Longtime Pa. environmental official heralded for his blog
David Hess helped avert a catastrophe at Quecreek mine; today, his online presence is ‘essential’ reading
For Inside Climate News
In July 2002, 18 miners working at the Quecreek mine in Somerset County, Pa., entered a chamber 240 feet below ground and accidentally broke through the wall of an abandoned, flooded mine, unleashing millionsof gallons of trapped water.
In the ensuing chaos, half the group was able to escape; the other nine fled to a space reportedly only four feet tall to seek refuge from the water.
Mark Schweiker, Pennsylvania’s governor at the time, says the outcome over four tense days was a tribute to a career civil servant who had risen to run the state’s Department of Environmental Protection: David Hess.
“The instinct of Secretary Hess to quickly assemble the needed equipment and encourage the deep mine rescue unit to essentially say, ‘Don’t worry about procurement policy and cost, acquire what you need to affect this rescue — waste not one minute,’ was ultra important,” Mr. Schweiker recalled in a recent interview.
Mr. Hess’ career coincided with numerous policy achievements and emergency responses — including Flight 93.
But 20-odd years after he retired, lawmakers and environmentalists say his lasting legacy might revolve around his blog, the prosaically named PA Environmental Digest, which sports a mid-2000s web aesthetic that belies its uncompromising coverage of Pennsylvania’s environmentand energy policy.
Once the most powerful environmental regulator in Pennsylvania, Mr. Hess spends a lot of his time these days birddogging a destructive force he never saw coming during his years in Harrisburg: hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking.
“We had no clue that this train was coming,” Mr. Hess said, his face folding into a frown.
Pennsylvanians are not the only ones who benefit from Mr. Hess’ reporting. He follows the global fight against climate change and believes the fracking industry — which produces billions of gallons of toxic, radioactive “wastewater” and leaks volatile organic compounds and methane into the air — is the state’s definingenvironmental issue.
“It affects the entire landscape of Pennsylvania,” he said. “Some critical people aren’t paying attention.”
Doing the dirty work
In the spring of 1970, David Hess, then in high school, joined millions of other Americans celebrating the country’s inaugural Earth Day, created to help draw awareness to deteriorating environmental conditions as a result of industrial pollution. Mr. Hess, then 18, rode his budding passion for protecting the environment to a long, decorated career in Pennsylvania’s environmental regulatory agencies. From 1977 to 2003, when he retired, Mr. Hess was involved in almost every piece of major environmental policy enacted in Pennsylvania.
When he first began working as a fledgling environmental regulator, taking internships at Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Resources (a predecessor to the state’s DEP) during his summers between semesters at Shippensburg University, he gained valuable experience doing “a lot of the work nobody else wanted to do.”
He worked for 12 years in the Department of Environmental Resources’ policy and legislation offices and then was appointed executive director of the state Senate’s Environmental Resources and Energy Committee in 1989, on the Republican side, where he developed an affinity for pursuing bipartisan environmental policy goals with officials from both parties.
Mr. Hess remembers his time working with state Senators fondly. “We had an amazing set of partnerships in the general assembly,” he said.
In 1995, he accepted a post as executive deputy secretary of Pennsylvania’s renamed DEP. Some of the accomplishments he’s most proud of there include literally flipping the switch on Pennsylvania’s first commercial wind farm, expediting the cleanup of brownfields and improving the state’s watershed quality.
Mr. Hess became DEP secretary, the agency’s highest post, in 2001. It was a year that would test him professionally beyond anything he could have ever imagined.
Managing two disasters
At 10:03 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a Somerset County field and spewed jet fuel across the field, igniting the wreckage and the land.
Mr. Hess helped coordinate the cleanup of the hazardous jet fuel by emergency response staff as they assessed and managed the portion of the wreckage near a reclaimed strip mine. The process, which took several days, was “very emotional,” he recalled.
“A lot of people could not stay there for an extended period of time, simply because of the nature of what happened — which was unbelievable,” Mr. Hess said. “One day coming back, somebody found a Bible and it was from one of the passengers with a note inside to their loved ones. And I mean, you know, just very emotional.
“There’s very little training you can give for instances like that,” he continued.
Less than a year later, on July 24, 2002 and in the very same county, the group of nine miners at Quecreek became trapped underground, only a few miles from the 9/11 crash site. It fell to Mr. Hess to help coordinate the response.
The men needed to be saved three times. First, rescuers had to deliver a continuous supply of oxygen to keep the group from choking. Then, they needed to vacuum out the water threatening to drown the miners. Finally, if they survived those two steps, the men could be pulled out of the earth.
Rescuers approximated the location underground where the men might have sought refuge from the rising water. The rescue team then turned to satellites to determine the corresponding position above ground where they should drill a six-inch wide hole so the men could breathe. All this happened in a matter of hours. “We had to hustle up and beat the rising water,” and the depleting oxygen concentration in the hole, said then-Gov. Schweiker, who served from October 2001 to January 2003.
Their calculations were so precise that after the rescue, Mr. Schweiker said a miner told officials that the drill they used for the air hole nearly knocked his helmet off.
“You got to give credit to David Hess for bringing to bear these experienced deep mine safety professionals that helped set the stage for a successful rescue of nine Pennsylvanians,” said Mr. Schweiker, now a senior advisor to a biomaterials company.
Mr. Hess remembered the next stages of the rescue — draining the water and pulling the men out — as a feat of interagency and interstate cooperation.
“We didn’t have drills big enough to drill the rescue shaft. We put out a call, got two rigs, no questions asked, from West Virginia,” he said. “We put out a call for big, huge probes to pump out water — they came from New Jersey, which closed down part of the turnpike. State police escorted them all the way over. It was just an amazingsight.”
Four days after they were trapped, all nine men were pulled out, one by one, in a 22-inch wide cage through a 24-inch hole in the earth.
A vital blog
Today, Mr. Hess fears the common ground he relied on throughout his career to make progress on environmental issues has all but receded from view, thanks to a rising tide of political polarization.
“Everybody works within the context of the politics they’re given,” Mr. Hess said, acknowledging that the political climate changes from generation to generation. Still, he feels today’s political atmosphere stymies progress, particularly as it relatesto oil and gas activities.
“People just do not respect the fact that other people may have, in fact, legitimate concerns about what’s going on,” he said.
Mr. Hess was referring to a statement state Sen. Gene Yaw, a Republican who serves as the chairman of the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee and represents Bradford, Lycoming, Sullivan, Tioga and Union counties, released in April, dismissing a bill that would have required oil and gas infrastructure to be sited 2,500 to 5,000 feet from homes, hospitals and schools.
Mr. Yaw called the proposed bill “horrible legislation,” and argued that it would amount to banning fracking in the state. “It is often said that we cannot legislate against stupidity,” Mr. Yaw said. “That is true but we can stop stupid legislation from becoming law.”
His use of the word “stupid” and refusal to even entertain the notion that another lawmaker may have a legitimate reason for increasing the setback distance for oil and gas wells (in 2020, a grand jury investigation recommended increasing setbacks to 2,500 to 5,000 feet, up from 200 to 500) alarmed and frustrated Mr. Hess.
“In my day, even if you disagreed with someone, you would never call a colleague’s proposal stupid, particularly on environmental issues,” he said.
Mr. Yaw’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Hess recalled the difficulties of regulating fracking — like “building an airplane while it was flying. That’s just how fast the industry came in and started drilling.”
He started his blog in 2008, and today, he said, he uses it to bring attention to the machinations of the oil and gas industry. Since retiring, he spends almost no time in the field. Instead, he takes a seat at his desk in his home office in Harrisburg to work on the blog. He’ll spend hours poring over proposed legislation and agency meeting minutes, and fielding reports from fellow citizens.
“My wife thinks I’m crazy for putting this much into it,” he said.
His coverage of the industry has resonated with Pennsylvanians (he said his blog received about 153,000 visitors last month) and become an invaluable resource to lawmakers and activists.
“I read him every day to know what’s happening in Pennsylvania,” said state Sen. Katie Muth, a Democrat. Ms. Muth has introduced legislation that would tighten regulations on oil and gas activity in the state and says she relies on Hess’ work to better understand how the industry operates. “Without him, there’d be no public awareness on the poisoning of Pennsylvanians,” she said.
Pennsylvania is the nation’s second largest natural gas producing state, behind only Texas, and like Texas, the state is facing significant problems disposing of billions of gallons of “produced water” that is mixed with sand and proprietary extraction fluids and blasted miles beneath to extract gas from tiny pores in the shale. The brackish wastewater, which comes up with the gas and is five or more times saltier than seawater, is laced not only with the toxic drilling chemicals but natural substances from deep underground — benzene, arsenic and radium 226 and 228, both radioactiveisotopes, among others.
“I rely on the blog and several of our partners do as well,” said Gillian Graber, founder and director of Protect PT, an environmental group that raises awareness about fracking in Pennsylvania’s western communities. “If it’s on the blog, I can trust it.”
“He’s done such a huge service,” said Karen Feridun, co-founder of the environmental organization Better Path Coalition. “If we had a regulator like him at the DEP today, we would be in much better shape. Not only is he knowledgeable, but he seems to understand the human side in a way that the regulators really don’t.”
The elephant in the forest
Mr. Hess’ blog is centered on Pennsylvania, but he pays attention to the wider fight against climate change — always with an eye for how global developments might play out at home. He was interested to see language calling for a transition away from fossil fuels included in the final text at COP28 in Dubai, calling such commitments “important.”
But in the absence of a concrete timeline and plan for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the world’s energy systems will still involve the oil and gas industry. And as long as that is the case in Pennsylvania, he said, “I want to make sure they treat everyone fairly and do things right — right by people and right by the environment. But so far they haven’t.”
He likened the industry to “this huge elephant roaming around Pennsylvania’s landscaping, taking out forests, having real impacts on habitats and creating forest fragmentation.”
He said initiatives like the newly announced partnership between Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration, the DEP and CNX, a large fracking company with several wells in the state, could be a positive step. But he cautioned that “there’s a danger in saying that it’s historic” and that it might have been “oversold when it was announced.”
So as long as the elephant remains in the forest, Mr. Hess sees a need for action.
“Our laws and regulations are so weak,” he said. “We can’t just wait for renewable energy in the long term to come down the road. If we do, people are going to get hurt — people are getting hurt right now.”