× Expand Carlos Kosienski/Sipa USA via AP Images An oil field tank truck on the road

When Jill Hunkler moved back to her home state of Ohio in 2010, she decided to settle down near Barnesville and live off the land. A single mother, she bought a home in the Ohio River Valley “because it was pristine, it was clean air, clean water. And just the country quiet life.”

Beech trees, tulip poplars, and sugar maple surround the village, as do reservoirs, grassy hills, and meadows. Bass swim through creeks, hikers scale the sandstone rocks, and history lovers visit the train depot, built shortly after James Barnes founded the village in the early 1800s. Barnesville’s motto is “Where History Meets Progress,” a summary of its juxtapositions.

After buying her patch of land, Hunkler lived in an Airstream trailer at first, and then started building a small home out of recycled materials, with the help of family and friends. With her was her daughter, three dogs who served as her “protectors,” and the occasional visit from nieces and nephews eager to get a taste of the country life. They had no internet, and cell service was spotty.

She filled out the land with a “three sisters” garden of beans, squash, and corn, and another section with tomatoes and a strawberry patch that reminded her of her great-grandmother’s garden. She was glad to be home.

And then the oil companies came.

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Beneath the Ohio River Valley’s earth lie rich deposits of fossil fuels like oil and natural gas that energy companies are eager to extract and sell for massive profits. Within just ten or so years of moving onto her homestead, Hunkler said, oil companies had started constructing well pads, which form the base for fracking operations, all around her town. Suddenly, she said, there were 78 well pads within a few miles of her home, a compressor station a mile away, and a pipeline just a few hundred yards from her door.

These pads are slabs of concrete built to mount the drills that force sand, water, and a soup of chemicals down into the shale, forcing it to crack apart and release its gas and oil. The pads, jarring patches of industrial gray gouged out of the landscape, also hold cars, tankers, wastewater reservoirs, and piles of unused equipment.

Hunkler says her initial wariness about the wells popping up in her region quickly developed into full-blown opposition when she learned that they could cause earthquakes and release volatile organic compounds into the air, which are heavier than air and settle into the lowest areas—like her hollow.

She began educating herself on the environmental and health risks of fracking and passed that information to her community. She formalized her work with the foundation of Ohio Valley Allies, and built power with another local group who know firsthand the dangers of fracking: truckers. As she continued organizing, Hunkler reconnected with her former high school classmates, many of whom worked hauling all kinds of fracking waste products, including drilling muds, settled solids, pipe scale, and hydrocarbon-bearing soil. Though she hadn’t seen them for 20 or 30 years, they began contacting her when they saw her work. The alliance between environmentalists and truckers might surprise some, but workers who want to protect themselves and the environment say it makes perfect sense to build power together.

“The trucking and the fracking industry are looking to continue to destroy Mother Earth as much as the coal industry and the hardrock mining industry,” said Billy Randel, a retired trucker and the head of Truckers Movement for Justice. “And you know what the funny thing is, the truck drivers can stop all this. We’re the key. We’re the 75 percent and our brothers and sisters on the rails are the other 25 percent. All we gotta do is educate our drivers.”

ON JUNE 4, OHIO VALLEY ALLIES WAS ONE of the signatories of a letter to the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that asked the government to enforce its hazardous material regulations. If the government enforces these laws, advocates say, it will help protect the truckers who transport the dangerous by-products of fracking: sludge, brine water, and silica-rich sand.

According to Earthjustice, which wrote the letter on behalf of Ohio Valley Allies and Truckers Movement for Justice, oil and gas companies consistently fail to correctly label hazardous material loads. Truckers agree, saying they typically receive no training for moving toxic waste, though trucking companies are eager to blame them if anything goes wrong. The effect is deadly and the examples are numerous, dating back decades.

Eleven years ago in Lawrence Township, Ohio, for example, a truck carrying so-called brine—the toxic wastewater pumped at high pressure into the earth beneath well pads—crashed over a guardrail, slammed into a home, and began leaking beneath it. The driver was found on the ground spitting up blood, Earthjustice writes. Little has changed since then. Just this May in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, another tanker truck carrying fracking wastewater spilled 2,000 gallons into a nearby stream, echoing a similar story three years earlier, in which the driver died. And in 2016, right by Hunkler’s homestead, another brine truck crashed, spilling waste over a field and into the Barnesville reservoir, which supplies the community’s drinking water. Environmental Protection Agency tests of the reservoir after the crash found elevated levels of radium, a radioactive metal.

Studies show that fracking waste typically contains high levels of salts, heavy metals, and even radioactive material, as evidenced by the thousand-plus pages of exhibits Randel shared with the Prospect. They include multiple articles, studies, research, and testimony dating back decades, illustrating how the toxicity of the waste is hurting both workers and the environment.

Randel, a retired trucker, hauled toxic waste for years and told the Prospect that the letter environmentalists and truck drivers signed together is “the salvo fired,” in what will likely be “a long, hard war.” But the combined power of organized labor and environmental activists will win in the end, he said.

× Expand Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo A photo taken from a drone shows a natural gas fracking well pad in Freeport, Pennsylvania, October 15, 2020.

As it is now, virtually no workers receive any notice about the danger of the waste they’re hauling, let alone training to handle it safely, Randel and other truckers said. When a worker cites a study or raises concerns, bosses tell them not to worry about it. Tom McKnight, a retired oil field trucker in Ohio, said bosses never mentioned the danger of hauling such material, and if a worker brought it up, “they were like, ‘pshaw, you’ll get more radiation out of the phones you’re looking at all the time,’” he said. “It was totally downplayed.” It was easy to go along with the charade for a while, he said, because Eastern Ohio had been depressed since the late 1970s and the jobs oil companies were offering paid well.

“We’re happy, but here we are hauling radiated water around, radiated chips, not to mention the icky by-products that are even worse than that,” said McKnight, who joined the industry as a trucker hauling brine in 2013. “We were never placarded, we had no radiation detector on our uniform … the conversation on the radiation was nonexistent.”

McKnight might have kept on believing the industry’s lies until he read a Rolling Stone investigation in 2020 about the toxic waste the oil and gas industry produces. “I might not have even realized that until I saw the picture and saw, holy shit, I was in that place for a year.” By then, he was suffering from cancer, though he can’t say with certainty it’s because of what he was exposed to as a trucker. Now 63, McKnight also suffers from pericarditis, inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart, and recently got a new diagnosis from a surgeon, who said he recognized mesothelioma in a biopsy of his lungs.

“I’m pretty sure I know what’ll kill me now. It’s just a matter of when,” McKnight said, speaking with the Prospect from his porch in the Ohio River Valley while his little Jack Russell terrier Coco ran around in the yard. His other dog, a big mixed-breed named Charlie, stayed closer to home. The sky was perfectly clear. McKnight worked until July 31, 2019, but the body can only take so much, so he applied for and received Social Security disability benefits. “I was expecting life to end up different,” he said, then added that it was still a beautiful day to be alive.

Oil field trucker Marco Mery spoke to the Prospect while he was on the job en route to Kermit, Texas, and then on to Mexico to celebrate his wife’s birthday. After ten years of working in oil fields, Mery, 54, said the reason for hauling the oil industry’s toxic waste is that the pay can be up to 35 percent higher than other jobs. But that’s hardly enough given the danger, which companies don’t help drivers mitigate with training or protective gear. Companies don’t even provide masks for toxic airborne material, like the silica he was hauling that day.

“The thing is, most of the well-paying jobs is work in the oil field,” he said. “And if it is not that good working in the oil field, well, the other jobs are worse.”

IN MOST INDUSTRIES, THESE RADIUM- AND SILICA-RICH products would be considered hazardous waste, but the oil and gas industries enjoy an exemption that classifies them as hazardous materials instead: a lower grade of danger with fewer regulations around their transportation.

The exemption, a major win for oil and gas companies, comes from the 1980 Bentsen and Bevill Amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Some states have passed legislation that tightens up regulations within their borders, but Ohio tends toward the opposite direction, trying to further deregulate the industry.

“Ohio is not trying to do anything to make it better,” said Silverio Caggiano, a retired fire battalion chief and hazardous materials specialist who worked at the Youngstown Fire Department in Ohio for 39 years. “They just seem to want to play to whatever the industry wants.”

Indeed, truckers and environmental activists say fracking and trucking companies aren’t even living up to the exemption’s modest rules surrounding hazardous materials transfer. According to Megan Hunter, senior attorney at Earthjustice, anyone hauling hazardous materials needs extensive training and a number of extra precautions, such as carrying Safety Data Sheets within arm’s reach, properly labeling their trucks, and driving on roads that bypass small towns instead of cutting through them.

In their letter to the government, Earthjustice merely asks “that PHMSA uses its enforcement authority to enforce existing laws on the books regarding hazardous materials, as to transport of oil and gas, waste, and other materials in oil fields,” Hunter said. The activists and workers aren’t asking for new regulations (yet); they just want to see current laws upheld.

In Youngstown, Caggiano has seen oil and gas companies blatantly ignoring hazardous materials law for decades, and told the Prospect about the consequences: a worker’s leather boots lighting up a Geiger counter. Workers washing their radium-contaminated clothes in public laundromats. Firefighters wading through unidentified waste after a truck spill. Oil barons dumping wastewater into a city sewer.

× Expand Ted Auch, FracTracker Alliance

Caggiano recalled one example in particular, when a truck carrying unidentified wastewater toppled over in Youngstown around 2016. When he and his team arrived on scene, they asked to see the driver’s Safety Data Sheets, which would give the first responders information about the materials being transported and any precautions to take. But the driver said he had never been given any. “OK, we’re breaking a couple of laws here,” Caggiano said, and called in the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

According to Earthjustice’s letter, many truck drivers have told Truckers Movement for Justice that they “rarely, if ever, receive Safety Data Sheets for their oil and gas waste loads.”

“These guys aren’t getting the right equipment to handle this stuff. These people should be in throwaway hazmat suits, and the industry is not going to do it because they’ll lose money,” Caggiano said. “They’re trying to get the least informed people. They can not inform them and get them to do dangerous work for very little pay. And if they complain about it, they get fired.”

Mery, the truck driver on his way to Texas, said the same. He told the Prospect that asking the bosses for help is pointless, because they’ll fire you, especially if they’re running a third-party provider or a smaller company.

“Most of the time, they tell you you have to be careful,” and little more, Mery said.

This lack of training and knowledge among truckers has disastrous consequences for the whole “eastern sacrifice zone of Ohio,” as Caggiano calls his region. He knows of one trucker who cleaned out his truck at a commercial truck wash, where the runoff is filtered and then reused for other trucks. While those filters can remove dirt particulates, or even volatile organic chemicals if they include carbon filters, they aren’t equipped to clear out the radium in wastewater.

Similarly, Caggiano said, some workers take home their uniforms and clean them in their personal laundry machines, transferring radium into the clothes of their spouses and children. Or they clean them in public laundromats, where the spread of chemicals could be even more extreme.

“It’s a Pandora’s box of bad shit that’s in these trucks,” he said.

LEGALLY, THE RESPONSIBILITY TO MEET SAFETY REGULATIONS lies with the shipper, who needs to class their loads and make sure that drivers are equipped to handle that class of materials. Earthjustice alleges that shippers are failing to class loads at all, leading to a host of subsequent violations: lack of appropriate protective gear, no placarding, trucks driving on the wrong routes and without the right insurance.

“Shipper” can mean many things, Earthjustice’s Hunter explained. It can refer to the oil and gas company, the producer, the entity creating the waste at the wellhead, processing facilities, or any other corporation involved in the process.

“There’s no permit, for example, that PHMSA issues, or some process that PHMSA goes through before shippers start shipping this stuff. So that’s why our ask is really just for enforcement,” Hunter said. The government “has the authority to check and see if violations are happening and to hit them with penalties if they are and to stop the violation. And that helps our self-enforcing laws work a little better.”

Earthjustice has no illusions about the “drill, baby, drill” Trump administration’s attitude toward regulating the fracking industry. But, Hunter said, she’s “hopeful” that Trump’s pro–industrial worker rhetoric could prompt action from the government.

“This is an administration that has suggested that it cares about energy workers, and if that is true, then certainly it should care about these drivers,” she said.

“I would like to see that they cared about us. I mean, we’re the people who move the industry,” Mery said. “It’s not just the oil field, everything that comes in trains and airplanes is then moved by trucks. I would like the government to treat us with respect.”

Earthjustice has already had a conversation with officials at PHMSA, who said the letter is a priority to them. Time will tell whether the government acts to enforce their own hazardous material regulations; as of now, they haven’t made any public statements about the letter.

But environmental activists and truckers know that the problem runs much deeper than Safety Data Sheets and truck placarding. Hunkler of Ohio Valley Allies told the Prospect that after industry came, she started getting headaches, rashes, insomnia, a metallic taste in her mouth, and unexplained body aches. On days that she left the valley, the symptoms would subside within an hour. But whenever she was home, they came back.

After four years of this, she decided to sell her home. “My peaceful, tranquil hollow was poisoned,” she said. She’s lived in a few other homes in the area since, but fracking always seemed to follow. As of 2021, there were 64,788 active wells in Ohio, according to the state, and they’ve become hard to outrun.

“If I had a magic wand, all the coal mines, all the fracking wells, all the chemical facilities, they’d all disappear,” Hunkler said. “They’re all gone. And it’s pristine again. But that’s not based in reality.”