This article by Aaron Skirboll about Grant Township’s resistance to Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE) injecting fracking wastewater into abandoned wells in the township was published in Sierra Club magazine on December 17th, 2019.

JUNE 3, 2014. Looking back, many residents of Grant Township, Pennsylvania, believe that was the day their fight against the state’s powerful fracking industry began—the point at which they started to assert their sovereignty over the lands and waters of their woodland community. That was when the battle lines were drawn in a contest that would come to dominate town affairs for years to come.

It was the first Tuesday of the month, the day of the routinely scheduled township meeting. Normally, the meetings are scarcely attended, quiet and uncontroversial, focused mostly on agenda items like replacing stop signs and repairing potholes. But on that hot spring night, the room was packed; every seat was filled, so people lined the back wall and poured out the entrance into the small parking lot. The three elected township supervisors and a secretary sat facing the crowd. Near the front sat three out-of-town attorneys, their formal attire contrasting sharply with the denim wear of the town officials and residents. “I can still remember their navy blue suits and their polished brown shoes,” says Judy Wanchisn, who has lived in the area nearly all of her 76 years.

The suits were there representing Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE), an independent oil and gas firm with wells throughout the greater Appalachian Basin. Earlier that spring—after what some local residents considered a pro forma process—the EPA had given the company permission to convert an existing gas well into a Class II-D wastewater injection well. Once completed, the well would insert as much as 30,000 barrels’ worth of fracking wastewater 7,500 feet into the earth every month indefinitely. Thirteen hours a day, seven days a week, large trucks would descend on the rural town to deposit fracking wastewater from across the state.

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