Radioactive Oil and Gas Waste May Lie Beneath a North Texas Elementary School, A 2,500-home Dallas-Fort Worth subdivision and a school have risen atop layers of oil and gas drilling waste. One worker who helped spread the material is speaking out by Justin Nobel, Feb 11, 2026, Truthdig and the Texas Observer
Lee Oldham is on a mission to speak out about the potentially harmful drilling waste that a Texas community has been built upon. (Graphic by Truthdig; images via Justin Nobel, Adobe Stock)
Editor’s note: This story was produced in collaboration by Truthdig and the Texas Observer.
On a cold winter morning in Johnson County, Texas, at the southwestern edge of the booming Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, 52-year-old Lee Oldham stands beside the Pleasant View Elementary School and wonders what the drilling waste he helped lay underneath might mean for the children inside. Surrounding the school is the partially complete 2,500-home Silo Mills development that will supply it with children and that is also built atop drilling waste, according to satellite maps and interviews. The first families moved in two years ago.
“They weren’t telling anyone this was a radioactive material. They told us it was safe,” said Oldham, who worked as a bulldozer operator here from 2009 to 2011, laying waste that he said was generally six inches to a foot deep, but in spots as much as two to three feet. In 2015, Oldham returned to the same area doing reclamation work that involved putting one to two feet of local dirt back over the waste.
Hundreds of homes have already been built in this subdivision and many are occupied, with cars parked in driveways and trampolines in yards. Pleasant View Elementary School is part of the Godley Independent School District and already has about 500 students. The school’s website shows photos of smiling children, a list of upcoming and recent events including chess club meetings, an area spelling bee, field trips and a celebration marking the 100th day of school.
School officials say the developer conducted a “Phase 1 Environmental Site” assessment prior to completing the school in 2022.
“The assessment indicated that no evidence of recognized environmental conditions was identified in connection with the subject property and that no further action was required,” the school district superintendent, Rich Dear, said in a statement provided to Truthdigand the Texas Observerby email. “The Pleasant View Elementary School site was developed following voter approval of Godley ISD’s 2021 bond election and the donation of the property by the developer.”
Students began attending the campus in January 2023.
Dear identified Terra Manna LLC as the site developer and said that the company could provide the assessment. Terra Manna did not reply to questions sent through an online contact form, and phone calls to the company’s main line requesting the Phase I Environmental Site Assessment went unreturned.
Oldham’s concern for the residents of Silo Mills is amplified by his own faltering health. In interviews, he said he suffers from bone deterioration in his jaw and loosened teeth, as well as neck vertebrae that “are fusing together like a 70-year-old woman with severe osteoporosis.” He believes these conditions are connected to his work with oil and gas waste.
“They weren’t telling anyone this was a radioactive material. They told us it was safe.”
After one particular day working with waste in this area 11 years ago, Oldham said a series of horrendous lesions — bright red scaly clusters — erupted across his legs and torso. “They consumed my body in a week’s time,” Oldham said, and they continue to appear unexpectedly. Concentrations of the element radium can be elevated in oil and gas waste, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, creating potential risks for workers that “work directly on top of uncovered waste sites” including “inhalation of radioactive dust.”
Citing facts that are supported by medical research, though doctors have not yet diagnosed the cause for his myriad ailments, Oldham said: “They call radium a bone-seeking carcinogen, and it has absorbed into my bones.” The threat the waste poses to others has inspired him to speak out and tell his story — and to hold a meeting with Johnson County Constable Troy Fuller and an environmental crimes detective named Dana Ames.
“The constable’s office is aware of the complaint, is investigating and is taking it very seriously,” said Ames, who previously held large corporations accountable for spreading “forever chemicals”-laden sewage sludge on farms and fields in Johnson County, a story that received national attention and continues to unfold in federal court.
Oldham’s story begins with the opening of the Barnett Shale, an oil- and gas-rich geological formation that was cracked in the early 2000s using the then-novel intensive drilling method now known as fracking. The Barnett was the first formation in America where these techniques were used, and it marked the inauguration of a fracking boom that would metastasize across the United States and reshape global energy politics. But before any of that came to pass, drillers in Texas had to convince the locals. “Get behind the Barnett,” instructed highway billboards, sponsored by Oklahoma-based driller Chesapeake Energy, with some featuring Texas-born actor Tommy Lee Jones. (Another billboard read: “Barnett Shale Helps Our Schools.”
JFC!!!!! frac’ers and their enablers are evil)
Oldham practically grew up at the controls of a dozer. He operated his first machine at age 6 and was moving dirt by 10. When news of the Barnett Shale came roaring through Johnson County in the mid-2000s, he found an industry in great need of his talent, and he took a job with a local oil and gas service company called Excel Environmental Services, for whom he worked at the Johnson County site where the school now stands.
Excel Oilfield Environmental, founded in 2008, is based in Cleburne, the county seat of Johnson County, according to the Texas secretary of state. A federal Department of Transportation database confirms that the company used the business name of Excel Environmental Services; carried oilfield equipment, saltwater and mud; and has employed 19 drivers. The phone number listed on the page is now out of service, and no one could be immediately reached for comment. Oldham said that Excel is no longer in business.
What many didn’t know was that the fuel-rich black shale could be radioactive.
“I loved oil and gas, and I took pride in the job,” Oldham said. He and a growing legion of workers signed up to join the energy revolution. Many drilling jobs paid six figures, offering a chance to put food on the table and buy a truck or home, all while getting America off of foreign oil. What many didn’t know was that the fuel-rich black shale could be radioactive.
There is “a fair positive relation between oil yield and uranium content,” stated a 1960 report on black shales conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey for the Atomic Energy Commission. The geologists suggested that black shales contained so much uranium they could even be mined for the nuclear fuel, with the oil “a possibly important byproduct.” Drilling horizontally through the shale to tap its fuel would inevitably bring broken-up pieces of it to the surface. These drill cuttings, as they are called, together with drilling muds — a slick chemical-infused mixture that provides lubrication and structural support in drilling a well — form a copious waste stream called drilling waste. This material surges back to the surface as the drill bores down, with each well drilled producing between 1,000 and 3,500 tons.
This drilling waste is too thick to inject underground, as industry does with problematic liquid waste streams such as produced water and flowback. Instead, it is often disposed of in pits, placed into landfills, laid under county roads (“road-spreading”) or spread across farm fields. In Texas, oil and gas companies have been distributing the waste for more than 50 years on land where crops are grown and cows graze, a practice referred to as “land-spreading” or “land-farming.” This last method was used across several hundred acres of land on which Pleasant View Elementary School and the Silo Mills development now sit. In Texas — as well as in Oklahoma and some other states — land-spreading is legal despite the science showing the waste may contain elevated levels of salts, carcinogenic compounds, forever chemicals, heavy metals and radioactivity.
“Drilling mud is a witches’ brew of chemicals,” said Blake Scott, president and CEO of Waste Analytics, a Texas-based firm that provides data on drilling waste. “Society will have to pay for the cleanup, and the company that made all the money just closes up their doors and they’re on down the road. I have been screaming about this forever.”
Scott estimates millions of pounds of drilling waste have been land-spread across the Barnett Shale, and he said, “Johnson County was one of the dumping grounds.”
David Carpenter, co-director of the Institute of Health and the Environment at the University at Albany in New York who is a nationally renowned public health expert, echoed concerns about the North Texas site. “You certainly are going to have all three of the major radioactive elements that can be present in black shale in that waste — uranium, thorium and radium,” he said. “Spreading it around fields then building homes and a school on top does not seem like a rational thing to do.”
The Texas Railroad Commission (RRC), the state’s oil and gas regulator, defines land-spreading as “a method of treatment and disposal of low-toxicity wastes,” which “are spread and mixed into the soils to promote reduction of organic constituents and dilution and attenuation of metals.” The agency describes using “the soil-plant system to provide a safe means of disposal without impairing the potential of the land for future use.” Ya, sure, but the food grown on it will be toxic, as will living, learning and playing on it
The RRC statements echo those made by the industry that the practice is good for the land, even as testing and limits are imposed on salts and, at some larger sites, on heavy metals, hydrocarbons and the radioactive element radium. Indeed! The frac industry and its enablers like AER and RRC are grand and evil liars. In Saskatchewan, companies were headlined in local papers boasting (lying) about how great their toxic waste is for the land. Land agents tell landowners the waste is free fertilizers. Of course, after the toxic dumping is done, landowners are hung with it.
“Drilling mud is a witches’ brew of chemicals.”
However, some federal government data contradicts this rosy view. According to a 1996 Department of Energy report on radioactivity risks posed by the oil and gas industry, land-spreading “presents the highest potential dose to the general public.”
Encana above and below, dumping their waste on the same piece of crop land, above in 2011, below in 2012.
2012: Gas-well waste full of radium
At Rosebud, Alberta, Encana used “land-spreading” to often dump their toxic waste in our high winds, just upwind from my home and the community of Rosebud. On the day I took the photo below, they went off lease and sprayed at me with the waste, I think because they were angry I was filming them. The “spray” reeked of hydrocarbons. My sinuses, throat, eyes and mouth started burning instantly; the burning lasted weeks. My dog Magic was with me (he always insisted on going to haul water with me, and for frac observing and filming sessions). He got sprayed too, became very ill, dying a terrible death less than a year later. Refer to FrackingCanada’s “Home” video below to see some shots of Encana “spreading” their waste at Rosebud. The company did this year after year, again and again, on the same piece of land. Summer 2025, Wheatland County council put this toxic shit into the old Rosebud River to raise the access road to my home (for no fucking reason – except I think to give frac’ers better access to water which Alberta is fast running out of). The shit blew in the winds for months as the construction crew made error after error; even with all windows closed and HEPA filters running 24/7, everything in my house was constantly covered in black sooty shit, no matter how often I cleaned. I don’t want to know what my lungs look like. Regarding the discussion on testing and the dumping in photo below, “concentrations vary.” Ya, no kidding.
It may “result in a total dose that is unacceptable” — on the order of 3,000 millirems per year under the study’s worst-case scenario, or 30 times the public dose limit under current Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules, the report said. Yet drilling waste is considered nonhazardous, thanks to the 1980 Bentsen and Bevill amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
In 2013, researchers at the University of North Texas Health Science Center published the results of a study that tested the waste in containment pits, where material is often held before it is land-spread, in the core area of the Barnett. The researchers discovered that radioactivity levels in one sample “exceeded regulatory guideline values by more than 800 percent.” Placing the material on land, the authors found, can raise radiation levels leading to “contamination of groundwater, soil, animals (domestic and migratory), and humans. … Health complaints related to low-level radiation sickness, common to occupational workers, may be overlooked by medical professionals who do not anticipate an industrial-type exposure to patients living within these communities.”
Encana unlined waste pits at Rosebud, Alberta. Waste management told me companies never use unlined pits for their waste because it’s against regulations. I walked around these pits above often, none were lined. No regulation can makes frac’ing or drilling safe for humans or wildlife because companies are only interested in money, which inspires them to break the law consistently as regulators and courts look the other way and punish the harmed.
Lead co-author Alisa Rich, an environmental toxicologist specializing in occupational exposures, called the report “one of the most illuminating papers that ever hit the oil and gas industry” and said the industry would rather people not know about these risks.
“It’s common knowledge that in the oil and gas industry, as in every type of mining, there are elevated levels of radioactivity,” Rich said. “Coming from a toxicology perspective, there are multiple avenues of exposure: inhalation, ingestion, dermal exposure.” Adverse health outcomes would include the same type of symptoms that Oldham has been experiencing, she said, “including effects on bone, blood, lungs, teeth and skin.”
After Encana illegally frac’d directly into the aquifers that supply my well, I suffered a similar rash, for 6 weeks, with periodic recurrences. My rash was more rectangular. The pain was unbearable. It was not itchy. A doctor said she thought it looked like I had bathed in industrial chemicals. I had not, and had not changed any of the soaps in my house and had not travelled anywhere.
Last month, 13 years after that report was issued, a former Department of Energy scientist named Yuri Gorby took several soil samples from the right-of-way beside Silo Mills Parkway, a few hundred yards north of the new elementary school. Some samples were taken using an auger in order to gather material several feet below the surface.
Testing for radium was done by Sheldon Landsberger, a nuclear engineer at the University of Texas at Austin’s Nuclear Engineering Teaching Lab. “From the samples we have tested, the levels we are seeing are elevated, but below the 5 picocuries per gram regulatory limit,” Landsberger said.
An EPA document from 2000 regarding radioactivity-contaminated superfund sites indicates soil standards that trigger cleanups for radium are 5 picocuries per gram for soil at the surface and 15 picocuries per gram for the subsurface, which are relatively low levels and demonstrates that even minor upticks in radium can be cause for concern. Landsberger suggested a more thorough analysis is needed in order to determine where radioactivity levels may be highest, background radioactivity levels for the area, and how the waste has been profiled in Railroad Commission records.
“Based on what you find, it should be considered a dump site.”
Gorby also argued that extensive tests are needed given the residential use of the site and the presence of an elementary school. “Eighteen inches of soil is a Band-Aid,” Gorby said, referring to the approximate amount of dirt that Oldham helped lay at the location. “You have a known source of radiological materials that has been remediated with a foot and a half of dirt. You should not be putting crops there, and you should definitely not be putting homes and a school. What is needed is a complete hydrogeological assessment of this site. … Based on what you find, it should be considered a dump site.”
Over time, the radioactive gas radon, which comes from radium that is naturally occurring in the earth and would be expected to be elevated in areas spread with waste containing black shale drill cuttings, could build up in basements and lower levels of homes and buildings, Carpenter, the public health expert, said. “Just because samples are not immediately radioactive doesn’t mean there isn’t a radiological concern here. Concentrations vary, and you are spreading radioactive material that is going to last for centuries.”
The Silo Mills development, an 840-acre master-planned development, is a joint venture of Terra Manna, the Southlake real estate developer, and a private equity firm, Prophet Equity Partnership, according to corporate websites. Neither company responded to requests for comment made by phone, email and online contact form.
“Terra Manna focuses on the acquisition of problem properties and adds value to them by overcoming obstacles, such as flooding, access, drainage, utilities, and zoning,” reads the company’s website. Prophet Equity boasts of using “a Holistic Value Creation” strategy to “drive dramatic value creation.”
The Silo Mills development was touted in an Oct. 25, 2021, article in the Cleburne Times-Review, republished on the Prophet Equity website, that described the groundbreaking for the project that would provide “affordable quality housing” for the booming Dallas-Fort Worth region. Homes are presently being listed as starting in the $430,000 range. Resident amenities include a resort-style swimming and entertainment complex, playgrounds, trails and a fishing pond. The crown of the development, according to Silo Mills development website: Pleasant View Elementary School, “open to the young minds of Silo Mills!”
The school was designed by Langan, a multinational engineering and environmental consulting firm headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey. The company did not respond to questions sent through an online contact form regarding whether it knew the school was built on a site containing oil and gas waste or if testing was conducted.
“Did the developers know it was there? Did they convey it to home buyers?”
On a computer screen in his Longview, Texas, office, Scott, the Waste Analytics CEO, used the “history” function on Google Earth to show how the land under the school and Silo Mills development was farmland in the mid-2000s. In 2009, land-farming operations appear to begin, and by the mid-2010s evidence appears of waste being spread across the land, organized into rectangular lots called cells. In 2021, construction on the school commences, and by 2024 the school appears complete as the 2,500-home development takes shape.
“There are multiple questions from the real estate side of things that should be answered,” Scott said. “Did the developers know it was there? Did they convey it to home buyers? And if so, what type of language did they use to cover themselves? Because it is almost guaranteed that, on some level, the liability was severed and passed along to homeowners.”
The RRC has not replied to questions about whether it is legal to build homes and schools on top of drilling waste, whether or not the agency thinks the practice is safe, and how many sites like this it believes may exist across the state.
In his drives across the state, Hawk Dunlap, a well control specialist with 35 years of oil field experience who is currently running as a Republican for a seat on the RRC, said he has discovered “huge gaps between how things are permitted, and how things are handled.”
“There have been a lot of dropped balls,” said Dunlap, “and this problem is going to continue as the population of Texas keeps growing and the suburbs expand.”
Oldham still operates heavy equipment, though no longer in the field of oil and gas. He’s doing his best to hold his life together, but he said his health conditions make pursuing his profession increasingly difficult.
“My body is going downhill,” he said, blaming exposure to the drilling waste. “Yet my body is how I earn a living.” Oldham said that physicians he has consulted generally have ignored his claims of being exposed to elevated levels of radioactivity while land-spreading oil and gas industry waste. He has no diagnosis confirming his suspicions.
Oldham first began to believe he’d been poisoned in 2011, when he said a local scrapyard took the rare step of rejecting worn-out metal tracks from a small piece of earth-moving equipment that he’d been using to plow the drilling waste into the land. That equipment, which had been used only to land-spread drilling waste at the land-farm in Johnson County, set off a Geiger counter at the scrapyard, he said.
“We check every load that comes in” with a radiation detector, said Willie Fleece of A&A Iron and Metal in Cleburne, where Oldham said the tracks were rejected. Fleece did not recall the specific incident, but he said the shop was very familiar with the pervasiveness of oilfield radioactivity.
“Radiation could be in anything,” he said. “It could be in the pipe, it could be in the soil, it could be in the water. Radiation absorbs into things” — so Oldham’s story was plausible to him.
Soon, Oldham was trawling scientific literature and finding decades-old geology papers that seemed to back up his suspicions.
If the waste was radioactive, reasoned Oldham, what about his co-workers who spent 10 to 12 hours a day cleaning it out of trucks — who were daily cloaked in the stuff without knowledge of or appropriate protection against the toxic substance?
Still working for the now-defunct Excel at the time, he mentioned his concerns to bosses and requested radiological testing, he said, and was shipped off to a menial job in Arkansas. Former company officials could not be located to confirm Oldham’s account. He never filed for worker’s compensation, nor did he contact the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration or any Texas regulatory agency because, he said, “I was in a state of fear — I was in survival mode.”
“The dirty secret needs to be brought into the light.”
His concerns resurfaced when he noticed that the elementary school was being built on the same land he had spread with waste. “It was bad enough houses were being built on it,” said Oldham, “but when I seen an elementary school, my stomach just dropped.”
In an interview, Carpenter said the inhalation of radioactive dust is “absolutely” a concern for workers like Oldham. “When there are hazards that haven’t been completely acknowledged and identified, the workers are the ones most at risk.”
Oldham remains convinced that the problem is much bigger than just his story. In November 2014, residents in Denton, two counties north of Johnson, voted to ban fracking, citing concerns over toxic pollution and alleged links to cancers and other illnesses. This was an extraordinary move for any community in oil and gas country, let alone one in Texas. But the following year, Texas House Bill 40 neutralized the ban by granting the state exclusive jurisdiction over the oil and gas industry, and additional restrictive legislation followed.
Oldham regrets not being part of that key political moment. “I was in Arkansas and totally separated from anything happening down in Texas, and because of everything that had happened to me I was a little gun-shy. But now, knowing what is happening to my health, and seeing kids and young families on top of this waste, I had to speak up,” he said.
“The dirty secret needs to be brought into the light.”
***
HOME 7:45 Min. by FrackingCanada
Waste dumping in the Lochend, NW of Calgary also on cropland:
Near Didsbury:
“Contaminated soil is being used due to its cheapness.” FFS. It’s wildly windy in Alberta, most days. Think of what we breath, day in, day out.
Science be damned, EnCana wants to inject waste into drinking water aquifer
2003: Alberta Landspraying While Drilling (LWD) Review One of the companies doing the waste dumping during this review, was, you guessed it: Encana/Ovintiv
… Mudpacks from poorly conducted land spray operations kill native prairie and take years to ameliorate.
Problem land sprays have been left with inadequate clean up.
… Industry has failed to meet mapping and record keeping requirements. Mapping has been non-existent or completely inaccurate with examples of company maps with incorrect GPS coordinates and sites that have received double spray applications over the same land base.
… In the scope of the last eight years, average precipitation to severe drought conditions have been experienced. During this period, staff have observed more evidence of LWD materials persisting on rangeland vegetation for prolonged periods. Drought conditions exacerbate the problem of residue build up.
… The AEUB[after hiring PIs to spy on innocent Albertans and breaking the law, gov’t changed it to ERCB; after my lawsuit went public, gov’t changed it to AER]had conducted drilling waste audits on 51 LWD sites throughout the Province. The information (paper) audit consisted of a review of information supplied from companies on disposals conducted between 2001 and 2003. Of the 51 audits, eight passed….
…
Discussion and Summary
The review of the LWD file paper trail and of field inspection reports from the Medicine Hat office highlighted a number of failures and problems, which were common to both review components. The most common problem was that of LWD projects being applied outside of the approved area. … Finally, siting problems were common to both review components with LWD materials being applied through watercourses, on high wildlife habitat like sagebrush cover and on fragile sand dune sites. … The file review and field observations revealed that on a high percentage of sites, LWD is not being conducted according to the guidelines and is having a negative impact on native range. [Lots of galling data tables included in the review]