Editor’s Note: This story is a collaboration between Truthdig and the Texas Observer.
In the late spring of 2009, Andrew Collins learned that an oil and gas drilling waste landfarm, operated by a Cleburne company called Excel Environmental Services, was to be built right across the street from the home he shared with his wife Minnie on County Road 905 in Joshua, a small city south of Fort Worth.
“We did some digging around and uncovered some of the stuff that would be used and expressed concern,” Collins told Truthdig and the Texas Observer in August.
On June 8 of 2009, his wife Minnie wrote a letter to the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC), the state’s oil and gas regulator, protesting the landfarm’s expected 24-hours-a-day operation, “the increased heavy truck traffic,” and the “lack of monitoring of naturally occurring radioactive material,” including radium and heavy metals including arsenic and lead.
The couple researched what that would mean for their property—and potentially for their health. Their letter expressed concern that drilling waste, a copious byproduct of oil and gas drilling, to be deposited on acreage adjacent to their home and others in their neighborhood could have “negative effects … on the residential properties of the offset landowners.” The couple also warned that the “accumulation of Radon,” a carcinogenic radioactive gas generated in the decay of other radioactive elements in the waste, would be dangerous if future homes were built on the land.
“All of the documents said that sludge they were putting on the land could come back and hurt people,” said Minnie.
In the days following their protest letter, the couple and Collins’ parents, Vernie and Dollye, who also protested, were visited by an Excel official named Jerry Marsh, as conveyed in the letters. Excel is no longer in business, and a number listed for it on a government website is no longer in service.
“He explained the Railroad Commission was to be overseeing the site and they were going to have inspections out there and everything done the way the Railroad Commission was supposed to do it,” Collins said. “They talked a very good game and convinced me it should be above board.”
Collins withdrew the protest, and so did his parents.
One month later, Excel received its permit from RRC to operate the landfarm, on a 656-acre site in Johnson County that included the land across the street from Collins’ house. From 2009 to 2015, the operation, referred to in records as the Joshua Land Farm, plowed more than 4 million barrels of drilling waste into the North Texas land. Stacked end to end, these barrels could line the highway from Houston to El Paso, then back, and back again.
Today, the former landfarm is the site of a development called Silo Mills, which was advertised in an October 2021 press release as offering “affordable quality housing” for the booming Dallas-Fort Worth region and amenities including a resort-style swimming and entertainment complex, playgrounds, trails, and a fishing pond. The crown jewel of the development, according to its website: Pleasant View Elementary School, “open to the young minds of Silo Mills!”
Pleasant View Elementary School opened in 2023, and hundreds of homes have already been built in the budding development.
Many of the new residents now say they were told nothing about the landfarm that once operated on that property when they purchased their homes. “They never disclosed anything like that when we bought our house,” said Clayton Boley, a homeowner in Silo Mills. “You can just imagine a group of people who have spent a lot of money on houses—then you find out there is an environmental concern.”
Yet public records show at least some of the entities involved in the development had to know about the land’s past: RRC documents reveal the same firm that profited from that waste operation benefited from its residential development.
While Excel initially ran day to day operations at the land-farm, RRC records indicate that in 2011 the landfarm’s operating permit was transferred to an entity called Joshua Land Farm, LLC. A 2014 operating agreement for Joshua Land Farm lists Ross Gatlin of Prophet Equity as the manager. Then, in 2021, just six years after the last loads of drilling waste had been dumped, Prophet Equity, in partnership with Terra Manna, a Southlake real estate developer, broke ground on the 840-acre Silo Mills development. The groundbreaking was touted in an October 2021 article published in the Cleburne Times-Review and republished on the Prophet Equity website.
Gatlin is listed currently as the managing partner at Prophet Equity. He is identified as either the “manager” or “president” of the Joshua Land Farm in various RRC records. And a 2019 application with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), regarding a permit for a wastewater treatment plant the business had applied for after the landfarm ceased operations, lists “Ross Gaitlin [sic]” as the “Chief Executive Officer” of the Joshua Land Farm.
It’s unclear whether the developers of the former landfarm had a duty under Texas law to tell the new owners—or Godley Independent School District (ISD), which includes the elementary school—about the property’s history as a waste site or about what was buried beneath their properties.
“We are going to have to decline this one,” said Bryan Pope, communications director at the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University, in response to questions on the developer’s obligation to disclose the site’s previous waste history. “Given the delicate nature of the story,” said Pope, “we simply can’t wade into it I’m afraid.” The Texas Real Estate Commission also refused to answer questions on the matter.
Texas law generally requires sellers of residential property to provide buyers with a Seller’s Disclosure Notice, per Section 5.008 in the Texas property code. Sellers are questioned as to whether the property contains “hazardous or toxic waste” or “subsurface structures or pits” or if any condition on the property “materially affects the physical health or safety of an individual.” But the code also lists several exemptions, in which sellers do not have to provide a disclosure notice, and one, Section 5.008 (e)(10), is for developers selling brand new homes.
“The law is there,” said Alex Hernandez, an Austin-based real estate attorney, “but it is not until the issue goes to court and gets adjudicated that the law is actually decided and whether or not there was a disclosure obligation in this situation can be determined.”
Hernandez continued: “There are protections in the common law for someone who does believe they have been duped or harmed, and in today’s world if it isn’t a direct disclosure, such as a leaky roof … what we see is a lot of this land-use stuff goes into the common law, meaning: Was the advancement of this project without disclosure negligent, fraudulent, or was it a material misrepresentation?”
Prophet Equity did not respond to questions for this story, sent to both their general email and also Gatlin’s personal address. Messages left on the phone number listed for Gatlin at Prophet Equity were not returned. A message left on his personal cellphone, the voicemail greeting on which stated it was him, was not returned.
Emails sent to an account listed on the Silo Mills development’s website and also to Jason Cunningham, a public relations manager working with the Silo Mills development team, have not returned a reply. The RRC has not replied to the question of whether it was legal for a 2,500-home development and elementary school to be built atop an oil and gas drilling waste land-spreading operation, or how many other instances like this exist across the state.
“The County does not have the authority to regulate land use [at Silo Mills] through zoning or other similar land use controls,” stated Johnson County Judge Christopher Boedeker, via email. “Additionally, oil and gas activities, including disposal, are also controlled by the State of Texas without input from Counties, primarily through the Railroad Commission.”
On February 19, a week after Truthdig and the Observer published a prior story about the landfarm, RRC visited the site but did not take samples. “Upon arrival to location I observed no visible pollution,” stated the inspector. In May, Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) visited the site and “found no radiation above normal background,” said spokesperson Chris Van Deusen.
Godley ISD Superintendent Rich Dear pointed to this testing and visits to school property by radioactivity experts with both the federal Environmental Protection Agency and DSHS: “All testing thus far has been consistent with normal levels of naturally occurring material.”
Dear said he knew of oil and gas development in the region but was unfamiliar with the practice of spreading oil and gas drilling waste onto farmland. “The school district did not know the site’s history,” said Dear. “We are doing everything that we can to take care of our people—our kids, our teachers, and our community.”
Details in RRC records obtained by Truthdig and the Observer reveal several reasons for area residents to be alarmed about the buried waste beneath their feet—and the way the landfarm was overseen by the state.
Those records show that, more than a decade ago, Texas regulators raised their own concerns about elevated levels of the toxic heavy metal arsenic on the site and alleged that the landfarm was spreading too much waste over the land, in violation of permits. “It has come to our attention that the referenced facility has been reusing landfarm cells after reaching the maximum capacity without permission from the Technical Permitting,” states a letter the RRC sent Joshua Land Farm in 2012. (“Cells” refer to the different sections of the landfarm, each designated by RRC to receive a certain amount of waste.)
The agency reminded Joshua that spreading more than 2,000 barrels of waste per acre “without requesting and receiving approval for a permit amendment” was a violation. “Waste reports indicate all cells have exceeded this limitation,” the RRC letter said.
But the RRC did not issue any enforcement violations. Instead, Joshua Land Farm received permit amendments that enabled it to continue to dump more. A November 2014 permit amendment shows that all 12 of the landfarm’s cells had received at least 8,000 barrels of waste per acre, with five cells receiving 16,000 barrels or more and one cell receiving as much as 18,000 barrels per acre—nine times the initial permit limit. The amendment enabled nine of 12 cells to receive an additional 6,000 barrels per acre.
A packet of real estate transaction documents for the Boley family, including the construction contract for the family’s new “Dewberry” style home, makes no mention of the property’s previous history as an oil and gas drilling waste land-farm.
Legal documents filed with the Johnson County clerk’s office do not explicitly mention that the site had been developed atop an oil and gas drilling waste landfarming operation. However, a general warranty deed, which is a legal document facilitating the transfer of real estate, signed on December 31, 2018, indicates the development site was transferred directly from Joshua Land Farm LLC to a corporate entity called Silo Mills Investment IV LLC. The mailing address listed for both entities is a suite at 1460 Main Street in Southlake, Prophet Equity’s address.
Records show that the Joshua Land Farm took in some 4,281,151 barrels of waste over six years. Based on federal Department of Energy estimates of what operators pay for waste disposal, this would have yielded fees from $2 million to $171 million. But not everyone associated with the operation benefitted equally from those revenues.
“It was a cash cow,” said Lee Oldham, a former landfarm dozer operator at the site, in an interview. “The guys who ran the landfarm were well paid and compensated. I started at $25 an hour; they cut me down to $21.”
Oldham believes his health also suffered from that exposure—and he decided to become a whistleblower, as Truthdig and the Observer previously reported.
“Knowing what is happening to my health, and seeing kids and young families on top of this waste, I had to speak up,” he said.
The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex overlies the Barnett Shale, an oil- and gas-rich geological formation that was cracked in the early 2000s using the then-novel intensive drilling method known as fracking. “Get behind the Barnett,” instructed highway billboards, sponsored by Oklahoma-based driller Chesapeake Energy, with some featuring Texas-born actor Tommy Lee Jones.
Many of the nation’s fastest growing suburbs now sprawl around the DFW metro, and concerns about health impacts of oil and gas waste are not new. Since the 1960s, U.S. geologists have suspected that “black shales,” like the Barnett, contain appreciable amounts of uranium, and more recent papers indicate these shales contain other concerning heavy metals such as arsenic and barium.
Drilling horizontally through the shale to tap its fuel brings broken-up pieces of it to the surface. These drill cuttings, as they are called, together with drilling muds—a slick chemical-infused mixture that provides lubrication and structural support in drilling a well—form the copious stream called drilling waste. Each well drilled produces between 1,000 and 3,500 tons.
“Drilling mud is a witch’s brew of chemicals,” said Blake Scott, president and CEO of Waste Analytics, a Texas-based firm that provides data on drilling waste and oil and gas wells. “There was a tsunami of drilling waste that was being created by drilling unconventional wells in North Texas during the 2000s and 2010s. This was definitely the Wild West, and Johnson County became one of the dumping grounds.” Scott said it’s difficult, without in-depth research, to determine how many Texas drilling waste landfarming operations later became housing developments or elementary school sites.
While residents were not informed of the site’s previous history, after publication of the Truthdig and Observer article and another article by the Barbed Wire in February Silo Mills management informed homeowners that a third-party firm was conducting extensive environmental testing, taking 1,996 samples.
These samples have “definitively confirmed that the Silo Mills community is safe for residential and school occupancy,” states a page on the development’s website labeled “The Facts About Silo Mills.” The page, last updated in May, continues: “100% of samples indicated protective for human health” and radiation “at natural background levels.”
The site further says that carcinogens like benzene and heavy metals like arsenic were below regulatory limits, but data was not provided. The page indicates that the full 745-page report detailing the development’s sampling efforts can be requested; Truthdig and the Observer made this request in August but have yet to receive the report.
An environmental assessment for the Silo Mills development site was conducted in 2020 by the Southlake-based firm, TBK Environmental LLC, and sent by the developers to the school and homeowners only after Truthdig and the Observer published the article in February. The assessment, provided to Truthdig and the Observer by school officials, stated there were no “significant known or suspect recognized environmental conditions,” but the assessment did not include taking soil samples or testing water—and only involved speaking to a single resident, on the southwest side of the proposed development. That resident indicated, “They were not aware of anything related to environmental concerns present, its just vacant land.”
TBK spoke with a representative of the Joshua Land Farm LLC, the report indicates, and “they were unaware of any environmental concerns with the land.” The name for the development project, as listed throughout the environmental site assessment, is “Silo Mills – Joshua Land Farms.” The assessment doesn’t mention public documents including complaint letters from local residents and state regulatory records.
RRC files related to the landfarm, received through a records request, reveal that regulators long ago raised concern about levels of arsenic at the landfarm. A 2014 document conveys that Joshua Land Farm LLC had to “conduct an investigation to determine background levels of arsenic in the native soil, due to ongoing concerns about arsenic concentrations found during soil sampling for cell closures.” The landfarm operators took samples from three locations and three soil depths outside the zone of drilling waste application and found that arsenic levels were in the range of what state health officials consider to be two to five times the average background level.
“Arsenic can cause short and long-term health problems, even if you do not feel sick” and “is especially dangerous for children,” a DSHS factsheet reads.
RRC did not issue any violations for high arsenic levels. Instead, it responded by amending the landfarm’s operating permit and nearly tripling the amount of arsenic allowed to be left in the ground upon closure. Taehyun Roh, a toxicologist and arsenic expert at Texas A&M’s School of Public Health who reviewed the relevant RRC documents, said via email that even if the landfarm site had high levels of naturally occurring arsenic, “preventing additional anthropogenic arsenic loading becomes particularly important because health risk ultimately depends on total exposure.” Further, “Meeting the closure requirements for an oil-and-gas waste land-farm does not necessarily answer the separate question of whether the property is appropriate for long-term residential use, particularly for children,” Roh said.
“The acceptance of a higher arsenic threshold level is concerning,” added Scott, with Waste Analytics. “On the surface this seems legal; however I personally believe more background samples should have been taken to confirm the supposed higher background arsenic level.”
For years, Sue Beaton wrote letters to TCEQ and RRC expressing concerns about the landfarm. In the late 1990s, she and her husband and two teenage kids, having recently left the Navy and city life in San Diego, found a pleasant home on Farm-to-Market Road 917, in Johnson County, and prepared for what they thought would be a quiet life in the country.
“I home-schooled the kids, and we did a lot of activities as far as science and nature,” Beaton said in an interview. “They sometimes followed monarch butterflies or caught crawdads that came out of puddles when it rained.”
Then, in 2009, the Joshua Land Farm ruined their haven, she said. Living on the same road that flanked much of the northern perimeter of the landfarm put her family across the street from its main entrance. Given that prevailing winds regularly blow south to north, they were directly upwind from the waste.
“I can’t even say how many animals we found dead on that property. It was terrible,” said Beaton. “Cats, a lot of dead birds, and a little bit later we noticed no more of the butterflies would come through, and the family dogs kept dying, one of them with tumors all over her.” Beaton added, “They would come in the middle of the night and dump, they were doing it at 2 or 3 in the morning, all hours.”
While dumping in the middle of the night is entirely legal at many commercial landfarms under RRC rules, the complaint conveys what it is like to live next to such an operation.
In February 2018, an RRC inspector finally followed up with a site visit. The resulting report stated that inspectors found “no signs of any pollution or anything on the property that would give cause for concern to human health and safety or the environment.”
Six months later, in opposing a wastewater treatment plant at the same site, Beaton wrote to TCEQ:“The wind blows continuously from that direction across my property ever since the mud farm and the chemicals they used have destroyed my [car’s] paint” and “my pool would never stabilize.”
When reached by phone in February, Beaton said inspectors had overlooked obvious problems. Beaton also recalled the regular smell of benzene, which has a distinctly toxic sweet-smelling odor and is a carcinogen associated with oil and gas waste. Her son Bernard, now 27, chimed in to recall a regular occurrence in which the wind would pick up “white flakes, like dander” off the landfarm and the material would be “falling from the sky,” like a mysterious snowfall. “I would go inside because I had no idea what it was,” said Bernard. “I saw it as something that could be dangerous and I thought it was probably best not to breathe this stuff in.”
Beaton said she became particularly concerned when, in the early 2020s, she learned about the hundreds of homes and elementary school that were going to be built on the site. “I questioned with all that dumping whether or not that land was safe,” she said.
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Today, Andrew Collins regrets that he withdrew his 2009 protest.
His grandson lives across the street from the Silo Mills development and attended Pleasant View Elementary School for one year. In May, the Barbed Wire reported that at least several kids in the development had been experiencing illnesses, such as dizziness and headaches.
“He had some health issues, skin, and gastrointestinal issues,” said Collins. “I don’t know if they can be linked to whatever it was in the ground there, but I know his parents were concerned.”
He continued, “I regret the decision now, based upon what has happened with my grandson.”
By phone in early September, Superintendent Dear said he trusts the test results that indicate the school site is safe. Still, he believes changes are needed in state rules to prevent future schools from being built unwittingly atop oil and gas waste.
“The district would recommend legislative or regulatory requirements for mandatory notification when large housing developments or schools are proposed on former oil and gas drilling waste sites,” said Dear.
“Such notification,” he added, “would help school districts and communities make informed decisions before development occurs.”
