Book review: Strange Fire
Review of Strange Fire by Joel Burcat (Headline Books, 2022)
By: Matthew Eshed
8/14/22
Image source: https://www.jewishexponent.com/2022/03/30/last-word-creating-a-protagonist-with-joel-burcat/
Strange Fire is an environmental legal thriller taking place in Pennsylvania’s fracking country, featuring a location and agencies who are nearly identical to their real counterparts, but are explicitly fictional.
A Texas-based oil and gas company leases land in Pennsylvania, to frack the abundant reservoirs there. One such operation features a regional operations manager, a veteran who accentuates the hyper-masculine culture often found in the military. A quote referenced in the book applies here: that the Navy is designed by geniuses to be operated by idiots (Whether or not this is true is not for me to say, but some who know more may confirm or deny the allegation. Hopefully no one will be offended!). The book, and its characters, say that the oil and gas industry is the same way. In this case, the “idiot” running the facility forces a contractor who was hired to dig an impoundment (that is, the pit designed to hold fluids generated through the fracking, in this case, designed for water), to work in torrential downpour in February. This operations manager feels pressure from his superiors in Texas to “drill baby drill,” and is caught in a situation where the fracking fluid tanks are stuck on the other side of a bridge that collapsed nearby. This situation introduces a risk that the fracking will start later than planned, and the manager does not want to let this happen under his watch. So he orders frack fluid tanks from 12 hours away, and orders the contractor to finish the pond, to temporarily hold fracking fluid until the tanks arrive. The seminal moment of the book comes when the operations manager calls the contractor at 2am in the rain and orders him to start filling the impoundment with fracking fluid. The contractor, drunk, says no, and the operations manager strikes him in the head, killing him, and buries him nearby.
In parallel, the landowner who has allowed the extraction on her land starts to become suspicious that the fracking operations are contaminating her drinking water. She hears from some of her peers in town that their water has been contaminated, and that they don’t trust the extraction companies, despite the tax revenue they bring and their assurances that they are not harming the water supply. She has a suspicion that her water is contaminated (it is unclear how much time has passed since the clean water impoundment was used temporarily for fracking fluid and the arousal of her suspicion), and she issues a complaint to the Pennsylvania Department of the Environment (PaDEP, or just DEP if you are already in PA). The DEP’s analysis shows that there is no way that the fracking fluid could have seeped from the encased lines into the well, and they blame the contaminants in the well on compounds that are already known in the water: agricultural runoff and naturally-occurring methane in the surface layers (fracking accesses gasses that are mile-deep, a form of “unconventional” gas extraction). The complainant appeals the PaDEP finding, with a local nonprofit activist law firm that is looking for a big case that it can use to fundraise and achieve its mission. The firm who accepts the case.
A lawyer from the DEP who is assigned to defend the appeal is teamed up with a lawyer for the O&G company, who works at a firm called “Finkel and Updike,” or “FU,” and was a rival of his in law school. The DEP lawyer is seen as an environmentalist by the FU lawyer, who is described in no more detail then as a brilliant layer who gets paid extremely well, bringing an element of tension between the two of them who have to work together.
The DEP lawyer is also teamed with the geoscientist who issued the report, with whom he has a mutual crush, and their romantic relationship develops throughout the story, despite her maniacal ex who follows her around. The landowner who filed the complaint and is the plaintiff in the case is upset that her husband is in the City during the week and is lonely during that time, with plenty of money to spend but nobody to share her bed with. She attempts to seduce the DEP lawyer at one point in the book, because he saved her child from a strange protest-turned-riot (organized by the activist law firm, but thwarted by unknown forces who hired black-clad protesters to “protect” the family protesters bussed in from the oil and gas worker counter-protesters who showed up).
All of these storylines intersect through this book; the murderous operations manager and the decision he made to use a clean water impoundment for frack fluid, the police chief who is investigating the missing person in the midst of so many oil and gas operations bringing people from around the country to town, the lecherous landowner with the vulgar tongue and the culture in which she lives, the nonprofit law firm trying to make their big break, the DEP lawyer and geoscientist who are lovers, and the Texas-based oil and gas extraction company.
The storylines are built throughout the book, with adept character development which at times tells the same story from multiple characters’ perspectives. The book takes us inside of the Intro to Geology course at Pennsylvania State University where the professor, an expert hired by law firms like FU to defend extraction companies, tells his students why fracking is not something to worry about. It describes the relationship between the DEP lawyer, his boss, and his rival. It takes us inside of the fundraising pressures experienced by the head of a nonprofit public-benefit law firm. We get a front-row seat to the ex-military gas extraction operations manager with anger issues, his trailer office, his aspirations for financial success, and the dynamic with his higher-ups.
The storylines intersect with great excitement and resolution by the end (with a twist, of course). Strange Fire is a great, easy, and educational read for those seeking more insight into the dynamics of fracking in Pennsylvania. The author adeptly tells a fictional story that is also parallel to what really happens in Pennsylvania’s fracking country, so much so that he includes a disclaimer in the book stating its fictionality despite the apparent similarities. The author is an environmental lawyer with 30 years of experience, bringing a strong element of legitimacy to the story and the accuracy of the concepts.