Railroad Commission, he says he felt they didn’t care what he had to say about the matter. He says he couldn’t find an attorney to take his case. As the line of dump trucks grew, Ross became determined and decided to take action alone. By putting enough pressure on state officials, he hoped to force the closure of the disposal site. “If I didn’t stick up for myself, no one was going to,” Ross says. He sits in worn armchair in his front room, wearing carpet slippers. His black Labrador sits at his feet as he gazes out of his window. His house wall and the narrow asphalt road are all that separate him from the 111-acre dump next door. He has no choice, he says, but to watch the quagmire of brown earth and toxic waste being smeared around the landscape by rusty bulldozers.
Denton Record-Chronicle file photo/Al Key
A gas drilling rig across the street from McKenna Park puffs out a cloud of black smoke April 19, 2010, in Denton.
*** Shale gas production requires massive resources — huge swaths of land, giant drilling rigs, countless trucks and many man-hours. Each well is drilled using thousands of barrels of drilling mud and fluids, then “fracked” by pumping between 1 million and 7 million gallons of chemicalladen water to crack the rock and release the gas. For North Texas, drilling horizontally under residential areas and the new fracking technique means that once unobtainable gas is now up for grabs. About 14,000 wells have been drilled in the 23 counties of the Barnett Shale; another 3,300 have been permitted, including new permits to drill in Hamilton County. To deal with the solid waste, the Texas Railroad Commission administers three types of permits for landfarms. A minor permit goes to operations of lowest impact. The minor permit allows a single operator to spread waste from one drilling site on a small area of land, usually about 3 acres. A centralized landfarm, a much larger area of land, allows an operator to spread waste for a number of its drill sites. Both minor dumps and centralized landfarms are typi-
cally issued permits that last for two years. A commercial landfarm can accept waste from multiple operators and many drill sites. Minor permits require a soil test between 30 and 90 days after landfarming, “which limits the amount of waste spread, and include pH and metal limitations that should protect agricultural safety,” says Travis Baer, an engineering specialist with the Railroad Commission. Soil toxicity testing at the landfarm is trusted to the operator because waste disposed under minor permits is considered not necessarily toxic. As a result, the Railroad Commission doesn’t pursue operators if soil tests are late, or nonexistent. Information on minor permits obtained through an open records request shows three regional offices taking widely different approaches in tracking minor permits in their jurisdiction. Not all of them tracked the number of acres affected, or the precise location. Records of soil tests showed up on only a handful of the thousands of permits being tracked. The Abilene office tracks minor permits for the western counties of the Barnett Shale, with about 188,020 barrels of waste on the books for 2009, 216,110 barrels of waste in 2010, and 5,860 barrels so far in