Buried Secrets
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A lot of people have gotten rich on oil and gas in this state – God bless Texas, but what happens when those old plugged oil wells start leaking a cocktail of dangerous chemicals? It’s a question the folks at Chevron refuse to answer, but the cases of alleged environmental damage and sickness demand an answer for all the BURIED SECRETS being uncovered.
“Just to show you something, the Beverley Hillbillies see the oil sheen on the top of the ground?” said Kerry Neuendorff.
The Beverly Hillbillies got rich discovering oil, so did a lot of folks deep in the heart of Texas. But there’s a price to pay and you may be paying it.
“I knew it had salt water in it. My wife could smell it and I could smell it on bad days,” continued Neuendorff.
In Columbus Texas, rancher Kerry Neuendorff is dealing with the filthy dregs of oil and gas from decades gone past.
A plugged disposal well is leaking salt water and a cocktail of oil contaminants.
Eroding his land, poisoning his groundwater, threatening the health of his cattle, killing trees, and the Colorado County grass.
“It could probably go back to the 60’s because my mother-in-law and father-in-law had vehicles that were rusting out because they’d drive across the crossings down here,” suggests Neuendorff.
Buried secrets spreading damage.
“It’s gotten worse because the vegetation just died off in the last 25 years 30 years,” said Neuendorff.
The Neuendorff well leak first documented in 2003, is one of the oldest complaints of its kind made to the Texas Railroad Commission.
They’re the state agency regulates the oil and gas industry in Texas, and they are also the industry’s cheerleader.
Kind of hard to do both.
Prior to the Neuendorff problem, if an underground well in Texas was plugged, well, the story was that contamination would never be a threat.
It just didn’t matter where those plugged wells were, whether they were near creeks, schools, or houses. But now we know that’s just not true.
“And this contaminated well water likely caused my mother’s death in late 2018 from a rare and aggressive cancer of the kidney,” said Ashley Watt.
Ashley Watt believes the price she paid was the death of her mother.
Sixty-eight-year-old Mary Watt died from a rare, aggressive form of adrenal gland cancer.
Only a few years later, Watt discovered the groundwater on her family’s west Texas cattle ranch was contaminated. Buried secrets from corroding oil wells.
“We’ve had to sell off all our cattle, we have to ship in our water we can’t drink it from our water wells anymore. It’s a disaster. It has ruined our way of life,” states Watt.
Ashley inherited the sprawling Antina Ranch after her both of her parents passed away.
It is located in the Permian Basin, the heart of the state’s oil and gas industry.
“Kind of inexplicably, in 2021, all of a sudden, some old wells started spraying brine water out of them. And we had no idea, so we had to start investigating,” said Watt.
Ashley turned to the Texas Railroad Commission, but something was very wrong.
“The last time I was here was over a year ago. I came asking for your help. We had three or four wells that had bubbled the surface. Old, plugged Chevron wells and we wanted help to know what’s going on. You rejected us and wouldn’t do a thing. You told us nothing was wrong,” states Watt.
After proving a priceless tragedy to our land Ashley Watt came back this month.
“So, I’m here pleading. How many wells do I have to dig up that are flowing brine to the surface? How many water well tests do we have to do? I’ve spent millions of dollars on this. It’s not my wells. It’s Chevron’s wells. It’s the railroad commissions responsibility,” continues watt.
Look at it, wells shooting salty water into the air with the pressure of a Las Vegas fountain.
But this is no tourist attraction, it’s a warning to so many of us.
“We’ve now dug up hundreds of wells and they’re all failing. It is shocking. And you can’t even tell its surface. You can only tell once you dig them up,” states Watt.
Leaking plugged and abandoned wells. Ashley might not be able to see them as she scoured her vast ranch, but the buried secrets, they were poisoning her land a possible death sentence for her mom.
“You name it, we’ve seen it. Benzene, crude oil, radioactivity. That’s what a lot of people don’t know. This oil field waste, it’s radioactive, it’s deep underground,” continues Watt.
Ashley isn’t just digging into the poisoned ground of the Antina Ranch, she’s digging into buried secrets all across this state.
“The railroad commission has been utterly unhelpful. Who is the regulator for oil and gas, so we’ve had to take the investigation into our own hands,” states Watt.
And Dolcefino Consulting has joined the investigation and it’s very clear The Railroad Commission doesn’t like it. Especially when we dare approach Christi Craddick, the chairwoman of this powerful state agency. It’s an outrageous display of state arrogance, our crew is pushed and shoved.
We’ve filed a request under state law for all complaints about leaking plugged wells in the entire state for the past 3 years. We were told about just four complaints, including Ashley’s land in Monahan.
How could that be? The Railroad Commission refused to let us interview a single one of their more than 400 employees.
But they didn’t know we had already talked to Dean Southward, The Railroad Commission Cleanup Coordinator in the Houston area.
“For the last 9.5 years I dealt with the bottom of the bottom, that’s all I do,” recalls Dean Southward.
He was surprised we found any complaints.
“If you have a plugged well it can’t leak. The problem is, when you actually call a well plugged, for people to say that and it is leaking after means that; it’s kind of a big deal and something that they really don’t put in writing,” states Southward.
“If you want to directly connect a leaking well to environmental impact then our other site out in Columbus is exactly that,” continues Southward.
“June 2003 is the first time that I got paperwork from them that I kept,” said Kerry Neuendorff.
Kerry opens up a wad of documents he’s gotten from the railroad commission over the twenty years he’s been fighting to get justice.
When we look for the Neuendorff case on The Railroad Commission web site though, look, you get no results.
We should all care about his fight; the contamination is not far from the Colorado River.
“That’s Walter’s Creek there which turns into Red Gates Creek which turns into Cummins Creek which turns into the Colorado River,” states Neuendorff.
“The whole assumption in oil and gas is you drill a well, you operate it, you pull oil and gas out of it, and when you’re done you plug it. You put cement in it, and then it’s considered plugged and abandoned. It’s done. It’s forever considered an afterthought,” states Watts.
“The problem is, if you now have to re-plug wells and they only last 20, 30, 40 years before they come unplugged, you now have millions of landmines you have left across the state,” continues Watt.
But finding these potential landmines isn’t easy, this is the geographic informational system on the RRC’s website. As you zoom I, little icons populate, they are different colors, different shapes.
That green dot with the slash is a plugged oil well.
Look at all the green in northwest Houston, Near 290 and the beltway. The greater Inwood area.
We can zoom all the way into the corner of Jaywood and Vernwood.
“Is it worrisome?” asked Andrea Palacio. “Now it is. Now that there’s possibly something down there. I don’t know what could happen,” responded Victor Torres.
It’s where Victor Torres lives.
According to The Railroad commission’s well mapping system, there’s a plugged well in his front yard.
Victor stated he had no idea despite living here for over a decade.
He likely didn’t know because you can’t see where it is, it’s not marked.
When asked if he would like it to be marked, Torres replied, “yeah that would be nice, like you said it could spill out and damage my lawn. Or do harm to the environment.”
We found more plugged wells under neighborhoods and near creeks.
In Southeast Houston there are plugged oil and gas wells on school grounds, again you can’t see exactly where, nor do we know if there are buried secrets leaking near where the children play.
Unmarked wells can be dug up accidentally too.
Last November, an excavator hit this old well in Baytown that shot oil up into the trees.
The railroad commission spent 85 thousand dollars cleaning up the “toll road 99 goose creek blowout.”
Dean southward also had to address the oily mess in Dayton just this year.
“It just was a simple well that started leaking, an abandoned well, our guys got it shut in and we’re going out there wed to clean up maybe 40 barrels of oil,” recalls Southward.
Damage from the early days of drilling are real. Like you see here when the ground opened up in Daisetta in 2008, the famous sink hole.
“That’s an oil field map of the Daisetta dome,” points out Richard Howe
Richard Howe is a petroleum geologist, considered the big expert on the sink hole.
“Those are oil wells that produced, and some have been abandoned. The red circle there is the original hole,” states Howe.
That’s the original sinkhole, a second hole opened up this past May.
“When the sinkhole collapsed, witnesses said the moment it collapsed for a few seconds there was like 4 or 5 casing strings sticking up in the air, like fingers sticking up out of the water and then they collapsed,” recalls Howe.
Looking at the concentration of drilling activity circling Daisetta, that’s kind of scary.
“A lot of these are not filled. I’ve got on the northern perimeter, and I have photos in this power point presentation of open wells just sitting there at the surface,” states Howe.
Laura Calzada has an open well in Cat Spring, but hers was abandoned more than five years ago.
“I’m not exactly sure what’s going on. All I know is it’s a 15 thousand foot well and it’s just sitting there,” states Laura Calzada.
The ranch includes a 5 acre well site where the cows can’t graze anymore.
She says the lease was sold to Fort Apache who then sold to a company called T.C. Oil & Gas.
“Nobody can find anybody at T.C. Oil & Gas,” said Calzada.
We found them, the two-year-old company has been cited by the railroad commission for multiple plugging violations statewide and they’re real friendly.
“I have all the answers I just don’t know who you are. Media? Yeah. Ok I ain’t talking to you. Thank you. Have a nice day.” stated a representative from T.C. Oil &Gas.
These stories prove if there’s a well on your property don’t assume it’s being taken care of…
“Just to let is sit there for eternity is crazy,” expressed Calzada.
“Why am I spending millions of dollars doing your job regulating the oil and gas industry?” said Ashley Watt.
Chevron has refused to clean up the environmental mess on Antina Ranch, perhaps they know they’ll be on the hook for other cleanups across Texas too. The legal liability could be enormous, a financial nightmare shockwave throughout the industry.
Maybe that’s why Chevron has ignored repeated requests to interview Ryder Booth, the vice president in charge of the Permian Basin region.
Just how many buried secrets have been left behind from plugged and abandoned wells all over our state?
“The people that get hurt are the little people. The ranchers, the landowners, the property owners—they’re the ones that get screwed,” concluded Ashley Watt.
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