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Of the 39 water samples his team had taken from a smattering of properties around Pavillion, Chavez said 11 were contaminated with chemicals, including some with strong ties to hydraulic fracturing. The EPA found arsenic, methane gas, diesel-fuel-like compounds and metals including copper and vanadium. Of particular concern were compounds called adamantanes a natural hydrocarbon found in gas and an obscure chemical called 2-butoxyethanol phosphate. 2-BEp is a compound closely related to 2-BE, a substance known to be used in hydraulic fracturing solutions, and that is known to cause reproductive problems in animals. It was a chief suspect when Colorado regulators investigated the well explosion in Silt.

Meeks’ well contained traces of petroleum hydrocarbons, bisphenol A, the adamantanes, and methane. John Fenton’s water, which tasted good and hadn’t even been suspected to have been contaminated, had methane and bisphenols. And Jeff Locker’s water, even after filtering with a reverse osmosis system, contained arsenic, methane and metals.

It seemed like the worst news anyone could get, but to the people whose water was bad, it was almost liberating. For the first time, an objective scientific inquiry had confirmed that the groundwater in Pavillion, WY was contaminated.

Suddenly it didn’t matter to Meeks what the preacher had told him that day by his mailbox, or how skeptical some of his neighbors had been about his incessant complaints. He wasn’t crazy. His water actually was bad. So was the water on several other Pavillion ranches.

“Everybody’s been calling me a liar since day one,” Meeks says. “Finally we’ve got some proof. Now they know it wasn’t just me, I thought. We can push on now.”

The room buzzed as the Pavillion community tried to process what the information meant. Meeks, a man of few words, kept his thoughts to himself. “Sometimes the way I put things people don’t like it,” he said. “So, I like to wait and think about it and try to put it in the right words later.”

Sanchez cautioned that the findings were still tentative. Because the EPA didn’t have a complete list of chemicals to work from, it had to go through the exhaustive process of scanning water samples for spikes in unidentified compounds and then running those compounds like fingerprints through a massive criminal database, hoping to find matches in a vast library of unregulated and understudied substances.

EnCana had sent a spokesman, Randy Teeuwen, to the meeting, and he stood saying that “we are as concerned as you are, and we want to find the source of these compounds too.” The comment drew jeers from the crowd that had once glared skeptically at Meeks and his public battle.

Jim Van Dorn, a local water professional, turned back to Chavez. “If they’d tell us what they were using then you could go out and test for things and it would make it a lot easier, right?” he shouted.

“Exactly,” Chavez shot back.

But Chavez tried to put the information in context. The compounds weren’t exclusive to fracturing fluids, he said. Some of them could also be found in common household cleaners.

The EPA’s findings set off a firestorm of accusations. Environmentalists issued a press release pointing out that chemicals used in fracturing had been found in Pavillion’s water. A prominent EPA scientist with expertise in the Safe Drinking Water Act enforcement said the results pointed more and more to fracturing. Pressure mounted on the EPA’s Denver offices. It began to field phone calls from pro-drilling representatives of Congress, questioning the research.

The EPA held steady, rowing hard through the rapids and trying to keep its distance from the politics and maintain its objectivity. The scientists stressed that no conclusions would be drawn until the agency completed yet another round of research, this time with more water tests and extensive lab work. They wanted get a better grasp of the quantity of contaminants in the water, and test more samples.

Chavez tried to temper both environmentalists’ and the industry’s expectations and keep the relatively small Pavillion project from taking on outsized national significance.

“We’re not ever going to say, ‘yeah, we know for sure.’ I think there will be a certain amount of preponderance of evidence,” he said. “The hydraulic fracturing picture seems to be in the national spotlight. But we are trying to be as broad as possible. Even if we find risks or something … again, it’s Pavillion. It’s Wyoming. It’s one little small spot that has totally different geology than the Marcellus shale.”

But it was difficult for Meeks and the environmentalists tracking this issue to ignore the deep controversy the agency was slowly wading into. All they could do was hope the agency would broaden its examination of drilling before the political currents against it became paralyzing.
No More Water

In the fall of 2009, Meeks got a call to meet Randy Teeuwen, the EnCana representative, at the Holiday Inn in Riverton.

The company had warned him months earlier that it would stop paying for his water supply and had given him the option to continue the service and pay for it himself. Meeks declined. There was no way he could afford the payments. He was still hoping that a broader settlement might be reached and EnCana would buy him out. If his property was worthless, Meeks wanted them to pay for his entire loss.

A real estate holding company called Pavillion Land Development, which shares an office address with EnCana in Denver, had bought the home in Silt, CO where the water well blew up, and at least one other Pavillion property with contamination problems, a 300-acre ranch. Meeks didn’t see why they shouldn’t do the same for him.

“We’re asking them to drill a new well, get us good water, or get us out of here,” he said.

In the meantime he was gambling that the tanker of water would stay put.

Meeks drove to the Holiday Inn and sat with Teeuwen in the motel’s café. There was small talk. Teeuwen asked him whether his granddaughter was still spending a lot of time out at the ranch, Meeks says. Then Teeuwen told him that by Sept. 15 EnCana would remove the water tanker that had been parked in front of his house.

Meeks was stunned into silence, unsure what to do. “That tank is costing $70 a day to site there — plus it cost them $280 a week to bring me a load of water. That’s over $3,000. … Now how could people like us pay $3,000 for water? And especially for something we did not do wrong.”

The 26-mile drive home was one of the longest of his life. He would have to tell Donna. And they were almost out of money.

For the first time in this long fight, Meeks had no idea what would happen next.

“I didn’t know what we were going to do or what to tell my wife,” he says. “It makes you feel less like a man. You don’t have no answer, and you can’t get no answers. What are you going to do? I didn’t have anything I could tell her.”

Meeks Jr. said that the turn of events nearly broke his father. “My dad feels like he has let us down as a family and that all that he has worked to give us and to leave us, which is by no means huge, but it’s his accomplishment, is no longer there,” said Louis Meeks Jr. “It’s like having the last 30 years of your life taken away from you. My parents aren’t quitters, and they don’t give up that easily.”

Meeks, feeling boxed in, called local news reporters to witness the water being removed.

On September 14, HB Rentals, the global oilfield services supplier EnCana had hired to supply Meeks with water, sent Scott Farrell with a truck to remove the tanker of water from Meeks’ home. Farrell found himself facing a cluster of television crews and reporters. But Meeks, for all his blustery anger, was uncharacteristically quiet. After all these years the wind seemed to have been sucked out of his lungs, and he had nothing to say.

He fought tears, and his voice quivered as he told his story to the TV cameras. Taking the water was like issuing a life sentence. Once it was gone, there was no way he would be able to replace it.

“I can’t believe someone would do something like that,” he told the reporters.

Farrell was visibly affected. “We decided that we were not going to leave Mr. Meeks without any water,” he said, when the cameras turned to him. “We’re going to leave the tank and everything here at no charge.”

But a few hours later, HB returned, loaded the tanker, and finally took Louis Meeks’ water away.

It’s difficult to know exactly what happened and why. Meeks said that EnCana told Farrell, “You get that god damn tank outta there or EnCana will give them (HB) no more work.” But an EnCana spokesman said that’s not the way it happened. According to EnCana, HB was welcome to make its own decision, but EnCana wasn’t going to foot the bill.

HB had recently bid on two major contracts with EnCana, which was planning to double its gas production over the next five years. “If we land them they would be one of our largest onshore customers,” says Tim Murphy in HB’s Houston office.

“A good deed was turning bad in a hurry,” says Andy Davidson, HB’s local manager in Riverton. “We got caught in a very ugly — in the middle of a situation. I know Louis Meeks personally, and we do business with EnCana also.”

October turned to November, and like it does in Wyoming, winter set its claws in early. For weeks Meeks drove to town for water, carting it back in 5-gallon jugs and using it to cook and to drink. There was no bathing, no heat. Meeks worried it wasn’t safe for his granddaughter to visit, and it was a humiliating way for his wife to live. At his suggestion, she moved in with their daughter, who had a house in town. He would visit them there and take showers.

Meeks was too proud, too stubborn, and too in love with the wild acreage of Wyoming to leave the ranch. And he had his cattle and sheep to care for. “Everything is invested in this place. I just can’t leave it,” he said. “How are you going to just walk away?”

As winter approached, Meeks found himself huddled around the pellet stove in the living room, having shut off the side rooms to block in the warmth. Now that his home had no water supply, he couldn’t use his hot-water heating system.

By Christmas 2009, nearly four years after his water well blew out and his war against the drillers began in earnest, Meeks had given up. Against the advice of the EPA, the Centers for Disease Control, and his own friends and family Meeks stomped out into his front yard with a wrench and a box of tools and reconnected his fouled water well to the house’s plumbing system, restoring his heat and shower and washing water with a certifiably contaminated, water supply. According to the EPA records, his water contained traces of xylene, toluene and diesel fuel, which were common in fracturing fluids, and other derivatives of petroleum hydrocarbons, including benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia.

“It’s really easy to say you should just get out of this situation,” says Deb Thomas, Meeks’ friend and the environmental organizer from Clark. “But they are not young. Everything that they have is wrapped up in that place, not just in their home. They’ve got animals and a life here. It’s pretty hard to leave that.”

Meeks didn’t drink the water but used it to bathe and clean his dishes. By January he was complaining of ill effects on his health. He suffered of shortness of breath and described lesions and sores on his arms and legs. At the veterans hospital, he was told he had a respiratory infection and prescribed prednisone and moxifloxacin, but the doctors couldn’t say whether it was the water, the stress, or his persistent medical problems that were to blame.