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.
Since the fracking boom of the 2000s, Oldham made his living dumping drilling mud and contaminated fracking dirt into open fields across North Texas. Though the Texas state oil and gas regulator technically forbade companies from dumping their sludge wherever they pleased, a 2016 audit found the regulator offered “little deterrent effect” to prevent it.
Instead of disposing of the fracking sludge the official way — which involved extra paperwork, expensive land designations, and tons of extra man-hours — Oldham’s company, like many others, chose to work it into empty fields.
“The whole thing operated on the honor system,” Oldham told the Barbed Wire. “And the only honor you can bank on in the oil and gas industry is there ain’t nothing honorable being done.”
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.
As Oldham’s medical records, which were viewed by Barbed Wire show, the 52-year-old’s jaw bone has become “seriously degraded” following his stint in the oil-waste trade. His vertebrae had also broken down, another telltale sign of radiation poisoning.
While the waste sites would be dangerous enough as tracts of farmland — plenty of which have sprouted up on former dumping grounds — one particular site Oldham showed Barbed Wire is located under a brand-new suburban development. Called “Silo Mills,” the community hosts some 2,500 homes just 30 minutes away from downtown Fort Worth.
It also boasts Pleasant View Elementary School, a Pre-K to 5th grade school building built on a field where Oldham and his co-workers used to dump fracking waste.
Oldham left his previous employer after he says his questions about radioactive waste made him a target for retaliation. He has now started sounding the alarm on Facebook, drawing the attention of local law enforcement.
Whether the authorities uncover a verifiable public health threat to the new town of Silo Mills remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure: with radioactive waste in play, it’ll be thousands of years before the area surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth fully recovers from the fracking boom.
More on radioactivity: Worker Falls Into Nuclear Reactor, Drinks a Little “Cavity Water”
