PA Environment Digest Blog: Part I - 500 Feet Isn’t Enough: Michelle Stonemark Tells What It’s Really Like Living Next To A Shale Gas Well Pad - Nosebleeds, Headaches, Nausea, Air Pollution, Vibrating House, Sleepless Nights, Anxiety

On September 24, Michelle Stonemark told the story of what she and her family experienced living 500 feet away from a shale gas well pad in Cecil Township, Washington County for the last 8 years.

Her personal experiences and those of her neighbors led Cecil Township to adopt a local ordinance requiring a 2,500 foot setback from well pads in November 2024 that is now under multiple legal attacks from shale gas drillers. Read more here.

Stonemark supports a rulemaking petition now before the state Environmental Quality Board to set the minimum setbacks at 3,281 feet from buildings, 5,280 feet from schools, daycare centers, hospitals and 750 feet from surface water in all communities. Read more here.

Stonemark told her story as part of a Protective Buffers PA Coalition September 24 webinar asking the public to urge the Environmental Quality Board to take action on the rulemaking petition

Lisa Hallowell, Senior Attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, also gave a presentation summarizing the petition and its supporting documentation during the webinar. Read more here.

Click Here for the webinar presentation slides.

Click Here to watch the September 24 webinar on demand.

The story you are about to read is true…

I live in Cecil Township, which is in Washington County, Pennsylvania, and like Lois [Bower-Bjornson] said, it is the most densely packed oil and gas county in the state.

And you can see in the first picture here, my home is in the bottom-right corner. I am 523 feet from the well pad. [Click Here for photo #5]

That pad was approved in our township in 2017. I fought it when I found out that it was going in.

My family and I, we all live on a big extended piece of property, a compound, we like to call it, just jokingly, but it's just one large piece of property, and my family and I all went in together and tried to stop the well pad from happening.

Our issue was that the [original oil and gas] ordinance in Cecil Township was designed way back in 2009.

The supervisors at the time worked with Range Resources and other industry members, and they based the ordinance solely off of industry opinions and state minimum setbacks.

That is how we ended up with the 500-foot setback in Cecil Township.

When the Augustine [shale gas well] pad was introduced and my family and I went in to fight it, we lost.

We appealed that decision to the [Courty] Court of Common Pleas, and we lost there as well.

I knew then that there wasn't a whole lot more I could do from a legal standpoint because what was in place in Cecil Township was what was making-- it allowed them to do this so close to my home.

You can see in the second picture in the middle here that right behind me, sort of on the other side of the pad, is a neighborhood of approximately 250 homes, and the closest home from that is 830 feet away. [Click Here for photo #5]

Nosebleeds, Headaches, Nausea, Air Pollution

These residents down in that neighborhood, along with myself, started to experience different side effects or consequences of them drilling, beginning when they began production in 2020.

At that time, we were mostly stuck in the house because of the COVID pandemic, so we were under lockdown.

At that time, Range Resources decided to use what they called their Green Fleet, and they were doing an air monitoring study while utilizing their Green Fleet [electric fracking fleet].

During the horizontal and vertical drilling, we had so much noise, so much air pollution, sometimes we couldn't go outside because of how bad it smelled.

Now, being stuck in our homes with nowhere to go during the pandemic, you can imagine this was super frustrating for us, so to be stuck inside, not even be able to go outside because of how bad the smells were outside.

Some other things that happened to us during that time were nosebleeds, headaches, and a lot of nausea.

We didn't experience too many side effects, which I like to talk about.

I'll talk a little bit about my home just because we started to experience a little bit of vibrations in our home as well, but I'll get more to that when I talk a little bit later here.

So after the initial drilling of four wells, they left, and I'd like to say it was peaceful, but it wasn't, because even though they weren't here anymore, we still had constant truck traffic.

We still had constant noises. We still had loud bangs in the middle of the night that would wake us up.

We had so many sleepless nights through that first round of drilling.

Pictures On The Wall Would Shake

In 2023, they decided to come back and drill four more wells, and this time, they did not bring their Green Fleet. They brought what I assumed to be their normal fleet.

At the time, during horizontal and vertical drilling, our house actually vibrated so bad that the pictures on our walls would shake, that water in a glass on the table, you could see the movement in the water glass on the table.

There were sections of our home that we couldn't even go into because we could feel it in our chest and on our heads.

We would literally feel the pounding in our heads.

Now, what happened with us when we complained about it, Range Resources would bring out some noise monitors, and they'd say, "Well, we're in compliance with your ordinance."

Low-Frequency Noise

And they were, because our ordinance, like I said, was developed back in 2009 and was developed with help from the industry, and they only allowed for the measurement of dBAs [decibel levels], which are regular noises like you're hearing my voice right now. It's a dBA.

The noises that we were hearing were low-frequency noises, and I always tell people that they're called dBCs.

I always tell people to explain it. Imagine you're in your car, and the car next to you pulls up right next to you, and its bass is really thumping in its car.

You can feel it in your car. You can feel it in your car, you can feel it in your body. Your change is rattling in your cup holder.

Those are dBCs.

And the way that Range was getting around the ordinance was that they weren't making a lot of dBA noise, which was the noise that you're hearing now.

They were making a lot of the dBC noises, and those were the ones that were low, that the monitors couldn't pick up, and that were shaking and vibrating our home.

So during that time, all of our symptoms worsened.

The kids all had nosebleeds.

My one daughter had, I'm hesitant to discuss the majority of it because she is 18 now and I don't want to speak on her behalf, but she had a lot of anxiety and a lot of mental problems accustomed to this, and she attributed most of it to the vibrations in the house.

It would make her feel like she was coming out of her skin, and she felt like she wasn't herself and that bugs were crawling on her.

She just had a lot of different issues that she had to deal with that were in a mental capacity.

But alongside, again, we were having sleepless nights, we were having nosebleeds, we were having headaches, we were having nausea.

None of us got a decent night's sleep for months while they came back and drilled the second five wells.

Advocating For A New Ordinance

It was at that time that I also had several Range employees come out to my house.

I had several of the Cecil Township Supervisors come out to my house so that they could experience it for themselves, and I really started advocating for an updated ordinance.

And I explained to them-- "This is happening because you had no other choice. You had this ordinance in place, all these rules were in place, and now I'm suffering the consequences of those rules and things that you had in place."

So I really started advocating a lot for a change of the Cecil Township ordinance.

Finally, with the supervisors coming out to my home and experiencing it themselves, they kind of got onboard, so they decided to hold meetings for a new, updated ordinance.

We had several hearings over the course of several months. At this point, there were maps that were drawn by the township that they proposed where a new well pad could be.

Growing Support For Change

And anytime a new well pad, a location where it could go was proposed, hundreds of residents would come out and say, "No, no, no. We don't want it here either. We don't want it here either."

And something that I didn't experience back in 2017 when the well pad was proposed was any type of support from any resident.

Other than my family in this township, I had no support.

And suddenly, here I am trying to update the ordinance all these years later, and hundreds of residents are coming out in support of updating this ordinance.

Shale Gas Driller Refused To Work With Township

So the supervisors, they kept making revisions to it, and finally they decided, they met with Range Resources, and they said, "Hey, look, where do you guys want to go? Work with us here. We know you want to drill in the area. Let's try to work together."

And Range refused to work with them in changing the ordinance at all.

So that left them with no choice, which was to really go by what the residents were calling for, which was a 2,500-foot setback.

Finally, after months and months, they did end up passing that 2500-foot setback.

They included new things in the ordinance, including language that discusses dBCs rather than just the dBAs, so we enacted a much stricter ordinance.

In November of 2024, it was passed. Read more here.

So No One Else Has To Go Through What We Did

So that is something that taught me that something that's just important, we are suffering here.

And to be quite frank, it's not going to help me at all, because they can still drill more wells up here on the pad, and I can't do anything about it because they're grandfathered in.

So this was really just so nobody else had to go through kind of what our family went through because it's hard, and it's not fair, and the air is bad.

Measuring Air The Wrong Way

And an interesting item that I do want to add is that I mentioned briefly that when they first came to drill in 2020, they were going to do an air study up here.

Range was going to do their own air study. And again, that's when they were using their Green Fleet, and when they came back the second time, they did not do an air study.

But during the hearings for the new ordinance [in the Townshiip], they had an expert discussing that air study saying, "The air is fine, here's the study we did, it was a long-term air study."

But it was found that the methodology that they were using in their air study was not commonly accepted standards in the air monitoring industry.

So under oath, the gentleman testified that, "Yeah, we didn't use what is the commonly accepted," meaning, to make it real short and sweet, the canisters of air should be checked every 24-hours, and they were waiting six days, so they were basically capturing something and letting it stay for days where most of it would escape.

So it's supposed to be checked every 24 hours, so they weren't following standard protocol, and then they were passing off this air study as if it was the greatest thing ever and trying to get other townships to believe it.

Determination

To make a long story short, I found that because of my determination, and I wouldn't give up with pushing for further setbacks in this Township, and I really feel like this is just the first step.

We can do it as a Township, but it's sort of like the last, what's the word I'm looking for? -- The last line of defense.

We should have these at a state level.

So the reason our ordinance was so poor to begin with was because they used state standards.

So now, we updated our ordinance, and we need to get the state to kind of follow us and follow our lead and update the states at the state level at this point.

And that's about it. That's my story.

Click Here for Michelle Stonemark’s presentation slides (starting on #5).

Click Here to watch the September 24 webinar on demand.

Take Action Now

The next scheduled meeting of the Environmental Quality Board is October 14.

Click Here to urge the Environmental Quality Board to act.

Visit the Protective Buffers PA Coalition website for more information.

NewsClips:

-- Freeport Township Declares Disaster Emergency After Residents Impacted By A Gas Related Water Contamination Event Have Been Without Permanent Water Supplies For 3 Years-- We’re Not Blaming Anybody, We Just Want Good, Clean Drinking Water [August 2025]

-- Springhill Township Becomes 2nd Township To Declare Disaster Emergency After Residents Were Impacted By A Gas Related Water Contamination Event In Greene County [August 2025]

-- Observer-Reporter: Study Shows Probable Link Between Freeport Twp. Water Well Contamination And Fracking In Greene County [PDF of Article]

-- Independent Research Study By Pitt, Duquesne Ties Water Well Contamination To Shale Gas Drilling In 2 Greene County Townships That Declared Water Disaster Emergencies [9.17.25]