West Virginia’s Chernobyl

In 2020, Ashlin Bailey was 16 and working at a Taco Bell in Fairmont, West Virginia, when she and some friends drove out to what they thought was an abandoned paper mill on a hilltop just outside town. Two childhood hangs had recently shuttered, Skate-A-Way and Valley Worlds of Fun, and the group needed a new place to get away, skateboard and have adventures, a place far from worries and adults. They found it in a dilapidated factory above the Monongahela River, which by way of the Ohio and Mississippi flows all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. For two years it was here — amid the mysterious factory’s abandoned tanks and dust-covered vats, rusted pipes, broken windows and creepy stairways — that Bailey and her friends picnicked and partied, lost their minds and broke each other’s hearts.

Seeking adolescent freedom in places abandoned by industry is a venerable American coming-of-age story. But in 21st century West Virginia, it has become a risky one. More than a century of fossil fuel development has drenched the landscape with a toxic legacy whose depth we are only just beginning to understand — as it literally seeps out of hillsides and into creeks, aquifers and human bodies. In the case of the strange hilltop facility overlooking the Monongahela, Bailey and her friends had discovered a highly radioactive plant that for eight years, along with the site’s earlier iteration, AOP Clearwater, had treated fracking wastewater from the nearby Marcellus shale formation.

It’s around 4 p.m. one fine summer afternoon on a West Virginia hilltop when Dr. Yuri Gorby, a former Department of Energy scientist, gets the first clicks on his Geiger counter. He is wearing a full-body plastic protective suit, and using the device to survey a span of odd brownish dirt near the dilapidated main building of Fairmont Brine Processing, a fracking waste treatment plant that ceased operations in 2017.

“These are the highest readings I’ve ever seen!” he shouts. “You want to come over here!”

I follow Ohio organizer Jill Hunkler past a graffiti-covered security shack and a vaguely Satanic-looking circle of busted up furniture to find the 62-year-old scientist wearing a look of deep concern. The clicking — hauntingly familiar from Hollywood depictions of Chernobyl and post-Apocalyptic scenarios — continues to quicken as Gorby walks toward the flame-scarred husk of the frack waste processing building. Bending over the odd brownish dirt, the clicks become furious beeps, like a smoke alarm gone haywire, before merging into a high-pitched wail, a sound reminiscent of an emergency room patient flatlining. Gorby freezes. A microbiologist who worked for years at a federal radiological lab in Washington state, he understands very well the meaning of the nerve-rattling screech.