Grandmother Jailed for ‘Interfering’ with Construction of Pennsylvania’s Mariner East Gas Pipeline

Interview with Elise Gerhart, daughter of Ellen Gerhart imprisoned pipeline opponent, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

Opponents of gas and oil pipelines across the U.S. have been fighting in the courts, in the streets and from the treetops. In Pennsylvania, one controversial pipeline, Mariner East Gas Pipeline, known as Mariner East 2, was touted by its owners, Sunoco Logistics and Energy Transfer Partners, as the answer to Europe’s need for more liquefied natural gas, or LNG. But to transport the LNG in tankers across the Atlantic Ocean, Big Oil needed a 350-mile pipeline to move fracked gas from the Pennsylvania heartland to the Marcus Hook refinery on the Delaware River.
That’s where, in 2015, the pipeline companies crossed paths with the Gerhart family, who had established a homestead in central Pennsylvania as a haven for native plants and animals over 35 years. The pipeline developers wanted an easement to build their pipeline across the Gerhart’s property, but the family said no.  So the companies took it through eminent domain.
There were battles in court and when it became clear they wouldn’t find justice there, that was followed by opponents engaging in nonviolent tree-sits along the pipeline route to block construction. On July 27, Ellen Gerhart, a 63-year-old retired teacher and grandmother, was arrested and her cash bail set at $25,000. She was convicted by the judge of “indirect criminal contempt” and sentenced to two to six months in prison. 
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Elise Gerhart, Ellen’s daughter who has been fighting the pipeline along with her mother. They set up Camp White Pine on their property as a focus for their resistance. Here, she discusses her mother’s case and the damage that the pipeline has already done to the surrounding property.

ELISE GERHART: Their complaint they submitted to the Huntingdon County Court making all sorts of wild allegations against her, saying that she was threatening them and that she had basically made a bomb threat or something to our Huntington County Emergency manager, when in reality what she did was send him an email about her concerns about safety with the pipeline and about potential for leaks and explosions. She wanted to talk to him about the emergency response plan for the county because these things do happen. We’ve seen them happen, like that TransCanada line that exploded in West Virginia not that long ago. Here in Pennsylvania we had a bad explosion on Texas Eastern back in 2016 and a man was badly burned. You know, these things happen, and so she was trying to get some information and spread some information to the emergency manager about what is really going on with these pipelines, because, in fighting this, we’ve had to do a lot of research about what is actually going through the pipe, learned a little bit about the chemistry of it all, what could happen, that people have learned by studying other pipeline explosions and all that.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Elise Gerhart, what was your mom actually convicted of?

ELISE GERHART: She was convicted of indirect criminal contempt. So in the courtroom they were trying to bring in all these other things they were accusing her of doing, and then sort of chalking it up to saying she’s interfering with the pipeline and therefore we’re sending her to jail because the judge previously ruled that the pipeline could use eminent domain on her property and that she was not allowed to interfere with them doing that.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Okay.

ELISE GERHART: And so, really, all what she’s accused of is interfering with their pipeline construction. But how they do that is through this long process of trying to criminalize her bit by bit, by taking away her property rights and criminalizing her under various Pennsylvania statutes. So I mean the whole thing has been a legal mess, and it’s been strange to kind of combat because there’s not a whole lot of precedent for doing this, trying to fight eminent domain and then direct action to try and fight when that failed. I mean, really, my mom should not be in jail for doing some things on her own property because theoretically these guys should not be on her property. They shouldn’t be around to see bears that are already here. There’d probably be a lot more bears if we weren’t here. You know, we’ve lived with them for 30 years. Everyone in Huntington County knows that there’s bears all over this county. It’s normal; it’s part of life. We live on a wooded property of 30 acres that’s surrounded by hundreds of acres of other wooded properties.

And so, now, Sunoco’s complaining because they saw a bear on an easement that they made. It’s such a weird twist they’re putting on the whole situation. Like, we live in the woods. They come to our house, they destroy the land, they muddy up the water, and then they throw the property owner in jail because she keeps speaking out against them, letting them know that she does not give them consent to do these things. That’s really all she’s done, is just continue to assert her rights and say, you guys don’t have the right to come in here and wreak havoc in my life and destroy the environment that I’ve tried to protect by stewarding this land. That’s the way my mom sees it, like she’s been taking care of this plot of land for the past 35 years.

The Monday after my mom was arrested there was a hearing about whether or not she could have bail, and the judge decided to hold her on $25,000 cash bail so we couldn’t even pay ten percent to get her out – literally (is needed) $25,000 to get her out. So there was a claim that she was baiting mountain lions in addition to bears, and there are no mountain lions in Pennsylvania these days. The game commission, their official position is that there haven’t been mountain lions in this area since the ’30s. So the judge said in court, I think mountain lions are extinct, and then he proceeded to revoke her bail, hold her on $25,000 and then the following Friday sentence her to two to six months in jail, based on Sunoco’s claim that could easily be disproven.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Do you know how close to finished the pipeline is?

ELISE GERHART: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Originally, it was supposed to be finished in November 2016, but because people worked together to fight the permitting and then just a lot of incompetence on ETP’s part when it comes to construction, like all the spills that have happened while they’re doing construction have happened because they didn’t even know what they were getting themselves into with the geology of Pennsylvania and they’re just been trying to pound it through, into people’s private water supplies, busting into aquifers, in mountains, dumping drilling fluid into rivers and all this stuff. It’s just been a disaster.

Ellen Gerhart was due in court the last week of August to testify before the Environmental Hearing Board of the PA Department of Environmental Protection, opposing the permits for the project, but the judge refused to let her be transported to testify at the hearing. She also has a criminal trial scheduled in late August on charges of harassment. Learn more about campaign opposing construction of the Mariner East 2 pipeline by visiting Unite in Support of Ellen Gerhart’s Facebook page at Facebook.com/events/1071685046303547.

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