Bikes in Frackland

An earlier version of this piece appears in Allegheny Sport and Outdoor Magazine, Issue 2.

If you rewound the clock 15 years, things would look a lot different. The Black Eyed Peas and Kesha were on the radio (the radio!). Obama was in his first term. Road racing had still had the hearts of the cycling community, which I had not yet discovered.

Hot Tub Time Machine had just come out in theaters, but so did another film— Gasland. I actually hadn’t seen it until shortly before writing this, but back then I still felt the splash it made. In the time surrounding its release, yard signs started popping up in my native Pittsburgh. The Post Gazette ran front pages depicting sludgy, opaque tap water in Beaver County. Channel 11 news clips showed my fellow Western Pennsylvanians setting water on fire. Combined, it was enough to drive the film’s core message home to my adolescent brain long before I’d ever screened it— this fracking shit is crazy.

Skip ahead, and I’ve lived and ridden all over northern Appalachia. My Strava heatmaps are a web that sprawls from Pittsburgh and ensnares Indiana, Altoona, State College, the Laurel Highlands, Eastern Ohio, and Morgantown, West Virginia, my recent home of a few years. With this history, almost every ride I’ve ever done has taken place against an industrial backdrop.  Between cutting my MTB teeth in Pittsburgh’s slag heaps, collecting photos of Central PA blast iron furnaces like Pokemon cards, and the innumerable miles I’ve clunked over railroad ballast, cycling in this region feels inextricably linked to our rusty, inhospitable landscape. Upon a deeper look— thousands of feet deeper, that is— the vast majority of those lifetime miles have taken place atop the Marcellus shale play.

If you go to Morgantown looking for a road ride, you will undoubtedly be pointed to the north-bound routes just over the state border in Pennsylvania’s Greene County. Plain and simple, the riding is just better in that direction, which is something you’ll notice almost as soon as you cross the inky seam that demarcates the two states. It could have just been my PA patriotism, but it felt like there were fewer aggressive drivers and that the road surface trended better, which I know isn’t really saying much. Still, I always felt an increased sense of safety once I’d crossed the state border, which I think any road cycling enthusiast would welcome.

And it just seemed to be getting better and better. Before I moved from Morgantown, I was finding newly reengineered and resurfaced roads almost every time I made it up to Greene County. On first impulse, one might attribute the stark contrast in road improvement to Pennsylvania and West Virginia’s differences in taxbase. I made that logical leap myself, but then I started to see little signs inconspicuously posted above unassuming mailboxes. 

Almost all of the freshly-redone roads feature red-bordered signs with text that shrinks as you read through it. Sometimes there is just one sign. Other times there are as many as ten. In the surrounding areas, white company pickups crawl around, and suspiciously slow speed limit signs with logos matched to the red-bordered signs and pickup trucks usher cyclists down the perfect blacktop. “Thank you, EQT, whatever you do,” I once thought to myself, envisioning a tip of the helmet. 

EQT is the biggest fracking operator in Greene County, and one of the main players in gas extraction nationwide. It owns or leases over 1,000,000 acres in PA alone, with the majority of that land lying in Greene and Washington Counties. Fracking, fallaciously touted as a cleaner alternative to our medieval reliance on coal, is not really a whole lot safer than it was 15 years ago. And since then, PA’s gas extraction has steadily increased. As first generation frack-boom wells are plugged and abandoned, a new generation is drilled thanks to increasing regional demand stemmed from the completion of Shell’s cracker plant in Monaca and the trend of coal-fired power plants like the towering Homer City Generating Station being converted to burn gas, ostensibly to support to-be-built hyper-scale AI data centers.

I could have easily spent the duration of my rides ruminating over the negative impacts fracking has on public health and the environment— the rare cancer cases that polka-dot fracked areas, the toxic chemicals that travel miles through our air and water, the negligent horrors of the industry’s waste stream— but the larger part of me that lives for the feeling of pavement under handmade tires told me to hush; to continue cashing in on the millions of dollars EQT allocates to road improvement, which according to their website, they do “in order to mitigate [their] impact on local communities.” How could I reconcile?

I’m sure some degree of nimbyism helped to push EQT toward adopting a policy of preemptive road improvement. If a bunch of heavy machinery and toxic waste trucks were coming through my community, I would like to see something out of it. Still, it’s laughable to think roads are improved out of an abundance of concern for public safety on EQT’s part. Just a few weeks ago, Greene County’s Springhill and Freeport Townships declared a disaster emergency nearly three years after an EQT frack disturbed an abandoned gas well, leading to the contamination of the aquifer that supplied water to over 100 community members. Those townships have since been embroiled in a legal fight with EQT while fundraising to tap into a nearby municipal water line.

So no, EQT doesn’t give a shit about their impacts on fracked communities. In reality, it’s just a pain in the ass to navigate the narrow, windy, patchwork roads of Greene County. In order to get their trucks around steep switchbacks, the roads simply had to be reengineered. These improvements are not an add-on by a benevolent fracking operator; they are built into any sketchy drilling plans in the region out of geographical necessity.

It’s pretty hard to argue with the fact that EQT has made the roads themselves safer, though. Besides the improved surfaces, sightlines are worlds better, and wider roads means fewer close passes. The guys in EQT pickups, tied down by their company speed limits, are always courteous. I imagine that they don’t care if they’re stuck behind a cyclist because of a cush hourly wage. Altogether, it feels like I made a tacit transaction when riding in Greene County, trading the obvious risks of road cycling for invisible ones. I voluntarily exposed myself to increased levels of volatile chemicals in the air and radioactive dust leftover from townships illegally using fracking brine as a deicer (and ironically, as a “dust suppressant” on gravel roads). I drank the well water from rural church spigots. I repressed thinking about it all. 

Sure, I’ve never lived 500 feet from a well pad like many in Greene County. I could simply stay in urban areas with protective zoning and never think about fracking ever again if I chose to. At the end of the day, it feels impossible to weigh whether riding in Southwestern PA is any safer or more dangerous than riding anywhere else on Earth. To end it morbidly, I could get cancer from any number of chemicals I used while working in bike shops for ten years. Equally, I could ride in Greene County tomorrow and get struck by an EQT company truck.

I suppose that any time you set out on a bike ride, you roll the mortal dice.