West Virginia’s Radioactive Party Zone

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. 

Now 21 years old, Bailey recalls exploring the maze-like complex and its decomposing ceilings. Together with her friends, she inspected rooms filled with strange containers and pumps, and a building that held a large sand pit that she and her friends used as a bathroom during parties. “I remember going into one rundown building, full of graffiti, where everything was caked in some sort of rust or dust or gunk,” says Bailey. “There was a number of situations where the dust would have been ingested. We found a big tank and two abandoned buildings and just explored. We were trying to be like the kids in Scooby-Doo, solving the mystery.” 

Rick Neptune, a Navy vet and retired Harley-Davidson mechanic who lives behind the site, recalls seeing the teens’ boozy bonfire infernos. “The flames were 15 to 20 feet high,” he said. 

Before its collapse, Fairmont Brine Processing was the pride of the local fracking industry. Its executives routinely boasted of the company’s “superior solutions” and were slathered in public praise, including an award for industry innovation by the Penn State University-affiliated Shale Gas Innovation & Commercialization Center. In 2016, the company’s president, Brian Kalt, touted its treatment process to legislators at the Oklahoma state Capitol. “We produce distilled water,” he said, that can be “reused during the drilling and hydraulic fracturing process. It can be reused for agricultural purposes, or it could be discharged into a body of water.” But by 2017, the company was having trouble paying its debts and found itself underwater. The following spring, Fairmont Brine was shuttered and became an industrial ghost site. 

When I stumbled upon the site in early June 2023, just days after an unexplained explosion had rocked the shuttered facility, there were still no visible “No Trespassing” signs, although there were a number of yellow-and-red notices posted throughout the site that warned: “KEEP OUT: Caution TENORM, Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material.” While a flimsy entrance gate had at one point been padlocked, it seemed to have been left permanently askew. It was not until several weeks after I published my September 2023 article with Truthdig, “Inside West Virginia’s Chernobyl,” that the Environmental Protection Agency ramped up a Superfund-like investigation of the site and blocked the entrance. Only many months later was fencing placed around the full perimeter of the site.  

During a February 2025 visit to Fairmont, I spoke with Bailey in her bedroom decked out with black light posters and a billowing tie-dye ceiling hanging. She told me that when her friends were hanging out at the site, in 2021 and 2022, there were signs posted outside certain structures within the facility that warned of radioactivity, but they still had “no clue” that they were partying in a former frack waste treatment plant in which radioactivity was concentrated not just near equipment, but spread all over the grounds. Neither they nor their parents had been informed about a 1982 American Petroleum Institute report that stated “radioactivity [from oil and gas waste treatment facilities] can not be modified or made inert by chemical means” and that attempting to remove radioactivity from waste risks transforming, “a very dilute source of radioactive materials into a very concentrated source.” 

In the spring and summer of 2023, I toured the Fairmont Brine Processing plant while reporting my book “Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.” I was accompanied by Jill Hunkler, an Ohio community organizer, and Yuri Gorby, a former Department of Energy scientist. We wore masks and full-body protective suits and found evidence that local teenagers were still entering the site. Random furniture had been moved around the parking lot, and a bathing suit had been discarded on the ground. “My god,” Hunkler exclaimed, “did they go swimming!?” 

On the other side of the parking lot, over a span of odd brownish dirt near the dilapidated main building, Gorby’s radiation detector, a Ludlum 3000 Digital Survey Meter, issued a terrifying alarm. “These are the highest readings I’ve ever seen!” he shouted. “You want to come over here!” His unit read around 7,000 counts per minute, or just under 2 millirems per hour. Working at those levels for one week (never mind the 70- or 80-hour weeks common in the oil and gas industry) could take a worker over yearly safety limits set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

Samples of the brownish dirt were later processed by Eberline Analytical, a radiological analysis lab, to reveal 5,072 picocuries per gram of the radioactive element radium, or more than 1,000 times the EPA limit. Testing also showed bismuth, polonium and radioactive lead present at worrisome levels. The upper fracking wastewater pond, the suspected swimming hole to explain the bathing suit, showed elevated levels of these same radioactive elements, though not nearly as high as the dirt. Later, in putting together the book, I determined that the site’s 2 millirems per hour was more radioactive than most of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. 

The processing plant was designed by Venture Engineering & Construction. Its president and CEO, Dave Moniot, defends his company’s involvement in the facility. “The facility was designed in accordance with the codes and regulations at the time,” he told Truthdig in a November 2023 email. “To our knowledge Fairmont Brine followed all regulations.” 

The EPA came to a different conclusion. 

“The Site is unsecured and rampant trespassing and vandalism has been observed,” with radiation levels above Nuclear Regulatory Commission limits, a 2023 report by the Environmental Protection Agency found. “Human exposure to radionuclides by inhalation, absorption, or ingestion is possible,” and those “partying at the Site” may face “exposure to radionuclides by inhalation, absorption, or ingestion.” 

The agency highlighted radium, the “bone-seeking” radioactive element that is a known human carcinogen and can affect the blood, eyes and teeth. 

After news broke about the plant on Truthdig in September 2023, the agency announced it would investigate the contamination at the site, including whether radionuclides or other hazardous substances overflowed the waste ponds and spilled into the Monongahela River. But, while the EPA has warned those “partying at the Site” that “increased time spent near radionuclides increases dose and potential health effects,” neither it nor the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources has made any effort to locate those who entered the site — like Ashlin Bailey and her friends — and evaluate the nature of their potential exposures.

“It is pretty terrifying to think that I was out there having something radioactive going into my body,” says Bailey. “I was finding out from Facebook posts instead of the people who caused it and were supposed to be cleaning it up.” 

I heard similar sentiments from Rick Neptune earlier this year as I walked with him and Bailey through the woods behind his home, which sits directly behind Fairmont Brine’s radioactive fracking wastewater pond. He vividly recalled when the plant burped in the night in the mid-2010s and upchucked salty frack waste onto their yard and roof. At the time, he didn’t know what was in the waste. It was only after his wife Debbie passed away from a liver ailment in 2023 that he learned the truth from my prior reporting for Truthdig.

“I honestly do not think that the plant contributed to Debbie passing, she had liver troubles for years and her father and brother both died from liver failure,” says Neptune. “I do feel that the plant has probably ruined my property value, and that the plant owners didn’t care, and the EPA turning a blind eye to the situation contributed to the deterioration of the facility.”

When contacted, Cole Devine, an EPA on-scene coordinator, pointed to an EPA Fairmont Brine webpage that he said is updated biweekly with new information, photos and reports. But the site does not address why there has been no attempt to assess the health of former workers or community members like Neptune, Bailey and her friends, or to determine how many other Fairmont Brine-like facilities may be out there across the U.S.

“EPA’s Superfund program is responsible for cleaning up over 1,300 sites across the country to address some of the nation’s most contaminated land, including sites impacted by oil and gas wastewater treatment,” said agency spokesperson Derek VanHorn, though he did not specify how many oil and gas wastewater Superfund sites there were. “EPA is working expeditiously to investigate the site,” VanHorn replied to questions about why the company that left the mess has not been held accountable, and, he added, “it is too soon for EPA to comment on a pending legal matter as the investigation remains ongoing.”

The agency had much more to say on the issue of their mission of American Energy Dominance. “EPA is committed to reversing the disastrous, anti-energy policies of the Biden Administration that drove up the cost of living for American families while offering no tangible environmental benefits whatsoever” while also “following the law and gold standard science when setting regulations and standards to protect public health and the environment,” said EPA spokesperson Mike Bastasch. “Protecting the environment and promoting energy dominance are the top two priorities of Administrator [Lee] Zeldin’s Powering the Great American Comeback Initiative. The Trump EPA understands protecting the environment while growing the economy is not a binary choice. We can and will do both.”

At the edge of Neptune’s yard begins the “Fairmont Forest,” where the plant can be seen through the trees. Beneath us is the site of the radioactive fracking waste pond, where company divers once descended into the thick brine to repair leaks in the liner. Just beyond that is the abandoned upper building that Bailey explored with her friends and graffiti-memorialized their broken hearts. With its looming tower-like structure and fire-scorched building façade, it is difficult not to think of the Chernobyl reactor core.

And as with Chernobyl, the industry, and even academia, once took pride in the frack waste treatment plant, and underplayed harms. Venture Engineering bragged about it in its summer 2014 company newsletter as “the only fully permitted and operational evaporation and crystallization plant capable of accepting brine from oil and gas drilling/fracturing operations.” And in May 2015, the University of Pittsburgh announced Fairmont Brine Processing as the winner of the fourth annual shale gas innovation contest. Brian Kalt accepted the $25,000 check, made possible by the Pittsburgh-based Benedum Foundation, which “seeks to create successful learning throughout the education system, from pre-kindergarten to post-secondary education.” 

Early one February morning, we were standing on the edge of the radioactive frack waste lake when Bailey turned to me and shared her thoughts on the whole situation. “I feel horrible,” she said. She loves her younger sister, Rayanne, and is plagued with guilt for bringing her to this hell-place that she thought was a heaven. 

“You learn to protect your younger sister, and you just go throughout the day thinking everything is fun and nice, and then you learn everything is radioactive.” She pauses. Somewhere birds are chirping. Now 21, Bailey works at a local weed dispensary, a job she loves. “I am just a teenage West Virginia girl who fell upon a radioactive brine site,” she said. “I am listening and trying to take every piece and connect the puzzle.” 

Now she really has become like the kids in Scooby-Doo. The experience of unintentionally being contaminated by the region’s powerful fracking industry has transformed her into something that she never expected to be: an activist.

Last year, Bailey was among the youngest Fairmont residents to attend an EPA meeting about the contaminated site. “Should I throw out all my clothes I wore up there? Should I wash them? What should I do?” she asked a local reporter with the Times West Virginian. On social media, she raises awareness among friends and urges them to share their stories with journalists and community leaders. She wished there was a way to test her cohort and figure out who among them may have waded into the facility’s more contaminated corners and received significant exposures. 

There is no time machine, and none of the other Fairmont Brine partiers have yet come out of the woodwork to talk to authorities, or journalists, about their involvement at the site. That is understandable, given the way some people desecrated the site — Ashlin recalls one young man smashing an old car into a building; when I first showed up with Gorby and Hunkler, there was a speedboat crashed into what we later learned was a radioactive moat of water half-ringing the facility. 

There is a way to hold the residue of the past accountable: shoes, which retain residue from where they’ve been and can serve as unintentional data collection devices. When nuclear forensic scientist Marco Kaltofen examined Bailey’s shoes, he found radiation levels that were not above expected background levels. But Bailey says she stopped going to the site in 2022, well before the May 30, 2023, explosion, which may have helped spread the highly radioactive dirt that Gorby sampled across the parking lot. So, what about the kids who tromped on the site that summer, before it was finally fully fenced off by EPA in the fall? 

“Pre-natal, childhood, and adolescent periods should be deemed as susceptible periods of development, vulnerable to toxicant exposure,” reads a 2023 study published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. “If anybody continued going up there after the explosion and doing the same things we had done the summer prior, they would have been completely exposed to everything,” says Bailey. “That risk is definitely there in my opinion.” 

“EPA’s efforts at the site are in support of its mission to protect human health and the environment, and the agency took immediate action to prevent potential exposure to TENORM radiation,” including installing fencing around the site to prevent any unauthorized access and installing security cameras which provide 24/7 video surveillance,” said VanHorn, the EPA spokesperson. “Specific questions related to health may be directed to the West Virginia Department of Health, Bureau for Public Health’s Office of Environmental Health Services Radiological Health Program at (304) 558-2981.”

For now, Bailey’s demands are simple. She wants to know exactly what her friends were exposed to, and just what that exposure means for their future. She also wants to know how many more Fairmont Brines are out there. 

“There is a stigma around being an activist in West Virginia. I understand it, I can appreciate it, I’m scared of it,” Bailey said as we walked back through the woods toward Neptune’s place. “But my will is stronger to change things that are wrong than to be scared of things. I’d rather call it what it is. There’s nothing I can do about the past. I just hope they fix the future.”

One of the ways Bailey connects with nature and the scenic if highly industrialized landscape of West Virginia is through art. Among the uses Bailey found for the abandoned plant in the woods above the Monongahela River was as an influence on her art. 

“It was a unique building with a rustic look outside the limelight of the city and it definitely gave an out-of-the-ordinary vibe that you didn’t see everywhere else,” she told me. “It inspired me to create things that were unique, different than the things I saw every day.”

This was before she knew it was a former fracking waste processing plant highly contaminated with radioactivity. And yet some of the work she produced suggests she may have had a sixth sense. One digital painting features a piercing white sun, a strange green river flowing like lava off a stone mountain and an ultrasonic purple and blue sky. It all seems to match the area’s surreal, poisonous beauty.

“I remember one fall day, the sunlight was really orange as it fell on the building in the middle of the green woods,” she said. “As the sun set, it got really cold, and the building and the forest turned very, very gold.”