of rusting metal.“ I thought, is it possible that this could be radioactive,” Blanock said.“ Then I figured no, they wouldn’ t do that … People are riding bikes and taking walks with their infants.
“ I look at this site and I wonder if this has any connection to my son’ s cancer, and could it happen again to other innocent kids playing in the creek and on the fields?”
The seven‐acre yard is part of a larger industrial site in Cecil Township, a community of around 15,000 located in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania’ s Washington County. The fence, which runs for nearly half a mile, separates it from the Westland Branch of the Montour Trail, a 60‐mile rail trail system that weaves through Pittsburgh’ s suburbs.
The entire region sits on the Marcellus Shale, a geological formation of sedimentary rock containing deep deposits of gas that runs beneath Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
The Cecil yard was owned for more than 20 years by Weavertown Transport Leasing. During the 1990s, the company transported hospital waste to the site for temporary storage and processing. In the mid‐2000s, when new drilling technologies made it possible to get at those deep gas deposits, Cecil and the surrounding countryside became a particularly valuable sweet spot for extraction— and handling radioactive oil and gas waste became a booming business.
In 2007, and again in 2013, Weavertown Transport Leasing asked the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection( DEP) to modify its permit for the Cecil facility,“ situated on 50 acres with a rural population,” to accept more waste. Each time, the DEP complied.
During this era Cecil was changing, too: from an Appalachian mining community into a blossoming Pittsburgh suburb, which in 2011 Bloomberg Businessweek named,“ one of the best places” in Pennsylvania to raise a family.
Cecil’ s first case of Ewing sarcoma, a pediatric bone cancer, appeared in 2008, when a local teen was diagnosed with the rare and highly aggressive disease. Six years later, Luke Blanock and his parents learned he had Ewing sarcoma, as well. By 2019, three years after Luke’ s death at the age of 19, six kids in Cecil’ s school district, Canon‐McMillan, had received the same diagnosis— including the catcher on Luke’ s baseball team— according to an investigation by the Pittsburgh Post‐Gazette.