Range, others paid $3M to settle fracking health claims
Range Resources and 10 other companies involved in developing the Yeager shale gas well site in Amwell, Washington County, paid Stacey Haney and her neighbors $3 million to settle their claims that the well development damaged their health.
The terms of the August 2018 settlement were revealed Tuesday after Range stated in a hearing before Washington County Common Pleas President Judge Katherine Emery that it would make public its portion of the agreement.
Judge Emery then vacated her temporary injunction barring publication of the agreement terms that were mistakenly made available to radio
journalist Reid Frazier last week because of a computer glitch in the Washington County prothonotary’s office.
According to the threepage offer sheet released by Range, the shale gas drilling company’s insurance carrier paid $1,880,000 of the total settlement amount and 10 defendant subcontractors paid the rest, although the amount each paid was redacted from the offer sheet by Range.
Ms. Haney and her neighbors agreed to release Range and the other companies from all past, current and future claims related to operations at the Yeager site and other nearby shale gas development sites. They also agreed to refrain from making any disparaging remarks about the shale gas companies or their developments and gave Range right of first refusal if Ms. Haney wants to sell the property where she no longer lives.
“We have voluntarily released the settlement agreement that resolved prior litigation with eight landowners in Washington County. We believe this additional transparency resolves any outstanding questions on this topic,” Range spokesman Mark Windle said in an email.
The company continues to maintain that it did not damage or pollute the plaintiffs’ water supplies or cause any adverse health impacts.
The agreement does not specify how much Ms. Haney and five of her neighbors — Beth, John and Ashley Voyles and Grace and Loren Kiskadden — received in the settlement. Loren Kiskadden died in November. Range said in an email that attorneys received 33 percent of the settlement amount, a standard fee.
The settlement agreement ended a contentious and lengthy legal battle that began seven years ago. Range drilled the Yeager shale gas well in 2009 and also built a drill cuttings pit and wastewater impoundment next to the hilltop well pad and near the plaintiffs’ homes.
Ms. Haney, her family and neighbors claimed the drilling and fracking operation fouled their air and water and caused a host of physical ailments.
John Smith, the attorney who represented Ms. Haney and other plaintiffs, declined to discuss the judge’s decision “due to our firm’s and our clients’ involvement with the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office and its ongoing criminal Grand Jury investigation.”
As part of that investigation, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro sent a letter to attorneys representing Ms. Haney and Range that referenced the “Stacey Haney/ Range Resources Investigation” and requested that the case record be preserved, under penalty of law.
The Haney family’s story, including health problems, was also chronicled in a book, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” by Eliza Griswold, which was among The New York Times critics’ top books of 2018.
Attorney David Strassburger, representing Mr. Frazier, said he was pleased at the outcome of the hearing.
“Reid Frazier was in the right. He was in a public courthouse in a public room, on a public computer, doing what is called constitutionally protected newsgathering,” Mr. Strassburger said. “He should never have been enjoined in the first place.”
Before its abrupt turnaround in court Tuesday, Range had sought to keep the settlement confidential.
Kimberly Brown, an attorney representing Range, argued in court that Mr. Frazier knew that the August 2018 court order barring the public from accessing the confidential agreement was in place but copied the document anyway when he found it in the public file in the prothonotary’s office.
“It was an intentional violation of the court order and made a mockery of the court order,” Ms. Brown argued in court.
Mr. Frazier, an energy reporter for the Allegheny Front, a Pittsburgh-based public media outlet, and StateImpact Pennsylvania, a media group that includes 90.5 WESA, was able to access the document last Tuesday, shortly after a hearing on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s attempt to unseal the settlement.
Judge Emery imposed the temporary restraining order barring Mr. Frazier from publishing the document on Thursday at Range’s request.
Mr. Strassburger noted at Tuesday’s hearing that the First Amendment protects publication of lawfully obtained information on matters of public concern, and cited numerous examples of case law that rejects prior restraint, including New York Times Co. v. United States, the so-called Pentagon Papers decision of 1971.
In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration’s claim of national security as a reason to keep The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing stories based on classified military documents about the Vietnam War.
Mr. Strassburger’s brief also states the allegedly confidential nature of a settlement agreement in the case at hand between private litigants in a “run-of-the-mill civil dispute” does not justify the court’s granting of a prior restraint.
In his brief, Mr. Strassburger also said the Pennsylvania Constitution contains a prohibition against prior restraint that is “just as strong, if not stronger than that afforded by the First Amendment.”