Slow Fuel Cleanup Near Delaware River Leaves Residents in Limbo As Agencies Shrink Enforcement

UPPER MAKEFIELD TOWNSHIP, Pa.— As their children ran in circles at the street corner on a clear morning, parents of Mount Eyre Manor kept watch, especially mindful of the white pickup trucks that begin to roll into the neighborhood before the school bus. Only after their 6-year-old daughter boarded the bus did Ryan Harper and Veronica Casina-Harper talk about the nightmare of the past year and a half. From their front yard, they pointed to work crews finishing four new holes in their street, the latest of 44 wells drilled in Mount Eyre Manor.

The driller is one of the nation’s largest and most politically connected oil and gas companies, Energy Transfer. The company is using the wells to determine how far and how deep an unknown quantity of petroleum fuel has spread into drinking water supplies from a rupture in its 68-year-old pipeline beneath this neighborhood just north of Philadelphia, a mile uphill from the Delaware River.