## Facts

- Property owners in Dimock Township, Pennsylvania alleged nearby natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing by Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. and its drilling subsidiary contaminated their groundwater and damaged their property.
- Plaintiffs alleged defendants’ operations involved underground injection of chemical fluids and related drilling practices near plaintiffs’ land.
- After drilling began, plaintiffs alleged their well water became brown, cloudy, and malodorous, and unusable for ordinary household purposes.
- Plaintiffs alleged the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection cited defendants for regulatory noncompliance and found dangerous methane levels in plaintiffs’ water supply and other local wells.
- Plaintiffs sued under Pennsylvania’s Hazardous Sites Cleanup Act (HSCA) and common-law theories including negligence, private nuisance, strict liability, medical monitoring, and fraud/misrepresentation.
- Defendants moved to dismiss selected claims under Rule 12(b)(6); the court treated well-pleaded factual allegations as true at this stage.

## Issues

1. Whether the HSCA claim was implausible because it did not plead precise time, location, and chemical-specific details of each alleged release, and whether it adequately alleged a “release” or “threatened release” attributable to defendants.
2. Whether plaintiffs plausibly pleaded negligence and private nuisance, including causal linkage between defendants’ drilling activities and the alleged water contamination and property interference.
3. Whether plaintiffs plausibly pleaded strict liability on a theory that hydraulic fracturing and related drilling activities constitute an abnormally dangerous activity under Pennsylvania law.
4. Whether ancillary claims such as fraud/misrepresentation and medical monitoring were adequately pleaded, including Rule 9(b) particularity for fraud-based counts.

## Decision

- The court granted the motion in part and denied it in part.
- The court denied dismissal of the HSCA claim, holding plaintiffs plausibly alleged a release or threatened release and were not required, at the pleading stage, to plead exact dates and locations of releases.
- The court denied dismissal of negligence and private nuisance claims, finding the complaint plausibly alleged duty, breach, interference, and causation based on contamination allegations and regulatory findings.
- The court permitted strict-liability allegations to proceed to the extent plaintiffs plausibly alleged an abnormally dangerous activity theory, treating the classification as fact-intensive.
- The court dismissed or narrowed certain other claims (including fraud-based and medical-monitoring theories) where allegations were conclusory or lacked required particularity, allowing amendment in some instances.

## Legal Principles

- Under Rule 12(b)(6), a complaint must plead sufficient factual matter to state a claim that is plausible on its face; courts disregard legal conclusions unsupported by factual allegations.
- An HSCA private action may proceed when plaintiffs plausibly plead a release or threatened release of a hazardous substance at a site connected to defendants; a failure to plead exact time and location of each release is not necessarily fatal at the pleading stage.
- Negligence requires plausible allegations of duty, breach, causation, and damages; detailed scientific proof is not required in the complaint, but factual content must link defendants’ conduct to the harm.
- Private nuisance requires a substantial and unreasonable interference with use and enjoyment of land plausibly caused by defendants’ conduct; alleged contamination of a water supply can satisfy the interference element.
- Strict liability for abnormally dangerous activity is assessed under Restatement (Second) of Torts §§ 519–520 factors; whether an activity is abnormally dangerous is context-dependent and may be plausible on the pleadings.
- Fraud and misrepresentation claims must satisfy Rule 9(b) by pleading the circumstances of the alleged fraud with particularity.

## Conclusion

The court applied federal plausibility standards to preserve core contamination-based claims—HSCA, negligence, private nuisance, and a strict-liability abnormally dangerous activity theory—while dismissing or narrowing claims that lacked particularized factual support, particularly fraud-related and other ancillary theories.


Roth v. Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., 919 F. Supp. 2d 476 (M.D. Pa. 2013)