For the better part of a decade, Rev. David Hudson has been
fighting to uncover what’s polluting the water in his home town.
Hudson moved to DeBerry, Texas, a poor, predominantly black
community straddling the Louisiana border in 2002.
DeBerry lies in the heart of the Haynesville Shale natural
gas development. When Hudson moved in, the area was littered with injection
wells used to deposit waste from oil and gas drilling deep beneath the earth.
The well sites – often located just a few yards from
residents’ doorsteps – were busy industrial zones clogged with truck
traffic and holding tanks. Oil stains spattered the ground around pipes where
waste was pumped underground.
Hudson said he soon noticed that his well water had a
metallic flavor and a sharp smell. Congregants in his church told him theirs was
cloudy and salty to taste, leaving rings in toilets and sinks. They said they
had been complaining to Texas officials since 1996, yet no one had
investigated.
“Our cries, they just fall on deaf ears,” Hudson said.
Shortly after moving to DeBerry, Hudson sent water from his
well and four of his neighbors’ to be tested for pollutants. The results showed
high levels of chlorides, chemicals found in drilling waste, a federal report
said.
According to the report, Hudson shared the tests with Basic
Energy Services, the company that operated the waste wells nearby, which sent
them to the Railroad Commission of Texas, the agency that regulates disposal
wells for oil and gas drilling waste.
Nearly a year after receiving the material, commission
officials tested DeBerry’s water themselves, confirming that it contained
arsenic, cadmium, lead, benzene and other substances. The contamination was
extensive enough that they advised DeBerry residents not to drink their water,
leaving Hudson and others to purchase bottled water.
In 2004, Texas officials ordered the injection wells in
DeBerry to be permanently shut down. A series of 30-foot monitoring wells were
drilled to test for leaking waste around the area, and one deeper well was
drilled to take samples from 170 feet below. None of the data collected enabled
the Railroad Commission to determine the cause of the pollution, however.
To Hudson and others, there were powerful clues in the
commission’s own records, which showed that one of the injection wells had a
history of problems. In 2000, a Louisiana trucking company illegally dumped
thousands of gallons of hazardous waste from an oil refinery into it, material
far more dangerous than the well was allowed to accept under government regulations.
Five years later, a mechanical
integrity test detected a crack in the well structure that allowed waste to
leak.
“Produced water was observed flowing from between the
surface casing and the production casing,” a Railroad Commission official wrote
to Basic Energy Services in Feb. 2006. “RRC staff requests that Basic
immediately evaluate the need for further environmental investigation of
groundwater.”
Still, federal and state regulators struggled to obtain a
definitive answer about what caused the pollution.
According to a 2007
report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general, the Railroad Commission had a difficult time getting Basic
Energy to cooperate. The agency ordered the company to drill additional deep
disposal wells to monitor DeBerry’s water, but the company refused.
“Basic
Energy Services informed the State that it did not
believe the contamination was its responsibility, and since the freshwater well
had been plugged, deeper groundwater testing could not be conducted,” the inspector
general’s report said.
Basic Energy Services did not return a call requesting
comment.
The Railroad Commission told ProPublica that it had done everything it could to solve the mystery.
“The commission investigation did not
identify a large plume of hydrocarbon and saltwater in the groundwater that
connected the former… facility to residents’ water wells,” said Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for the agency.
“Commission staff address all water well complaints promptly and base their
decisions on science and fact.”
Unsatisfied with the state’s progress, federal EPA officials
took over the investigation in 2005 under the Superfund program, ordering more water
sampling around the injection wells. For the first time, a decade after the saga
began, the EPA also began supplying bottled water to DeBerry residents.
By 2007, however, the EPA also concluded that injection
wells played no part in DeBerry’s water contamination.
“A range of surface activities including septic systems, surface spills
and/or agricultural and domestic practices caused the ground water
contamination,” an EPA spokesperson told ProPublica in an April, 2012 email.
“Comprehensive review of the admin record for the injection wells in question
indicated no ground water contamination from the wells.”
The EPA declined to allow any of its staff in Texas to be
interviewed for this story, sending written responses to several questions.
The 2007 inspector general report suggested the EPA’s
conclusion may have been premature, however.
“Region 6 personnel told us they
believe evidence shows the contamination did not originate from the injection
well,” the inspector general’s report states. “Neither the State nor EPA has
conclusively determined the source of the contamination… The full extent of the
contamination, its lateral limits, its depth, and its migration patterns or
movement along the groundwater plume is not known.”
Earlier this month, EPA officials
returned to DeBerry to sample five public drinking water wells, in “response to
community concerns,” according to a statement sent to ProPublica by the agency
Wednesday. The agency did not respond to questions about whether it was
reconsidering its previous conclusions.
Hudson has little hope that the
renewed scrutiny will yield closure.
“We will always have a problem proving the contaminants are
coming from injection wells. You’d have to have a camera underneath the ground
somewhere,” Hudson said. “Even if they find oil and gas carcinogens in the
water, they are going to find another way to say it came from somewhere else.
Nobody wants to say what the cause was.”
