental harms,” the DEP stated.
During an Oct. 14, 2025, inspection of the site, the DEP’s Bureau of Waste Management found that operations were being conducted “as approved,” with no violations. That same week, I was taking a trip through the region with environmental-justice organizer Jill Hunkler, the director of Ohio Valley Allies. On a tip from Lois Bjornson, a Washington County organizer with a Pennsylvania group called the Clean Air Council, I inspected several pipes in 5D’s Cecil storage yard. I’d encountered fracking waste like this before, and knew it was reasonable to suspect the pipes were radioactive. On the day we were there, two large gaps in the fence made it freely accessible to the public. There were no signs warning against trespassing or about the presence of radioactivity.
I returned later that week with Yuri Gorby, a former U.S. Department of Energy scientist who worked at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Hanford Nuclear Site. Clad in a pair of protective latex gloves, Gorby gathered peels of rusty metal that had flaked off the pipes, a type of waste generated in oil-and-gas development that the industry refers to as pipe-scale. Gorby placed the material in plastic bags and labeled them, later to be sent off to labs for analysis.
Next, using his Geiger counter — a Ludlum 3000 Digital Survey Meter — Gorby examined several of the thousands of pipes dumped at the site. One pipe, with an opening wide enough for a child to crawl into it, had a dose rate of 4.88 milliroentgens per hour, nearly 1,000 times the location’s background radiation levels. A 2016 report of the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers considers radiation levels greater than twice background to be a contaminated workspace that “should be surveyed for loose contamination” and “promptly cleaned up and drummed.”
My reporting has shown that industrial sites in Appalachia that appear abandoned may end up getting visited by kids, to party, to play, or just to check things out. A child who spent five hours inside that pipe would be exposed to radiation levels that blow past limits that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency established to protect workers cleaning up radioactive-waste sites. If that child happened to fall asleep inside the pipe for a full day, they would awaken with an exposure surpassing the annual radioactivity limits set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Pipes in the waste yard were tested for radiation.
Justin Nobel
In another section of the yard, a colorful mountain of hoses stood more than two stories tall, a radioactive castle beckoning youth to come and climb.
In November, I sent samples of the scale to Sheldon Landsberger, a University of Texas at Austin nuclear engineer. Landsberger found that the material contained levels of radium-226, a particularly dangerous form of the cancer-causing radioactive element, at 3,108 picocuries per gram. That’s some 622 times the limit of 5 picocuries per gram set by the Environmental Protection Agency to protect the public at Superfund sites.
These levels, said Landsberger, were “significantly higher than allowable legal levels under EPA.”
Samples Gorby sent to Eberline Analytical, a radiological analysis lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, showed exceptional levels of radioactive lead and bismuth, as well.
In mid-April, I returned to the site and, not 20 paces from the fence dividing the yard from the Montour Trail, gathered additional samples of loose scale to send to Landsberger. He found that they had similar radium-226 levels, at 3,302 picocuries per gram — 660 times the EPA limit.
The situation was so alarming that in late April, I sent a letter to two dozen federal and state officials, ranging from Pennsylvania Health Secretary Debra Bogen, DEP Director Jessica Shirley, and a state radiation complaint line, to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office and top officials at the EPA, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: “Given the unusual and extraordinary contamination present at this site … I felt the need to, before publishing anything in the media, notify appropriate agencies and officials.”
In early May, the state’s Bureau of Waste Management visited the site and determined that “no waste was observed throughout storage lot … no additional actions are needed at this time. Complaint can be closed.”
In response to questions for this story, DEP spokesperson Neil Shader said, “The department will continue reviewing the information provided and conduct any additional inspections or follow-up actions necessary to ensure compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and permit requirements.”
Pennsylvania Department of Health spokesperson Neil Ruhland responded, “We do not have additional information to share.”
Cecil Township did not reply to questions for this story.
When I visited again in mid-May, there were still large gaps in the fence and no warning signs. A trail through the tall grass growing along the edge of the yard confirmed people had taken advantage of them. The bent grass led to an open area where the dirt was strewn with pipe-scale.
“When I was a kid, we explored everything,” said Silverio Caggiano, a board member of the Buckeye Environmental Network, a regional advocacy group. A former battalion fire chief, Caggiano has four decades of experience tackling threats posed by hazardous and radioactive materials, including weapons of mass destruction. “If you are a kid frequenting this site as a playground through the summer, you could be getting a lifetime dose” of radiation, he told me.
A pile of pipes and hoses in the Cecil waste yard.
Justin Nobel
Caggiano said storms blowing through the yard, as well as winds generated by trains that run on tracks along the yard’s north side, would provide “ample chance to spread this stuff, kick it up in the wind, and be dropped a considerable distance.” Further, he believed that the radioactive pipe-scale drifting around the yard could be used by bad actors willing to put the public at risk.
“No additional action is required on our end,” the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission had stated in response to my April letter detailing the radioactive situation at the site. “We hope this clarification is helpful. Have a great day.”
In response to questions for this story, EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch stated: “It’s absolutely untrue to say nothing has been done about this. PA DEP received your outreach and has visited the site. EPA stands ready to assist to protect human health and the environment as requested and as appropriate under the law.” Hirsch suggested individuals report suspected environmental violations through EPA’s tip page.
Neither 5D nor Weavertown have replied to questions about the site.
A History of Hazards
In the late 1990s, Texas drillers pioneered intensive new drilling techniques called high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which allowed them to get at oil and gas deposits that were previously too deep to access. By the mid-2000s fracking had arrived — chaotically — in Pennsylvania. There were spills, explosions, and regular allegations of contamination and corruption. When it came to radioactivity, “there was obviously a problem that the state was not dealing with,” John Quigley, who ran the Pennsylvania DEP in the mid-2010s, recently told Inside Climate News.
With state agencies ignoring their concerns, residents began documenting their health problems on their own. “Headaches, fatigue, dizziness, nausea, nosebleeds, blood test show exposure to benzene and other chemicals,” reads one typical Pennsylvania story on List of the Harmed, a website that eventually spanned fracked communities nationwide and included more than 21,000 entries.
In 2011, The New York Times conducted an investigation into the harms of fracking in Pennsylvania: “Drilling sites bustle around the clock with workers, some in yellow hazardous material suits, and 18-wheelers haul equipment, water, and waste along back roads,” while “rigs announce their presence with the occasional boom and quiver of underground explosions” and “drilling-waste pits, some as large as a football field, sit close to homes,” smelling “like raw sewage mixed with gasoline.”
In 2018, Eliza Griswold published Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, about a southwestern Pennsylvania family’s devastating experience with fracking in Washington County. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, and the Haney family was included in an investigation on fracking by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro. When Shapiro’s 243-page investigation was published in 2020, residents in communities besieged by the industry were overjoyed, seeing it as the first time a top government official had captured their intense personal trauma.
“What is most concerning about this industry is that it doesn’t happen in out-of-the-way industrial parks,” stated Shapiro’s report. “It happens … under houses, and farms, and woodlands,” a process so invasive and toxic that “worms were forced up out of the ground,” farm animals were “giving birth to deformed offspring,” drinking water began “to smell like sulfur or taste like formaldehyde and burn the skin,” and “at night, children would get intense, sudden nosebleeds; the blood would just pour out,” turning their pillows red.
“Our government often ignored the costs to the environment and to the health and safety of the citizens of the Commonwealth, in a rush to reap the benefits of this industry,” Shapiro concluded.
The investigation made a set of recommendations, such as barring drilling within 2,500 feet of a home and 5,000 feet of a school or hospital, better monitoring of fracking air pollution, better regulating the industry’s toxic waste. and unleashing “the full force of the public health apparatus” in order to deal with fracking as “we do with other public health crises.”
Homes are close to the pile of waste.
Justin Nobel
Since becoming governor in 2023, however, Shapiro has altered positions. The year he took office, Shapiro launched a project called “Radical Transparency” with CNX Resources, a notorious local fracker, that lets them monitor their own pollution data, and his administration has continued to ignore calls to visit with residents in communities on the front lines of fracking. “There is a consistent and profound lack of urgency from the Shapiro administration when it comes to protecting Pennsylvanians from the health risks of fossil fuels,” says Alison L. Steele, the executive director of Environmental Health Project, a southwestern Pennsylvania advocacy group.
Blanock feels betrayed. “[Shapiro] said we Pennsylvanians have a right to clean air and water, and we thought this official really cared, but it was obviously just something to get him elected,” she says. “Think about all these rare cancers in children and adults — it’s grotesque, it’s really sickening that this can be happening in our community, literally right along the trail. You can bet money that sites like these are all over southwestern Pennsylvania.”
Shapiro’s office didn’t provide answers to detailed questions that I sent for this story, including about whether the operations at the Cecil facility could be linked to the cases of Ewing sarcoma or other rare cancers in the area.
There’s a body of science going back more than a decade that connects fracking with risks to human health, although potential links between fracking and Ewing sarcoma have received very little research attention in the United States. When the Concerned Health Professionals of New York published its first “Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking” in 2014, the report cited 340 research and news articles related to the risks and harms of fracking. When the most recent edition came out in 2023, the citations numbered more than 2,300. “The risks and harms of fracking for public health are real and growing,” the 2023 report stated.
Studies from Pennsylvania included in the compendium found that babies born to mothers near fracking sites were more likely to be born prematurely, and that there was a two- to threefold increase in leukemia among children in Pennsylvania who lived near a fracking well during their first years of life or while in the womb.
In 2019, Blanock joined organizers with the Center for Coalfield Justice, another Washington County advocacy group, on a bus trip to the state capitol in Harrisburg, to demand that then-Gov. Tom Wolf study the potential link between fracking and rare cancers like Ewing sarcoma. When Wolf emerged from his office to address the activists, who had gathered outside his door, Blanock invited Wolf to tour the area and experience for himself how fracking impacted kids and communities. “You have to see it in person,” she pleaded. “You can’t understand what people living right up against the industry are going through.”
Wolf ultimately promised to do a study. When the Department of Health published it four years later, in 2023, the state researchers reported links between fracking and childhood lymphoma and asthma hospitalizations, but “no associations” between fracking and the Ewing sarcoma cases reported in the region. Advocacy groups contended that the study did not include all of the region’s Ewing’s cases, and failed to address how radioactive fracking waste may have played a role in the cancers.
“We are all at risk,” Ned Ketyer, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania, told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star in response to the report. “And the risk is significant.”
Ketyer, a former pediatrician who practiced in the area for more than 30 years and cared for many Cecil families, told me that it’s shaken him to learn that there is a freely accessible yard of highly radioactive oil-and-gas-industry equipment in the community. “This may very well be a crime scene,” he said. “I am livid. Put up the yellow police tape to stop exposures now, keep the public away with signage, and there should be a public-health announcement made by local authorities.
“People need to be held accountable, and I think the responsibility ultimately lies with the governor.”
In response to my list of questions about the Cecil waste facility and fracking in Pennsylvania and cancers and other health harms, Rosie Lapowsky, a Shapiro spokesperson, said in an emailed response: “Governor Shapiro has been clear that protecting Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to clean air, pure water, and a healthy environment remains a priority of his Administration. Under Governor Shapiro’s leadership, DEP continues to conduct meaningful oversight of the oil and gas industry, carrying out thousands of inspections each year, documenting violations when they occur, and holding operators accountable under Pennsylvania law.”
DEP spokesperson Shader said, in response to questions for this story, that the Cecil yard “is inspected on a quarterly basis to ensure compliance with applicable permits, rules, and regulations,” and that the “DEP continues to monitor the site and oversee activities associated with the storage and management of materials related to oil-and-gas development to ensure compliance with Pennsylvania’s environmental laws and regulations.”
State radiation protection program staff visited the yard on June 3, to assess its radiation levels and potential public-health risks. It was the first-ever inspection of this kind noted in department records that go back more than three decades. Kylan Bjornson, an area resident and frequent Montour Trail user who was present at the time of the inspection, said that he “did not personally see the DEP team take any samples, or investigate inside of the pipes.” The DEP team “did not have the attitude that they were looking for a problem,” in Bjornson’s opinion, “which I thought was the point.”
A few days later, Shader emailed me an update on the inspection, saying that the tests had not turned up dangerous or unusual conditions. “Inspectors collected radiation measurements both on the facility property and along the Montour Trail to assess potential public exposure and evaluate concerns that had been raised,” he stated. “Readings taken along the trail did not indicate radiological impacts to trail users or any conditions that would pose a public health concern. Measurements taken on private property were consistent with materials associated with oil and gas development and similarly did not indicate conditions warranting additional protective actions for the public.”
The DEP has so far not responded to questions about the radiation levels detected by the inspection team, whether they had taken samples of materials from the trail or yard, whether 5D received any violations as a result of the inspection, or when the final report will be released.
Waste Without Warnings
Tom McKnight hauled oil-and-gas wastewater in the Marcellus for six years. While he doesn’t attribute his stage 4 thymoma cancer — a rare cancer of the thymus — to the job, he does wonder why no one ever warned him the wastewater that filled his truck might contain elevated levels of the radioactive element radium.
McKnight credits a 2020 Rolling Stone article with waking him up to this fact, and inspiring him to educate others. McKnight now serves on the board of the worker advocacy group Truckers Movement for Justice.
He says “laydown” yards filled with radioactive oil-and-gas-industry pipes like the one in Cecil are common in the Marcellus, as they would be in any oil-and-gas field. “I would have to say every company has a laydown yard,” McKnight says. “You have to put that stuff somewhere between jobs, or until you get some guys to deal with it.”
Dozens of companies across Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania have permits to process radioactive oil-and-gas waste, but not a single one of them has a permit to operate an unmarked low-level radioactive-waste landfill, suggesting a much more widespread environmental and public-health problem for the region and the industry.
Production wastewater — sometimes called brine — is run through pipes from the wellhead, where it surfaces to storage tanks, which are typically located several hundred feet away. These pipes can become coated in radioactive pipe scale, as can the hoses that link brine tanks to the brine trucks that crisscross fracking regions daily. These are the kinds of contaminated pipes and hoses that are piling up by the thousands in the Cecil yard.
Pipe-scale is a type of waste generated in oil-and-gas development.
Justin Nobel
The EPA webpage on radioactive oil-and-gas waste warns that disposal of these materials can result in “environmental contamination” and “may lead to ground and surface water contamination.” The page continues: “Those at risk could include oil and gas maintenance workers and nearby residents or office workers,” who face “inhalation of radioactive dust and direct exposures to gamma radiation.”
In Texas, oil-and-gas-field equipment contaminated with radioactivity must be identified “by securely attaching a clearly visible waterproof tag or marking with a legible waterproof paint or ink,” and pipes must be capped, so radioactive material doesn’t drift out to contaminate workers and the public. Pipes and hoses in the Cecil pipe yard have no markings and no caps. “Every time you move the pipes, you are shaking that scale off,” says McKnight.
5D’s permit with the Pennsylvania DEP states: “All waste-handling activities and storage areas shall be in an enclosed structure or otherwise suitably protected from the weather or kept in covered containers.” Despite this, the pipes in the Cecil yard are uncontained, and radioactive scale is scattered across the open ground. There is no barrier to prevent wind or rainwater from carrying radioactive material onto the rail trail or into the creek that runs just beyond it and immediately joins with Millers Run, where the township hosts an annual fishing derby. Less than two miles downstream of the juncture, Millers Run flows past Cecil Township Park, where Luke Blanock played baseball for years. 5D’s original permit application to the DEP noted the short distance between the storage yard and the park.
Under its permit, the company is allowed to use a mixing process called “solidification” that combines radioactive oil-and-gas waste with paper dust, cardboard dust, fly ash, and cement-kiln dust (which can contain a known carcinogen called hexavalent chromium) — although a recent DEP report suggests it is illegal in Pennsylvania to handle radioactive oil-and-gas waste in this way. Solidification is necessary because landfills, under federal rules, cannot accept fluid or dripping waste. An added bonus for operators is that the nonradioactive materials can mask the radioactive signature of oil-and-gas waste, enabling the trucks transporting the waste to pass the radiation monitors typical at local landfills without tripping them. This is a low-cost way for operators like 5D to get the waste off their hands, compared with the sizable costs of hauling waste across the country to disposal sites in Texas or Utah that accept low-level radioactive waste.
Solidification is a sloppy job that can lead to workers being coated in dangerously radioactive sludge. “In no oilfield I have ever been to or heard of do these guys know what the fuck they are doing, do they have any training, and is any sort of concern given for their health and safety and the environment, ever,” a Marcellus worker named Jesse Lombardi tells me. The Radiation Action Plan that 5D submitted to the DEP in 2025 states that “all public and facility staff exposure to radiation should be maintained as-low-as-reasonably-achievable (ALARA).” The plan also states that if radiation dose rates exceed 250 microroentgens per hour, “the area will be marked and access restricted” and “radiological hazards will be communicated to personnel through postings, signs, and labeling,” including “the standard radiation symbol” and “yellow and magenta rope.” On our visit to the Cecil yard, Gorby had measured almost 5,000 microroentgens per hour.
The DEP did not reply to questions regarding solidification of radioactive oil-and-gas waste, including whether it’s legal in Pennsylvania.
There have been hundreds of lawsuits regarding radioactive oil-and-gas equipment abandoned at wellheads or in storage yards in an agricultural or community setting. In the best-known case, Grefer v. Alpha Technical, the Grefer family sued Exxon Mobil and Intracoastal Tubular Services, an oilfield pipe-cleaning company, in Louisiana state court for contaminating their property with radioactive “scale deposited on used oilfield piping/tubulars that were cleaned and/or maintained by ITCO and Alpha for Exxon and other oil companies.”
The Grefers won the case, with the initial jury verdict in 2001 awarding them $56.1 million in general damages, as well as $1.06 billion in punitive damages — which on appeal were reduced to $112.3 million.
A running and bicycle trail sits near the piles of waste.
Justin Nobel
Radium Risks
Earlier this year, standing at a gap in the fence separating the Montour Trail and the Cecil waste yard, Blanock found herself thinking about a particularly dangerous radioactive element. “I always go back to radium,” she says, as joggers and cyclists buzz by on the trail. “It sticks in my mind, because radium acts like calcium and attaches to bone.”
While the general scientific consensus is that there is no link between radium and Ewing sarcoma, there is scientific research that says otherwise, and the fracking industry’s sloppy handling of radium across the region is cause for concern.
Radium is a silvery-white metal naturally present in soil, water, and rocks at very low levels. It is often present in the wastewater that surges to the surface in oil-and-gas production at significantly higher levels. Because radium and calcium are chemically similar, it has a “preference for bone” and is “commonly referred to as a bone seeker,” as noted in a 1988 federal-government report on the cancer risks of ingesting radium.
Radium has been firmly linked to the bone cancers that killed the “Radium Girls,” early-20th-century factory workers who were poisoned by the radioactive luminescent paint they applied to clock dials to make them glow.
To date, Ewing sarcoma — the cancer that has been diagnosed in several Cecil residents, and which killed Luke Blanock — has not been linked to exposure to radium or other radioactive materials, according to the American Cancer Society.
However, in the 1990s, the Canadian epidemiologist Murray Finkelstein studied naturally-occurring radium contamination in drinking water and the presence of Ewing sarcoma and osteosarcoma among Ontario youths. Research he published in 1994 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that even minor increases of radium in drinking water led to a “statistically significant” increase in death from bone cancers, including Ewing sarcoma.
When I spoke to Finkelstein in 2021 about Pennsylvania’s Ewing sarcoma cases, he told me that he believed “the only ingestion pathway of any concern is drinking water.”
The oil-and-gas industry is a major generator of radioactivity, as production brings to the surface an annual 1 trillion gallons of salty wastewater that can be rich in radium. A confidential 2010 EPA report, published the following year by The New York Times, warned that fracking in the Marcellus Shale would bring significant amounts of radium to the surface.
In 2016, when the Pennsylvania DEP published its report on radioactivity associated with oil-and-gas development in the state, it found that radium levels in Marcellus wastewater averaged 9,330 picocuries per liter, more than 1,800 times the EPA’s safe-drinking-water limit, and more than 150 times the federal agency’s threshold for defining radioactive waste.
In Pennsylvania, from 2005 through the mid-2010s, this radium-rich fracking wastewater was dumped at sewage plants and waste-treatment facilities that were not equipped for removing radium, and unknown amounts of the radioactive element were shot into the same rivers that provide drinking water for communities like Cecil. Pennsylvania researchers have discovered the fracking industry’s radium in streambeds, the shells of mussels, and the sediment at the bottom of reservoirs.
The other Marcellus Shale states are also contending with radioactive contamination at oil-and-gas-waste facilities. At Austin Master Services in Martins Ferry, Ohio, radioactive oil-and-gas waste was sloppily processed at a facility located on the Ohio River just 1,000 feet from the city’s drinking-water field. In 2024, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sued the company for “threatening to put Ohio communities and our natural resources in jeopardy.” In January, a state judge ordered Austin Master Services, CEO Brad Domitrovich, and parent corporation American Environmental Partners to pay more than $34 million to the state in fines and cleanup costs. Austin Master Services is no longer in business, and the processing plant is up for sale.
In 2023, I visited Fairmont Brine Processing, a treatment plant in northern West Virginia initially touted as the gold standard for safe handling of fracking wastewater. I found an abandoned site deeply contaminated with radioactivity, with radium registering at 5,000 times higher than general background levels. Local high school kids regularly partied at the site for years — I interviewed one of them, Ashlin Bailey, for a Teen Vogue story last year. “We went up there and found a big tank and two abandoned buildings and just explored,” she told me.
“Trespassers may be partying at the Site for unknown periods of time” and face “potential health effects,” the EPA reported in 2023, following my investigation, which also ran on the site TruthDig. “The quantities and types of hazardous substances entering” the Monongahela River, which is located directly below the Fairmont Brine Processing site and the source of drinking water for downstream cities like Pittsburgh, were “unknown.”
The EPA is presently cleaning up the facility, which contained more than 800 tons of radioactive waste when it was listed as a Superfund site in 2023, most of it still on-site as of late May.
Sean Guthrie, the former operations manager at Fairmont Brine, told me that the plant shuttered in 2018, and that two young co-workers have died from cancer since. “There is potential there for whoever is moving that stuff around or kids and the public that get in there to end up with issues down the line,” Guthrie says. “You may not see any effects of this right away.”
In 2021, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey published research confirming that radium from a brine spill in Blacktail Creek, located in North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield, traveled 4.5 miles downstream, building up in creek sediments and the floodplain at levels “significantly above the U.S. EPA action level.” The creek contamination posed “a route of exposure to aquatic organisms,” and radium-contaminated dirt on the floodplain suggested “a potential for animal exposures.”
‘We May Not Know for Generations’
Google Earth historical images show that the Cecil yard has been storing materials since at least the early 1990s, while the upper part of the facility has been storing radioactive oil-and-gas waste since the Marcellus gas boom began in the mid-2000s. It is bordered by a creek that, a few miles downstream, flows past the town’s ball fields. The first case of Ewing sarcoma in Cecil was diagnosed in 2008.
When asked if it was possible that radium from the pipe yard, or any of the other radium-releasing aspects of fracking development in the area, could have caused local residents like Luke Blanock to develop Ewing sarcoma, Ketyer, the retired pediatrician, said it was an important question that would take additional research to answer.
“We may not know for generations what the true health effects of this site are, and I don’t think anybody can say with any degree of certainty that one exposure led to one outcome, there is just no way to know that, and we are never going to have full certainty as to why Luke had Ewing sarcoma,” Ketyer says. “We live on a radioactive planet where sometimes we do things that increase the concentration of that radioactivity. Reducing threats to our health wherever and whenever we can is all we can do, individually and as a society.”
Lauren Minsky, an environmental-health scientist at Haverford College in Philadelphia, has used novel data-analysis techniques to pinpoint localized cancer patterns across Pennsylvania, and says, “This pipe-yard site has direct implications for the Ewing sarcoma cluster in Cecil, as it would for the full range of radiation-caused or -linked cancers across the area.”
The state’s 2020 report “did not identify statistically significantly higher rates of Ewing’s tumors or other childhood cancers in fracking counties — including Washington County — than in non-fracking counties,” says DEP spokesperson Shader. “Both DEP and [the Pennsylvania Department of Health] continue to monitor the situation.”
It’s almost 10 years since Luke Blanock died. For the 10th year in a row, his family and friends plan to participate in the annual Pittsburgh Cure Sarcoma 5K run under the name Team Luke Strong.
“Every year at the sarcoma walk, there are more teams created,” his mother tells me, “because, sadly, there are more sarcoma patients.”