“We need a smoking gun.” — Investigators at Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office told Public Herald during a meeting in 2017.

A criminal investigation of the oil and gas fracking industry is underway in Pennsylvania, the nation’s second largest producer of natural gas. Pennsylvania’s Office of the Attorney General (OAG) has “assumed jurisdiction over several criminal investigations involving environmental crimes” in Washington County where oil and gas companies have been indicted. The promise of accountability was advertised and pledged by Shapiro during his campaign for public office.

The AG’s office is neither confirming or denying that an investigation is actually happening.

But if you’ve been following Public Herald’s work over the last two years, you already know there is – specifically, that the Attorney General’s investigators have been visiting the homes of people across Pennsylvania who have lost their water, their land, their cattle, and their health due to oil and gas operations. If you haven’t seen our stories about this yet, you can get caught up at PublicHerald.org by searching “Josh Shapiro.”

But it’s not just the industry’s fault that people have been harmed by their operations, some of them living without clean water for years and ignored by nearly every public official they turned to for help. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, whose job it is to regulate the industry and enforce the law, has repeatedly failed to do so as we’ve often reported. DEP is complicit and responsible for the continued contamination of water supplies across the state, and for allowing them to stay contaminated, but Shapiro’s office has yet to hold them accountable.

Setting The Record Straight

In an article published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on January 28th, despite receiving our investigations speaking with us directly, the reporters declined to reveal Public Herald’s pivotal role in a May 4, 2017 meeting with Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s team in Harrisburg. That  meeting came at the behest of Public Herald and impacted resident Craig Stevens, who gathered 16 other impacted residents to attend and share their stories. Some of them came with piles of documents that they could barely carry. Public Herald brought scientist Dr. John Stolz from Duquesne University, who served as a Science Advisory for our six year investigation of water contamination from fracking development in Pennsylvania which revealed the coverup of these environmental crimes by DEP and the industry.

At that meeting, the AG’s investigators told us, “We need a smoking gun.” So Public Herald gave them every smoking gun we had.

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Since 2011, Public Herald has reported about the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s cover-up of water contamination cases related to fracking development, which developed into two feature documentaries: Triple Divide and Triple Divide [Redacted]. In 2016, Public Herald called for a criminal investigation of the Environmental Protection Agency and PA DEP based on the evidence discovered in our investigations of criminal misconduct by officials from both branches of government.

Over the last seven years, we’ve compiled a list of over 178 cases of misconduct by state officials that have manipulated and broken the law, letting companies pollute resident’s drinking water, kill their cattle, their pets, and make them sick.

We published a list of these cases in January 2017 and took them to Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s team in May.

Finally, nearly two years later, we’ve confirmed that Attorney General has had two grand juries in Pennsylvania. In both cases, impacted residents took the stand to testify. What’s unclear is whether state officials complicit in those cases have also taken the stand — and whether the OAG has questioned state officials for their own conduct.

Here today to talk with Public Herald about crimes by the oil and gas industry, and state officials, is Dr. John Stolz from Duquesne University. Dr. Stolz has been intimately involved with many water contamination cases in Pennsylvania, conducted countless water tests for residents, studied some of the worst cases of drinking water pollution, and also serves on the Department of Environmental Protection’s Science Advisory Board.

Dr. Stolz recently met with Public Herald editor-in-chief in Pittsburgh for the following interview.