David Hess, Longtime Pennsylvania Environmental Official Turned Blogger, Reflects on His Career and the Rise of Fracking

In July 2002, 18 miners working on the Quecreek mine in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, entered a chamber 240 ft beneath floor and by accident broke via the wall of an deserted, flooded mine, unleashing thousands and thousands of gallons of trapped water. 

Within the ensuing chaos, half the group was capable of escape above floor; the opposite 9 grew to become trapped and fled to an area reportedly solely 4 ft tall to hunt refuge from the water.

Mark Schweiker, Pennsylvania’s governor on the time, remembers the second effectively and says the end result over 4 tense days was a tribute to a profession civil servant who had risen to run the state’s Division of Environmental Safety: David Hess. 

“The intuition of Secretary Hess to rapidly assemble the wanted tools and encourage the deep mine rescue unit to basically say, ‘Don’t fear about procurement coverage and price, purchase what you have to have an effect on this rescue—waste not one minute,’ was extremely necessary,” Schweiker recalled in a latest interview.

Hess’ profession coincided with quite a few coverage achievements and emergency responses. Lower than a 12 months earlier than the Quecreek mine catastrophe he remembers an aide discovering a Bible strewn within the wreckage of United Flight 93 that crashed on 9/11 in Stony Creek Township.

However now, 20-odd years after Hess retired, lawmakers and environmentalists say his lasting legacy as an environmental champion in Pennsylvania revolves round his weblog, the prosaically named PA Environmental Digest. The weblog sports activities a mid-2000s net aesthetic that belies uncompromising protection of Pennsylvania’s surroundings and its power coverage. 

Hess is prolific, overlaying the great, the unhealthy and the ugly, as one longtime resident of Pennsylvania put it, with a scope, nuance, and workman-like dedication to draping historic context over at the moment’s information that may make some journalists blush.

As soon as probably the most highly effective environmental regulator in Pennsylvania, Hess spends quite a lot of his time as of late birddogging a harmful drive he by no means noticed coming throughout all his years in Harrisburg: hydraulic fracturing, higher generally known as fracking.

“We had no clue that this practice was coming throughout our time,” Hess stated, his spherical face folding right into a frown, and his mild however agency voice turning into somber. 

Pennsylvanians are usually not the one ones who profit from Hess’ reporting—legislators and activists say his weblog is unmatched, calling it an important useful resource for anybody involved in regards to the state of Pennsylvania’s surroundings.

Hess follows the worldwide combat in opposition to local weather change and believes the fracking trade—which produces billions of gallons of poisonous, radioactive “wastewater” and leaks risky natural compounds and the super-polluting greenhouse fuel methane into Pennsylvania’s air—is the defining environmental concern for this technology of Pennsylvanians.

“It impacts your complete panorama of Pennsylvania,” he stated. “Some vital individuals aren’t listening to what’s being realized.”

Doing the Soiled Work

Discovering a profession can start with merely supporting Mom Nature. Within the spring of 1970, David Hess, then in highschool, joined thousands and thousands of different People celebrating the nation’s inaugural Earth Day, created to assist draw consciousness to deteriorating environmental situations throughout the U.S. on account of unchecked industrial air pollution. 

The occasion was celebrated with such fervor that it helped push Congress to create the Environmental Safety Company and cross a number of different landmark items of environmental laws later that 12 months.

Hess, then 18, rode his budding ardour for shielding the surroundings to a protracted, embellished profession in Pennsylvania’s environmental regulatory companies. From 1977 to 2003, when he retired, Hess was concerned in nearly each piece of main environmental coverage enacted in Pennsylvania. 

When Hess first started working as a fledgling environmental regulator, taking internships at Pennsylvania’s Division of Environmental Sources (a predecessor to the state’s DEP) throughout his summers between semesters at Shippensburg College, he gained useful expertise doing “quite a lot of the work no person else needed to do.” 

After receiving a Grasp of City and Regional Planning diploma from the College of Illinois, he labored for 12 years within the Division of Environmental Sources’ coverage and laws places of work after which was appointed govt director of the state Senate’s Environmental Sources and Power Committee in 1989, on the Republican aspect, the place he developed an affinity for pursuing bipartisan environmental coverage objectives with officers from each events.  

Hess remembers his time working with state Senators fondly. “We had an incredible set of partnerships within the normal meeting,” he stated. “In every single place you flip there was nice environmental or power conservation stuff happening.”

In 1995, Hess accepted a put up as govt deputy secretary of Pennsylvania’s renamed DEP. Among the accomplishments he’s most happy with there embrace actually flipping the change on Pennsylvania’s first industrial wind farm, expediting the cleanup of brownfields, plots of land inundated with hazardous substances and set for reuse, and bettering the state’s watershed high quality. Befitting his reserved demeanor, Hess credit these successes to the “wonderful workforce” he labored with, and the “frequent floor” the overall meeting usually discovered on problems with environmental coverage. 

Hess grew to become DEP secretary, the company’s highest put up, in 2001. It was a 12 months that may check him professionally past something he might have ever imagined. 

Managing Two Disasters

At 10:03 a.m on on September 11, 2001, a aircraft hijacked by terrorists crash landed into an open discipline in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, later believed to be headed for Washington D.C., after a heroic revolt from its passengers and crew. The crash spewed jet gas throughout the sector, igniting the wreckage and the land.

Hess arrived on the crash web site the next day and helped coordinate the cleanup of hazardous jetfuel by emergency response workers as they assessed and managed the portion of the wreckage close to a reclaimed strip mine. The entire course of, which took a number of days, he remembered, was “very emotional.” 

“Lots of people couldn’t keep there for an prolonged time period, merely due to the character of what occurred—which was unbelievable,” Hess stated. “Someday coming again, any individual discovered a Bible and it was from one of many passengers with a observe inside to their family members. And I imply, you realize, simply very emotional.” Hess paused, the corners of his mouth sliding right into a small frown, and his voice reaching a brand new, decrease register. 

“There’s little or no coaching you can provide for cases like that,” he continued. “I’m simply so very happy with the job DEP of us did.”

Lower than a 12 months later, on a heat summer season’s night in July, the exact same county would play host to a different emergency that gripped the globe.

On July 24, 2002, the group of 9 miners at Quecreek grew to become trapped underground, only some miles from the 9/11 crash web site, and it fell to Hess to assist coordinate the response. 

“We had a really energetic mine security program for many years. They usually educated so much for conditions like this. However conditions like that often don’t prove efficiently as a result of it’s simply the character of mine actions,” Hess stated. 

The boys wanted to be saved 3 times. First, rescuers needed to ship a steady provide of oxygen to maintain the group from choking. Then, they wanted to hoover out the water threatening to drown the miners. Lastly, in the event that they survived these two steps, the boys could possibly be pulled out of the earth.

Utilizing every day updates the mining crew had posted within the days previous their entrapment, rescuers approximated the situation underground the place the boys may need sought refuge from the rising water. With that location in hand, the rescue workforce turned to satellites to find out the corresponding place above floor the place they need to drill the six-inch extensive gap so the boys might breathe. All this occurred in a matter of hours. “We needed to hustle up and beat the rising water,” and the depleting oxygen focus within the gap, stated then-Gov. Schweiker, who served from October 2001 to January 2003.

Their calculations had been so exact that after the rescue, Schweiker stated a miner instructed officers that the drill they used for the air gap practically knocked his helmet off.

“You bought to provide credit score to David Hess for bringing to bear these skilled deep mine security professionals that helped set the stage for a profitable rescue of 9 Pennsylvanians,” stated Schweiker, now a senior advisor to a biomaterials firm. 

Hess, who described the entire rescue as a “workforce effort,” remembered the subsequent phases of the rescue—draining the water and pulling the boys out—as a feat of interagency and interstate cooperation. “We didn’t have drills sufficiently big to drill the rescue shaft. We put out a name, received two rigs, no questions requested, from West Virginia,” he stated. “We put out a name for giant, large probes to pump out water—they got here from New Jersey, which closed down a part of the turnpike. State police escorted all of them the way in which over. It was simply an incredible sight.”

4 days after they had been trapped, all 9 males had been pulled out, one after the other, in a 22-inch extensive cage via a 24-inch gap within the earth.

A Very important Weblog

Right now, Hess fears the frequent floor he relied on all through his profession to make progress on environmental points has all however receded from view, due to a rising tide of political polarization. When he surveys Pennsylvania’s modern political panorama, Hess is discouraged by the deference to trade he says has consumed a lot of Pennsylvania’s legislative meeting.

“All people works inside the context of the politics they’re given,” Hess stated, acknowledging that the political local weather modifications from technology to technology. Nonetheless, he feels at the moment’s political ambiance stymies progress, notably because it pertains to oil and fuel actions. 

“Folks simply don’t respect the truth that different individuals could have, in reality, reputable issues about what’s happening,” he stated. 

Hess was referring to a press release state Sen. Gene Yaw, a Republican who serves because the chairman of the Senate Environmental Sources and Power Committee and represents Bradford, Lycoming, Sullivan, Tioga and Union counties, launched this April, dismissing a invoice that may have required oil and fuel infrastructure to be sited 2,500 to five,000 ft from properties, hospitals and faculties. 

Yaw referred to as the proposed invoice “horrible laws,” and argued that it might quantity to banning fracking within the state. “It’s usually stated that we can’t legislate in opposition to stupidity,” Yaw stated. “That’s true however we will cease silly laws from turning into regulation. Ought to Home Invoice 170 or any comparable laws cross the Home of Representatives, it is not going to be thought-about within the Senate.” 

Yaw’s use of the phrase “silly” and refusal to even entertain the notion that one other lawmaker could have a reputable purpose for growing the setback distance for oil and fuel wells (in 2020, a grand jury investigation really useful growing setbacks to 2,500 to five,000 ft, up from 200 to 500) alarmed and annoyed Hess. 

“In my day, even in case you disagreed with somebody, you’d by no means name a colleague’s proposal silly, notably on environmental points,” he stated. 

Yaw’s workplace didn’t reply to a request for remark.

In terms of bettering environmental coverage, at the moment’s meeting “will not be fertile floor to get stuff completed,” Hess stated. “Although, after all, we’ve to maintain making an attempt.”

Hess stated it was tough, simply as his tenure was ending at DEP, to control fracking for plentiful pure fuel within the huge Marcellus Shale. He likened the problem to “constructing an airplane whereas it was flying. That’s simply how briskly the trade got here in and began drilling.”

He began his weblog in 2008, and at the moment, he stated, he makes use of it to deliver consideration to the machinations of the oil and fuel trade. 

Since retiring, Hess spends nearly no time within the discipline. As an alternative, he takes a seat at his desk in his residence workplace in Harrisburg most days to work on PA Environmental Digest. “I’ve at all times had an curiosity in sharing info,” Hess stated. 

He’ll spend hours pouring over proposed laws and company assembly minutes, and fielding experiences from fellow residents. “My spouse thinks I’m loopy for placing this a lot into it,” he stated, with a smile.

Hess’ protection of the trade has resonated with Pennsylvanians (he stated his weblog acquired about 153,000 guests final month) and change into a useful useful resource to state lawmakers and activists, too. A number of even imagine PA Environmental Digest will probably be his legacy within the state.

“I learn him day-after-day to know what’s occurring in Pennsylvania,” stated state Sen, Katie Muth, a Democrat. Muth has launched laws that may tighten laws on oil and fuel exercise within the state and says she depends on Hess’ work to raised perceive how the trade operates. “With out him, there’d be no public consciousness on the poisoning of Pennsylvanians,” she stated.

Pennsylvania is the nation’s second largest pure fuel producing state, behind solely Texas, and like Texas, the state is going through important issues disposing of billions of gallons of “produced water” that’s blended with sand and proprietary extraction fluids and blasted miles beneath to extract fuel from tiny pores within the shale. The brackish wastewater, which comes up with the fuel and is 5 or extra occasions saltier than seawater, is laced not solely with the poisonous drilling chemical compounds however pure substances from deep underground—benzene, arsenic and radium 226 and 228, each radioactive isotopes, amongst others.

“I depend on the weblog and several other of our companions do as effectively,” stated Gillian Graber, founder and director of Shield PT, an environmental group that raises consciousness about fracking in Pennsylania’s western communities. “If it’s on the weblog, I can belief it,” she stated.

“He’s completed such an enormous service,” stated Karen Feridun, co-founder of the environmental group Higher Path Coalition. Given her place as an activist and Hess’ historical past as an environmental regulator, Feridun suspects that she and he don’t see eye-to-eye on each environmental concern. Nonetheless, she referred to as his weblog “massively influential” and added “that’ll in all probability find yourself being his legacy.”

“If we had a regulator like him on the DEP at the moment, we might be in significantly better form,” Feridun stated. “Not solely is he educated, however he appears to grasp the human aspect in a method that the regulators actually don’t.”

Hess’ affinity for locating human angles into environmental tales was on show on the DEP, too. “When it got here to neighborhood engagement, his open-mindedness and suppleness and capability for locating consensus was excellent,” Schweiker stated. “He cares in regards to the Pennsylvania citizen.”

And, often, he’s turned the pages of his weblog over to them.

In 2018, Siri Lawson, who follows Hess’ weblog carefully, contacted him to share her expertise residing subsequent to grease and fuel infrastructure for 40 years. Lawson sees a number of docs to deal with her sinuses and lungs, which she says have been broken by many years of publicity to risky natural compounds from oil and fuel waste merchandise close to the place she has lived in Pennsylvania and New York. 

Lawson instructed Hess that, regardless of a moratorium on the apply, oil and fuel firms in Pennsylvania had been spreading poisonous produced water on roadways as a type of waste administration, together with on roads close to the place she and her husband dwell in Warren County.

“He listened,” Lawson stated of her dialog with Hess, a easy step that was uncommon, in her expertise, for somebody steeped in environmental politics to take. When Hess agreed to publish Lawson’s visitor essay on highway spreading, she remembered considering, “Lastly, we’re going to get a voice.”

The Elephant within the Forest 

Hess’ weblog is centered on Pennsylvania, however he pays consideration to the broader combat in opposition to local weather change, too—at all times with an eye fixed for the way international developments would possibly play out at residence. He was to see language calling for a transition away from fossil fuels included within the ultimate textual content at COP28 in Dubai, calling such commitments “necessary.”

However within the absence of a concrete timeline and plan for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the world’s power methods will nonetheless contain the oil and fuel trade. And so long as that’s the case in Pennsylvania, he stated, “I need to be certain they deal with everybody pretty and do issues proper—proper by individuals and proper by the surroundings. However to date they haven’t.”

“When you learn the weekly oil and fuel inspection experiences that the DEP posts, like I do,” Hess stated, “you get an actual image of what’s happening on the market, from spills of twenty-two,000 gallons of manufacturing wastewater with fracking chemical compounds in it, to explosions, fires, erosion, truck accidents and rollovers.” Nearly a 12 months in the past, a pure fuel gathering pipeline in Allegheny crashed via a household’s concrete basement wall whereas they had been away from residence. On account of numerous regulatory loopholes and gaps in fracking laws, “no company did a factor about it,” Hess stated.

By now, Hess stated, he’s exasperated. Listening to these tales “actually impacts me,” he stated. “These items have to be overtly mentioned so we will do one thing about it. Not simply ignore it.” 

And Hess feels the trade has completed a superb job remaining ignored. “When you have a look at the size of what’s occurring—from large effectively pads to pipeline proper of method spider-webbing out all around the panorama, compressor stations, pure fuel processing amenities—you have a look at all that infrastructure that’s being constructed on the market and plenty of occasions it appears invisible to individuals as a result of they solely see a tiny piece of it,” he stated. 

In truth, all of those apparently separate items of infrastructure are a part of the identical trade, “this large elephant roaming round Pennsylvania’s landscaping, taking out forests, having actual impacts on habitats and creating forest fragmentation,” Hess stated. 

This infrastructure “must be a lot additional away from individuals’s homes, faculties and different establishments,” he added. “Having an industrial facility inside 500 ft of your own home defies frequent sense,” he stated. “I’d be keen to guess there’s not one trade govt that lives inside 500 ft of their drill rigs.”

For Hess, it’s not sufficient to attend for a worldwide dedication to phasing out fossil fuels to come back to fruition. He stated initiatives just like the newly introduced partnership between Gov. Josh Shprio’s administration, the DEP and CNX, a big fracking firm with a number of wells within the state, could possibly be a constructive step in the direction of higher regulating the trade. 

However he cautioned that “there’s a hazard in saying that it’s historic and that it’s one thing that’s going to alter the path of what’s happening. I believe it’s a really restricted program to watch, in a really restricted method, a really restricted set of drill websites for less than sure sorts of parameters,” he stated, including that “there’s a hazard that it was oversold when it was introduced.” 

Regardless of the end result of Shapiro’s partnership with CNX or the standing of the worldwide dedication to transitioning away from fossil fuels, so long as the elephant stays within the forest wreaking havoc Hess stated he sees a necessity for motion. 

Pennsylvania’s environmental regulators, he stated, needs to be studying from the litany of errors and disasters to strengthen the laws across the trade. “Our legal guidelines and laws are so weak,” he stated. “We are able to’t simply watch for renewable power in the long run to come back down the highway. If we do, individuals are going to get harm—individuals are getting harm proper now.”