Whistleblower Says Radioactive Fracking Waste Site Melted His Jaw. Now There’s an Elementary School There.

EXCLUSIVE

Sure, Lee Oldham told me, he had spread radioactive fracking waste on Texas farmland. But in his defense, he never in a million years thought anyone would put a school there.

We were standing in the frigid wind on a field in Johnson County. It was January, and 52-year-old Oldham wore a heavy flannel sweatshirt pulled tight over his belly. 

In the early 2010s, when the region was ground zero for the biggest fossil fuel production boom in human history, Oldham worked in waste disposal for a company that helped get rid of the millions of pounds of solid waste that came out of tens of thousands of natural gas wells about two miles underground. 

That work, Oldham believes, exposed him to a witches’ brew of chemicals that, even now, likely lurked inside the fabric of his cells. His doctors have diagnosed him with injuries consistent with radiation exposure. Though he has no definitive proof of the cause, he believes the dust he inhaled during his time in the land farm melted the bones in his jaw and neck.

He also believes it made him an accessory to what he now views as an enormous crime — albeit one that was technically legal. 

According to the nonprofit FracTracker — which shares maps, data, and analysis on the oil and gas industry — there were at least 21,000 oil and gas wells in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. Most of them sit in and around residential neighborhoods. 

Each one of those underground wells produced between 1,000 and 2,000 tons of solid waste — sometimes as much as 3,000 or 4,000 tons as the decade wore on — laden with PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as “forever chemicals”), radiation, and other toxic contaminants. 

In total, somewhere between 20 million and 60 million tons of hazardous waste were dumped in and around Dallas-Fort Worth — in the very hinterlands the city is now expanding into.

But the public has little idea where any of it went. 

It could be in your mother’s backyard, or, in the case of this story, under the playground at your child’s school.

Near a square of concrete in the midst of the field in Johnson County, where waste trucks used to drop off, Oldham held a small black box at ground level to track the radioactive particles pinging through the topsoil: a telltale sign of the presence of fracking waste, which is commonly disposed of by being spread on soil.

A hundred yards away stood a low-slung building with a roof like a ski ramp: Pleasant View Elementary School. The school, which serves nearly 500 students from Pre-Kindergarten to 5th grade, is part of Silo Mills, a 2,500-home “fresh, new residential community” that opened in 2023, offering residents an affordable slice of country living, just half an hour from downtown Fort Worth. About two-thirds of students at Pleasant View are considered economically disadvantaged.

Again, the waste — drilling mud and bits of subterranean rock pulled up by drilling rigs in a part of the quest for oil — tends to be toxic: radioactive and impregnated with cancer-causing chemicals, in particular high levels of PFAS, a massive family of hormone-disrupting, never-dissolving “forever chemicals” that are essential for fracking.  

At ground level, Oldham’s detector began to beep faster: a sign of something that those residents hadn’t been informed of. Those beeps showed something below the surface was emitting higher than normal levels of radioactive particles. While the levels weren’t dangerous — at least, not in that spot, on the other side of the topsoil — they were a small piece of evidence in favor of his story that developers had built a whole community on a toxic waste site he’d helped cover up.

His claims are now being probed by Detective Dana Ames, an investigator with Johnson County. She’s a rare rural Texas law enforcement officer with experience handling complex environmental crime cases, and she’s trying to determine whether they have a public health crisis on their hands.

The next step will be to drill into the topsoil to take soil samples, looking for traces of dangerously radioactive materials, as well as PFAS. Over the coming weeks, that soil will be tested by labs specializing in environmental contamination — yielding evidence that could be used in lawsuits or, ultimately, criminal charges. 

For now, however, the constable’s first priority is to see if the hundreds of people living in the development are in any danger. If the levels come back normal, then residents can breathe a sigh of relief. 

But they can also consider themselves to have dodged a bullet. Because the most troubling part of Oldham’s story are the parts that are legal and well-understood: For decades, Texas let drillers spread staggering amounts of radioactive and PFAS-ridden waste on the fringes of the nation’s fourth largest metro area — while making it virtually impossible for the public to know where.

Meaning that, as America’s fourth-largest metro area expands — the region has added more than a million people since 2015 — an unknown number of people are now living and playing, in blissful ignorance, on top of what may be toxic waste.

“The whole thing operated on the honor system,” Oldham said. “And the only honor you can bank on in the oil and gas industry is there ain’t nothing honorable being done.”

‘Are You Guys Nuts?’

At the dawn of the 21st Century, oil and gas drillers faced terminal declines in fossil fuel production — a fact that caused leading newspapers “to panic about a world running out of oil” and Texas Republicans like George W. Bush and Rick Perry to throw their influence behind the solar and wind industries.

This awful fate was avoided thanks to a cocktail of technologies that became known by the not-very-flattering shorthand of fracking, which reached its first flowering in the outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth.

Faced with depleted reservoirs, the early frackers like George Mitchell looked even deeper to the layers of “source rock” that the oil and gas that America burned in the 20th Century had come from.

By figuring out how to blast open these layers of carbon-rich black shale, the frackers threw the peak oil saga into reverse, paving the way for the flood of cheap gas that powered cloud computing, fueling a new age of the American energy empire, and funding the rise of the modern hard-line right.

This came with significant risks. Scientists and oilmen have known for decades that the source rock is radioactive. 

Three hundred million years before my site visit with Oldham, the land that would one day host the Dallas Fort-Worth metro area lay at the bottom of a warm, shallow sea.

Year by year, huge blooms of plankton and algae died and sank into the deep silt at the bottom of the sea. Over millions of years, they were pressed by their own weight and baked by the slow cooker of the earth into a flat, stony cake of oily shale.

As the seas rose and disappeared, radioactive uranium and thorium from the ground also settled by the ton down in the muck of the shallow sea.

It was undisturbed until the past 20 years, when a two mile-long drill bit cut them from the surface and dragged them back into the light — the first of many waste products on the path to natural gas.

The waste that comes out of the wells are full of toxins.

There’s the organic trash — naturally-occurring chemicals like benzene, which blasts apart the body’s ability to make blood. Forever chemicals like PFOS and PFOA lubricate drill bits cutting through oily rock — but also disrupt our hormone systems — the chemical language that all living things use for their cells and organs to talk to each other — as well as the immune defenses, energy processing, and DNA-formation essential to all complex life on Earth.

And then there are the radioactive elements like radium, which under the circumstances of oil and gas extraction can reach levels hundreds or thousands of times more concentrated — and dangerous — than the normal, low levels of radiation that form a background hum to life on Earth.

Even when those levels are low, “we don’t know what happens when we lay it out in a horizontal landscape, as water moves it, and air moves it,” said Justin Nobel, an investigative journalist who has been published in Rolling Stone and specializes in the toxins that come out of oilfields. He is also the author of “Petroleum-238,” a defining book on radiation and fracking waste.

Scientists have long warned this is dangerous. When John Stolz, a Duquesne University microbiologist who studies fracking waste in Pennsylvania’s Ohio Valley region region, first heard about Texas companies doing landfarming — the technical name for spreading solid drilling waste on farmland — around the Barnett Shale, his first reaction was, “Are you guys nuts?” 

The Barnett Shale was the oil rich geologic layer below North Texas that served as ground zero for the state’s fracking boom.

Radium, he told me, is sticky — lay it out in a field or put it in a waste pit, and water will tend to wash out soil and salts, leaving an ever-more-concentrated product behind: something like a natural reactor, releasing a radioactive plume for thousands of years.

But for regulators, fracking waste is, by definition, safe. Since the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency has treated oil and gas waste as “non-hazardous” by definition, allowing it to be spread on farmland without treatment. 

And the Texas Railroad Commission — the state’s confoundingly-named and notoriously underfunded oil and gas regulator — left operators to, as Oldham said, “self-police.” They didn’t require oil and gas operators to test their waste for radiation or PFAS or require them to line waste pits with plastic to keep contaminants from seeping into the water supply.

They also didn’t offer public maps — or in most cases, even keep track themselves — of where the waste was going. 

And while the agency forbade polluting Texas’ land and waters, their slapdash record keeping and weak penalties offered “little deterrent effect” to bad industry actors, according to a blistering 2016 audit by the Texas legislature’s Sunset Advisory Committee.

That meant drillers with radioactive waste — and drill cuttings are radioactive by definition — could either take extra time, paperwork and expense to do things the right way and send it out to a designated hazardous waste landfill, despite the fact that those loads had almost no chance of encountering a state agent with a Geiger counter.

Or, he said, “You could just let it slide, and go out there and dump it on the ground.”

‘This Stuff Is Radioactive’

Back in the days of the Barnett Shale gas boom — the first frenzied phase of Texas fracking between 2002 and 2009 — Oldham worked in waste disposal at a Johnson County landfarm: effectively a spread‑out dump where drilling muds and contaminated soils were plowed into open fields and left for microbes, air, and sunlight to slowly break down the pollution.

In practice, that meant Oldham — like other workers at sites across North Texas — was spreading thousands of truckloads of drilling waste on farmland. Vacuum trucks would discharge their loads of drill cuttings and lubricating mud, and Oldham and his crew would spread the trash across the field to dry out, then plow it under: dump, dry, repeat.

In 2012, Oldham made an unpleasant discovery. After the worn-out steel tracks for his skid-steer had been sent to a scrap yard, he overheard two other workers saying that the yard had rejected them because they were radioactive.

“Those tracks were put on new,” Oldham said. “They’d only ever touched the drilling mud.” 

That’s when he started to put other things together: That the scrap yards in the Barnett Shale region all had Geiger counters. That a supervisor yelled at a young roughneck who was spread-eagled on a pipe to get his ass up if he ever wanted to have kids.

All those metal objects, Oldham realized, had a common denominator — they had been touching the drilling mud and Barnett Shale cuttings. 

“I’m sitting going, ‘This stuff is radioactive, and we’re blowing it out on the ground,” he added.

In 2012, he asked his boss if it would be possible to get personal protective equipment and radiation tests for the crew. After that, he told The Barbed Wire, everything changed. His boss told him he was “too smart for my own good” and put him on what he called “a punishment job” at an isolated ranch. Then men in a pickup ran his car into a boulder on his way home from the job, he said. 

He left Johnson County, he said, in fear for his life.

Three years later, in 2015, he mended fences with his bosses and came back to help with the Railroad Commission-overseen project to clean up and shut down the mudfarm. 

Once while on that job, in the July heat, the air filters on his bulldozer filled with the dust rising off the dried-out drilling mud. Cleaning them out, he got a faceful of dust, he told The Barbed Wire, and he was laid out for days with agonizing pain in his throat. 

In the coming years, his teeth began getting loose in his jaw, and in 2023, the dentist found that his jaw bone had become seriously degraded. An orthopedic surgeon told him that — at 51 years old — his vertebrae looked like that of a 70-year-old woman with osteoporosis. (The Barbed Wire reviewed medical records that corroborated Oldham’s account.)

While Nobel, the oil and gas journalist, said establishing direct causal connection to these health scares lies at the frontiers of science, these are characteristic impacts of radiation poisoning. Radium — which is in the same periodic table column as calcium — is what’s known as a bone-seeking carcinogen, which means the body inadvertently binds it right into bone, where it begins to kill the cells that form and repair bone.

There is suggestive evidence that Barnett wells are a source of persistent radiation pollution into surrounding communities: In 2020, a study in the scientific journal Nature found that Fort Worth-area communities downwind of fracked wells had airborne radiation up to 40% above average. Fort Worth, which has more than a million people living in the danger zone of fracking sites, also had the highest number of upwind oil and gas sites of any city in the country.

And a 2023 study found that in the early years of the fracking boom, Tarrant County — the home of Fort Worth — had 60% more children born with serious birth defects than would have been expected for its population. Hauntingly, this data only went till 2014, though the county remains a hotbed of new drilling, and there has been no comprehensive attempt to clean up waste.

Soon after Oldham received his diagnosis, Pleasant View Elementary, the school built on the mud farm Oldham said he had helped bury, opened its doors. Oldham decided he could no longer keep quiet. He began posting on Facebook, which brought him to the attention of Detective Ames. 

He was lucky. Almost uniquely among oil and gas whistleblowers, Oldham had made his claims in a county where officials, all staunch Republicans, were willing to dig.

Watching Their Animals Die

Ames saw Oldham’s posts in the midst of an entirely separate environmental crisis.

In 2023, Johnson County made headlines around the world comparing the situation to Chernobyl when a plume of PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” began killing fish and cattle on two farms outside the town of Grandview.

As county officials would discover, the poison had originated in sewage from the Fort Worth water treatment system that the farmer’s neighbors had spread on their fields as fertilizer.

This practice was, like spreading fracking waste on farmland, entirely legal even though the sewage was dangerously high in PFAS. PFAS are ubiquitous in fracking fluid. While no source for the PFAS in the solids has been proven, it’s a fact that it came from a water treatment plant in an area of Tarrant County that’s being actively and extensively fracked.

We know this because Johnson County did its own investigation — outlined in a civil complaint — in the face of indifference, and even opposition, by state regulators and industry lobbyists in Austin. Through that process, Johnson County’s Detective Ames learned more than she ever cared to about PFAS, a vast family of artificial oil-like substances treated with fluorine to give them exceptional stability — the reason that the Teflon on a nonstick pan doesn’t burn off like cooking oil. They stick tightly and irreparably to fat molecules like a drop of cooked oil dissolving on the surface of a greasy burger.

Tens of thousands of varieties of PFAS can hitch a ride into virtually any system in the body, causing insidious and prolonged effects. One 2025 study in Nature found that PFAS altered the sperm of male mice, making them less likely to be able to conceive a viable embryo, and raising the risk that embryo would have birth defects. 

One such defect: the inability to have healthy children themselves. Those PFAS-induced changes in sperm can also impact the fertility of the next generation of males — and the next, and so on — said Dana Sheinhaus, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin whose research specializes in PFAS and male fertility.

In her lab, she said, “we are looking at the children and the grandchildren [of affected individuals], and we are seeing changes in those fertility genes.” Male fertility, she noted, is falling relentlessly year by year — an accelerating drop some researchers have linked to fossil fuels and chemicals made from them, like PFAS.

These studies raise the possibility that men, and particularly oil workers, exposed to today’s contaminants — or, say, boys playing in the dirt of Pleasant View Elementary — may leave their children or grandchildren unable to have healthy kids of their own.

It can also cause more immediate problems for this generation. 

For the Colemans, one of the families whose farms had been contaminated, it meant two agonizing years of watching their animals die one by one as their bodies and nervous systems failed — their cattle beginning to drool; their careful gait turning sickening and scissor-like; their eyes failing. Once gentle cattle began to attack them. 

“I had a yearling come straight for me with all her might trying to take me out,” Tony Coleman told The Barbed Wire. The liver of one stillborn calf showed levels of one PFAS-family chemical at more than 100,000 times the level the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe.

The story broke amid a national wave of mass litigation around PFAS, and in its wake New York banned the practice of spreading biosolids on farmland, and Minnesota required them to be tested for PFAS.

That was the kind of change Johnson County officials — naively, two officials told me they now believe — expected in Texas. Ames turned her results over to Texas environmental regulators, and Johnson County officials asked Gov. Greg Abbott for a disaster declaration that would allow the farmers, like the Coleman family, financial support to leave their ruined farm. But Abbott never signed it.

To the consternation of both the Coleman family and county officials, Texas state officials have refused to act. In the 2025 legislative session, a slate of bipartisan bills aimed at requiring PFAS testing of biosolids all failed — some, as The Texas Tribune reported, under direct opposition from the oil and gas industry, which relies on both PFAS and land application as part of its business model. 

So when Ames saw people on Facebook beginning to panic over Oldham’s allegations, she reached out and visited the site with him. She told me she could not speak specifically about Oldham’s allegations, considering the pending investigation, beyond saying that the county was involved in site testing of its own. 

And her time in environmental enforcement, from cleaning up illegally dumped construction waste and mattresses from county roadways to the Coleman’s case, had taught her two iron laws of industry.

First, that Texas state regulators have refused to force polluting industries to clean up their mess. Second, that no one industry cleans up its mess unless it is forced to. 

Ames is waiting on preliminary results of her testing, which will take weeks; more comprehensive ones will take longer, assuming the county can come up with the money to pay to conduct them. If the 2,500 homes sold at Silo Mills turn out to have been built — without the knowledge of their buyers — on tainted land, a wave of litigation looms; for now, she is trying to determine if they have a public health crisis on their hands.

There’s a still-more-troubling connection between Oldham’s allegations and the PFAS case. County Commissioner Larry Wooley said that county officials only knew about the PFAS because the Coleman family, staunch Christians, had come forward rather than quietly selling off their tainted cattle and their contaminated land —  despite having no legal obligation to do so.

“Everybody knows that Tony’s not selling those cattle, and he’s taking a huge financial hit because of that, because of his morals, that he doesn’t want to introduce that stuff into the food chain,” Wooley said. “But a lot of people weren’t concerned about that.”

Wooley has become something of a Texas leader in the fight against PFAS contamination, and said that to this day — thanks to the expense, opposition from biosolid-using farmers, and the lack of interest from state leaders — only Johnson and Ellis County have done any testing at all.

One unsettling conclusion he drew from this experience was that his county wasn’t unique in having a serious contamination problem. It was unique in investigating it. 

Texas legislators did consider some reform — requiring drillers to notify landowners when waste pits are dug or requiring pits to be universally lined. But as the Texas Tribune reported, the oil and gas industry called the measures “too stringent,” and they failed.

Two reforms the legislature did pass point to a wider problem. One reform, which safety advocates say was needed, will for the first time in state history require oil and gas companies to register the location of their waste pits. But that rule only takes effect going forward: underscoring the extent to which Texans simply do not, and perhaps cannot, know where the staggering amount of waste created in the fracking boom is buried.

The other measure was less welcome: a bipartisan push to allow oil and gas companies to dispose of treated fracking fluid in Texas rivers and on Texas farmland. It also protects any company or landowners who sells, treats or applies this water — which has been proposed as irrigation for crops — from litigation in most cases. And though fracking fluid is ridden with PFAS, the law does not require it to be tested for PFAS.

That’s caused a rift among Johnson County Republicans. “If I’m elected, we need to get that bill thrown out,” said Mary Louise Wells, a Johnson County child safety advocate running to replace state Rep. Helen Kerwin. While Kerwin herself was the only statehouse Republican to vote against the fracking waste disposal bill, recent campaign finance filings show that she received more than $55,000 in cash — and $26,500 in push polling support — from Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLR), a principal group advocating for it. 

Those donations represented around 60% of Kerwin’s total fundraising that period.

For Oldham, the prospect of liquid fracking waste — even if treated — spread on Texas crops contributed to his sense of mission. 

He had returned, he said, to make what he had done right. He had grown up in Cleburne, he told me, and he knew the men who had done this. “If they could walk around knowing what they did to me — well, they have to look at me. And know I’m looking right back at them.”