"In total, the Dallas-Fort Worth area is now host to somewhere between 20 and 60 million tons of hazardous waste, dredged up by the 21,000 oil and gas wells that call the place home. As fracking involves blasting through shale teeming with naturally toxic materials to find oil and gas, that waste is surely brimming with a noxious potpourri of heavy metals and radionuclides, as well as PFAS introduced during the drilling process."
"Nearly 500 elementary school children in Texas play on fields where a whistleblower says he once spread tons of radioactive fracking waste - a noxious hell-brew he believes melted the bones in his own jaw. Lee Oldham is a 52-year-old former waste disposal worker from Cleburne, Texas, on the southern outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth. In an interview with Texas-based publication the Barbed Wire, Oldham detailed how he went from waste handler to corporate whistleblower, and the horrifying apathy of state politicians that led him there."
Lee Oldham is a 52-year-old former waste disposal worker from Cleburne, Texas, who dumped drilling mud and contaminated fracking dirt into open fields across North Texas. Companies routinely avoided official disposal procedures because those required extra paperwork, costly land designations, and more labor, choosing instead to spread sludge on empty fields. A 2016 audit found the state oil and gas regulator offered little deterrent effect against such dumping. The Dallas-Fort Worth area now holds an estimated 20 to 60 million tons of hazardous waste from about 21,000 wells, containing heavy metals, radionuclides, and PFAS. Medical records show serious bone degradation in Oldham, and nearly 500 elementary school children play on affected fields.
Read at Futurism
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]