Investigations & Briefings

The Johnson County Mud Farm (February 2026)

For years, drillers legally dumped tons of radioactive, PFAS-loaded fracking waste near Dallas and Fort Worth. People did not know where it went. We found a site right under Pleasant View Elementary in Johnson County.

• The Report: Read Saul’s story in The Barbed Wire. It is about Lee Oldham. He is a past oil worker who spread radioactive waste on the site. He thinks the waste melted his jaw.
• The Talk: Listen to Saul on the HEATED podcast with Emily Atkin. He explains how this waste was legally buried with almost no records.
• The Impact: Since our reporting, residents say they weren’t told what lay beneath their new homes, and parents at Pleasant View say their kids have bad headaches, dizziness, and sick stomachs. Now there’s a massive local push for soil and water testing.
  Now state and county investigators are digging into whether residents were misled, and the school district and local developers are carrying out the exhaustive environmental testing that — residents say — they should have done on the front end.
• The Hooks: With more than 20 million tons of drilling waste buried around Dallas-Fort Worth, a century of legacy oilfield pollution across Texas and no legal requirement to tell homeowners about it, there’s no reason to believe Johnson County is unique.
• What’s Next: One oil and gas waste industry veteran working with our project thinks that the statewide public health burden from oilfield waste and petrochemical pollution is bigger than cigarettes and asbestos — combined. Now, as pediatric cancer rates rise, we’re mapping the scale of the danger facing Texas.

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The Data Machine

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Texas Water Quality Dashboard

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