Friday, April 23, was a victorious day for residents in the Mon Valley. The proposed frack well at the Edgar Thomson plant was canceled. It is a day that deserves remembrance and acknowledgement that community persistence, collective action and responsive elected representatives can prioritize and uphold Article 1 Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution: “The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.”
North Braddock Residents For Our Future, a grassroots, volunteer community organization, along with residents throughout the Mon Valley, Pittsburgh and the region with the support of elected representatives and environmental organizations worked to prioritize the health of the region over corporate wealth. This resistance happened one street at a time. Neighbors and residents coming together can imagine and implement a future that is free of increased harm to an area that already has been expected to make an undue amount of sacrifice.
Fracking at Edgar Thomson would have compounded the environmental injustices borne by local residents; it offered no benefit to the local economy; and it would have “locked in” more regional air pollution and greenhouse gases for decades to come. Yet the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Allegheny County Health Department wouldn’t prevent it. These watchdog agencies take a paint-by-numbers approach to new polluters: As long as the requisite pages are submitted, with the requisite answers to the requisite questions, the granting of a permit is a foregone conclusion. Fortunately, the small borough of East Pittsburgh stood its ground.
After years of organizing and investigating, it seemed as though the well’s existence hinged on East Pittsburgh’s zoning ordinances. The driller’s conditional-use permit expired without commencement of use. And so, when the borough’s action wasn’t to the driller’s liking, the driller called its lawyers rather than comply with the borough’s decision. Law firms who work for drillers are “supposed” to steamroll municipal officials – especially in municipalities as small and low-budget as East Pittsburgh. But, in this instance, the municipality and the community held their ground against the driller’s legal war of attrition. The zoning case wound on, and oral arguments were pending in Common Pleas Court when U.S. Steel pulled the plug on the project.
This victory against fracking at Edgar Thomson, like all victories, hinged on its own peculiar set of circumstances; speculation on “what-if” would be useless. Looking forward though, the people of our region still face a host of environmental and economic threats from the blitzkrieg of the gas industry invasion. Each of those many projects — just as at Edgar Thomson — has its own peculiar circumstances.
Community involvement seeps in around the edges and through the cracks of the regulatory routines despite the regulatory processes that are designed and operated to smother any public debate. The pro forma “comment” stage is a charade, generating a box of unread paper, another box to be checked on the predictable path to approval. The community doesn’t have a roadmap to victory, so it tries everything. Now, there is a landmark that didn’t exist one week ago. An unwanted, dangerous, health-harming project was stopped.
We won this battle in spite of being told over and over again that we could never win against such powerful forces. We won because at a grassroots level, residents were willing to set aside their own plans and fight for the health of their communities. Never give up!
Edith Abeyta and John Detwiler are members of North Braddock Residents For Our Future.
First Published: May 16, 2021, 9:45 a.m.