A traumatized neighborhood braces for the worst — again
The news hit the neighborhood like a brick.
Ivy Lane, the Center Township cul-de-sac where a gas pipeline exploded in September 2018, was getting another pipeline.
This one would be laid on the other side of the street, and, just a few hundred feet from the site of the blast, the new pipeline and the old ruptured one would cross.
After experiencing one of the most catastrophic failures in the decadelong build out of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale industry, the community on Ivy Lane in Beaver County was figuring out — both communally and individually — what it meant to piece together their disrupted lives.
Sue Michael and her neighbor Karen Gdula had joined together in a neighborhood alliance to advocate for pipeline safety. They worked to extract information from and about Energy Transfer, the company that had built the damaged Revolution pipe. More broadly, they hoped to regain some feeling of agency after what the residents of Ivy Lane perceived as an invasion.
Whatever progress they thought they were making was suddenly jumbled by the introduction of another pipeline — a 12-inch-wide natural gas link to the Shell petrochemical plant in nearby Potter. This one was being built by National Fuel, a New York-based gas infrastructure firm.
By late February 2019, the woods behind Karen’s house at 730 Ivy Lane were cracking with the sound of falling trees.
“I’m so sorry,” she said — to no one, to the trees — as she stood in her backyard watching a large dirt path being carved for the new pipeline.
Sue had been spending more and more time collecting clips about pipeline disasters and had been in touch with landowners and activists across the state in Chester County waging their own battle against Energy Transfer over its Mariner East pipelines. That project was being constructed to deliver natural gas liquids to Eastern Pennsylvania and — because of a series of well-publicized sinkholes during construction — had inspired the ire of residents, regulators and local politicians.
The two neighbors wanted to harness the same forces for Ivy Lane.
Sue Michael began using the
term “sacrifice zone,” which is how environmental groups and pipeline safety advocates refer to areas that would be harmed in the event of a pipeline accident. The phrase — which is rooted in environmental policy — is understood to mean that those inside the zone had no choice in the matter.
“If Energy Transfer were to have another problem, our fear is that it would trigger the National Fuel pipeline. And then we would have a blast,” she reasoned.
While Karen concerned herself with extracting details from the pipeline companies, Sue decided she would go after public officials.
She contacted everyone she could think of: state and federal pipeline regulators; Conor Lamb, D-Mt. Lebanon, her U.S. representative; Beaver County District Attorney David Lozier; Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa.; and Gov. Tom Wolf.
Some agencies referred her to other agencies. The politicians didn’t call back.
Sue kept pressing to talk to Mr. Wolf, who she believed could single-handedly cancel the ruptured Revolution pipeline. “I’m serious. I want a call from the governor,” she’d plead with whomever would answer the phone in his office.
The more she called and wrote to people in charge, the more she became convinced that those people didn’t exist.
“It’s layer upon layer upon layer of government, [and] no one really has complete authority. Everybody has a piece of this,” she said.
She had a point — the Revolution pipeline had slipped through a regulatory patchwork filled with gaps.
At the state level, Energy Transfer presented the highpressure pipeline as a transmission facility, a description that ensured it would be permitted by the local conservation district instead of the state Department of Environmental Protection. To federal pipeline safety regulators, the company said the Revolution pipeline was a gathering line, eluding stricter requirements.
None of these agencies, or the townships that eventually hosted the pipe, had a say in whether the route was the safest one.
Karen, the ‘straight man’
In March, Karen Gdula made her first appearance during an anti-oil-and-gas industry tour.
A bus with a Yahoo News reporter and a few environmental group representatives picked her up and drove to an overlook on Bunker Hill Road, where Karen told them the story of the pipeline explosion while overlooking the scar carved into the ground.
She reprised the talk on another tour for University of Pittsburgh environmental students. In April, she traveled to Harrisburg with the Better Path Coalition, which advocates for a quick transition from fossil fuels, to read her story before Auditor General Eugene DePasquale.
The groups she was connecting with, such as Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community and Citizens to Protect the Ambridge Reservoir, were highlighting the link between the Revolution and National Fuel pipelines — really, all oil and gas pipelines and all oil and gas wells — and the petrochemical industry, climate change and plastics pollution.
They were fighting against the Shell ethane cracker being built in Potter and the handful of other such facilities that industry officials hoped would follow. Industry supporters liked to dismiss them as out-of-town, out-oftouch radicals.
Karen Gdula was there as the “straight man.” She was not political, and her message was all about safety — generic and unobjectionable. Pipelines shouldn’t be that close to homes, she argued.
There’s something about Karen that’s instantly endearing. Her golden hair, the flowery tops, the raspy voice, and the way everything she says seems like prized information extracted through persistence, charm and military-style record keeping.
When Karen spoke to Energy Transfer — and increasingly, the company would call only her with updates — she spoke for the neighborhood.
Everyone appreciated what Karen was doing, but for some Ivy Laners, it was hard to envision what impact the effort might have.
“I just don’t see the point of investing myself in something that [is] a much bigger thing,” Amy Curley said in March, while her children Micah and Nathan watched “Power Rangers” on the living room couch at 722 Ivy Lane and the baby, Rowan, napped.
The family’s French bulldog mix, Sophie, was sitting in her usual place on a pillow near the window — the same window where Amy’s mother-in-law had found the boys quietly staring at the fire the night of the explosion. Micah, 5, calls it “fire bullets raining from the sky.”
Amy wasn’t sure that going up against this pipeline was what it meant to work for change.
The change would have to be bigger — “a societal change” — not about where in Beaver County you would put a pipeline, but how to shift the entire energy profile of the country. Even that possibility gave her pause. Oil and gas had brought jobs to the Pittsburgh region and revitalized chunks of forsaken steel ruins.
Maybe, she wondered, it’s unfair to argue “you can’t have this because there’s a chance that something will go wrong.”
“I still have a gas stove and gas heat,” she added. “We’re part of it, too.”
By the spring, Ryan Boring, the one-time face of the alliance, had faded into the background. He said he was out of town a lot, coaching his son’s baseball team. Over time, he stopped returning calls.
‘Good relationship with both pipelines’
A DEP-imposed lull in construction of the Revolution pipeline, followed by environmental regulators suspending all new permits for Energy Transfer in February, had allowed those who wanted to put the situation out of their minds the luxury of doing so.
That was Barbara Goblick’s take on the state of the group in May. She’d become Karen’s right hand at the Ivy/Pine Alliance.
By that time, the group had succeeded in getting the Center Township supervisors to arrange for both Energy Transfer and National Fuel to appear at township meetings each month.
Although Barbara didn’t share Karen’s optimism, she made it a point to attend the meetings. She wrote letters to regulators and posed while a photographer from The New York Times snapped what seemed like hundreds of shots to get a portrait of her looking lost in thought.
She did it, in part, to feel as if she’d done everything she could. And, in part, she didn’t want to let Karen down.
By the summer, Karen seemed pleased with how many of the residents’ concerns were being heard.
The alliance had sharpened its focus on the close intersection between the Revolution and National Fuel pipelines, asking the companies to bury them deeper and farther apart than required by law. The Revolution pipeline was only 3 feet underground when it burst. Even a corpse gets buried deeper, Ryan Boring liked to say.
Karen was waging a diplomatic battle as she worked to ensure that the companies knew she was keeping up with regulatory reports about National Fuel’s construction and Energy Transfer’s violations. But she also made sure to thank each company for small accommodations.
“Right now, we have a good working relationship with both pipelines,” she said with visible pride. An Energy Transfer resentative even told her that he felt Ivy Lane residents had been kind and made him feel welcome.
was decidedly not Sue Michael’s goal.
“I will not make them feel welcome. They’re not welcome here,” she declared.
‘I need a new plan’
Sue stopped attending the township meetings by the summer, seeing little meaning in the updates that were being doled out at that point.
It didn’t matter to her when trucks were driving down her street. They were polite enough; they moved to the side when she was passing. The sight of pipeline workers grilling their lunch in the driveway of the Demarco family’s former home had seemed so jarring once. Now, it wasn’t a big deal.
It wasn’t the daily inconveniences that grieved her, but the bigger indignities.
During a private meeting that Energy Transfer hosted for Ivy Lane residents in June to officially announce that the pipeline would be rerouted uphill onto the former Demarco property, Sue couldn’t get past the company’s representatives calling the explosion an “incident.”
She was told it was a corporate term.
“It was an explosion!” she said.
Sue resented the chitchat at the beginning of these meetings, and the handshakes exchanged between people who have to live next to a pipeline that once exploded and those whose job it was to sell them on how safe that pipeline is.
“I do not suffer fools,” she said later. “I’ve had my life planned out here. Now I need a new plan.”
As the summer wore on, she’d consulted with four real estate agents about putting her house on the market. All of them said it would be a hard sell. To make the inside of her home more attractive, Sue decided to start the renovations that she had put on hold after the explosion.
Her goal was to be out before the Energy Transfer line was reactivated.
She was once again being kept awake at night by her dog, this one a new rescue that she just couldn’t resist.
The animals brought her comfort, Sue said, and her mother liked it when the dogs sat on her lap and she stroked their fur. So much of her mother’s time now was spent sleeping, confused or anxious about things in the house that it was nice to see her enjoying something.
“Sometimes, I have to look at her picture on the wall to remember what she was like,” she said.
Mudslides
On the one-year anniversary of the explosion, Karen Gdula invited alliance members and friends to her house for a gathering. They celebrated Barbara Goblick’s birthday and tried not to dwell on the pipeline talk.
Karen typed out a page-long summary of what the alliance had accomplished in the past year and displayed it on a stand for guests to see. At the top of the list, she wrote: “National Fuel — TWENTY FEET deep at the crossing. WooHoo!!”
With Barbara’s blessing, Karen prepared a signature drink: the mudslide. Rum, coffee liqueur and cream, ironically sweet.
Sue didn’t come.
By late fall, Sue said she was living with such unsustainable anxiety that she decided to take a break from the decision-making. She stopped looking for new homes.
“Everything is in God’s hands,” she said.
Another way of saying that might be that the pipelines were coming no matter what. Karen had always accepted this premise and tailored her tactics accordingly.
“I’ve actually had quite a few people say to me, ‘You’re doing it the right way. You’re not going out there protesting.’ [State Rep.] Josh Kail and [U.S. Rep.] Conor Lamb told me that,” she said. “We stick to the facts. We don’t do the ‘I hate pipelines’ discussion.”
Because she’s kept her expectations nonexistent, Barbara Goblick has felt no defeat.
“The fact that Energy Transfer is talking to us — hey, that’s a win,” she said. “The fact that [National Fuel’s] pipe is 20 feet in the ground, that’s phenomenal.”
The National Fuel pipeline is now packed with inert gas and waiting for the Shell petrochemical plant to be completed in the next year or two.
Barbara is not at all confident that their efforts played a part in
National Fuel’s decision to dig that deep. Maybe the bedrock needed to ground the pipeline was just that deep. No matter. It’s something, and she’s happy to put it in the win column.
What she doesn’t know is if this sense of momentum will be the comfort she needs when Energy Transfer recommissions the Revolution pipeline.
On Jan. 3, regulators fined Energy Transfer an unprecedented $30.6 million for the Revolution explosion and, in the same breath, lifted the permit hold, which allows the pipeline company to begin the process of getting Revolution back online.
“The day they turn that back on — I don’t know,” Barbara said. “Am I going to be a disastrous nervous wreck at work? I don’t know.
“I’m not looking forward to that day.”
Neither is Karen Gdula. For all the progress she feels has been made, she and her husband recently began mapping out escape routes. They can’t go through the woods because there’s a pipeline there. They can’t run in the opposite direction because there’s another pipeline on the hill. They think they’ve identified a path through neighbors’ backyards.
She’s packed a “bug-out bag” in case of another emergency evacuation.
Don Lehocky keeps his camopatterned bag on the back of his kitchen chair. He adds to it often, most recently tossing in some parachute cord and a water purification tool.
Barbara Goblick has stacked her house with rolled up bags for quick packing and keeps a portable litter box on hand.
Sue Michael had been adamant that she didn’t need to prepare because she expected to be out of Ivy Lane when Energy Transfer’s pipeline starts flowing again.
But in the fall, she started packing an emergency bag. Sue hadn’t heard about the DEP lifting the permit ban because her mother had been taking up much of her time.
“She’s not long with us; it’s day to day now,” Sue said in early January.
As for moving, she said she’s decided to wait until she feels more sure of her decision.
“Right now, I’m in my home, [and] I’m going to be there tomorrow,” Sue said.
“I’ve actually had quite a few people say to me, ‘You’re doing it the right way. You’re not going out there protesting’ ... We stick to the facts. We don’t do the ‘I hate pipelines’ discussion.”
Karen Gdula