This story is published in partnership with Rolling Stone.
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 said. “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.
