Salty and oily drinking water leaves mouth sores. Oklahoma refused to know why.

In the summer of 2022, months after Tammy Boarman and her husband Chris moved into their new “forever home” 30 miles from Oklahoma City, the plants in their yard began to turn yellow. The bushes withered, even though Tammy watered them often. And the couple began to notice a salty taste in their drinking water.

The water came from a private well, drilled the year before, and they hoped the bad taste would fade with time and the help of a water softener.

But the problem has gotten worse. Their ice maker expelled large chunks of wet salt which, when rubbed, dissolved into an oily, foul-smelling substance.

The couple knew that some oil and gas extraction was taking place nearby. On the dirt roads and behind the oak groves of their neighborhood, pump jacks bobbed their heads up and down to suck up the oil. This is a common sight in Oklahoma. Several studies estimate that about half of the state’s residents live within a mile of oil and gas wells.

The following summer, Tammy and Chris Boarman were in contact with the state agency overseeing private water wells and were beginning to worry that these nearby oil operations had tainted their water, which they had largely stopped drinking after developing mouth sores. The couple filed a complaint with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s petroleum division, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry and is responsible for combating associated pollution.

When Tammy Boarman first contacted oil regulators, she hoped state officials would find the source of the pollution and clean it up. Over the next two years, the state repeatedly tested the Boarmans’ water for contaminants and found salt concentrations that made the water undrinkable and, at one point, toxic metals at levels high enough to endanger human health — clear signs of oilfield wastewater pollution, according to the agency’s tests.

But regulators repeatedly delayed or failed to perform other tests recommended by the agency’s own employees to locate the source of pollution, according to internal agency documents obtained by The Frontier and ProPublica through public records requests.

Despite Boarman’s calls for regulators to do more, the agency would ultimately reject its earlier findings of oil and gas pollution and close the couple’s case, leaving fundamental questions about the origins of the problem unanswered.

“For the longest time, we were so naive about everything,” Boarman said. “We thought things were going to get better.”

State delayed testing to find source of pollution

The Boarman home, a white, modern farmhouse, sits in the middle of an aging oil field, one of several that surround Oklahoma City and helped make Oklahoma one of the nation’s leaders in oil production in the 1940s.

Today, the area is experiencing rapid growth, with a sought-after school system and affordable real estate. New housing developments are springing up on undeveloped land, and residents in more remote areas – like where the Boarmans live – often rely on private water wells dug near newly built homes.

But the region’s groundwater contains an untold amount of pollution from previous decades of oil production, a study finds. 2024 Report of the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments, a multi-county planning agency.

“What scares me is that a lot of people buy homes that are supplied by well water, and then find out two or three years after they buy the homes that they are drinking salt water,” said John Harrington, recently retired director of the regional planning agency’s water resources division.

Oklahoma has about 130,000 private water wells, essentially straws that drink from shallow groundwater supplies with minimal filtration, increasing the risk of contamination. Indeed, after extracting huge profits from the planet, Oklahoma oil companies left behind tens of thousands of unplugged wells spewing greenhouse gases and greenhouse gases. allow industrial waste to spread underground. The state has some of the nation’s assets weakest regulations regarding industrial cleaning of old wells.

In 2016, dozens of residents in a subdivision about 20 miles from the Boarmans’ home sued oil giant ConocoPhillips, alleging that years of improper disposal of oil field waste had poisoned their drinking water. The company settled an undisclosed amount with more than 30 families.

Shortly after moving into their home in 2022, the Boarmans found themselves in a similar situation to those families. Their water corroded the bathtub and covered their faucets and appliances with rust and salt residue. The trees near their sprinklers withered and died. Tammy Boarman started keeping a jug of bottled water next to the sink for brushing her teeth.

At that time, Tammy, an imaging manager in the radiology department at the University of Oklahoma Hospital, and Chris, a sales representative for a sanitation company, had forbidden their adult children from drinking the tap water during their visit. They stopped inviting friends: it was too embarrassing to have to warn them about the water.

Oklahoma Corporation Commission Petroleum Division staff began taking samples of the Boarman’s water in August 2023, about a week after Tammy Boarman’s first pollution complaint, and continued to do so every few months, per agency protocol. Lab analysis of those ongoing samples showed that salt levels rose steadily over the next year, far exceeding natural levels in local groundwater, a sign to regulators of potential oil and gas contamination, according to results reviewed by The Frontier and ProPublica. As of January 2024, chloride levels in their water reached nearly 10 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommendation for drinking water. State sampling results deemed their water too salty even for agriculture.

As the state studied the Boarman pollution, agency officials found a tangle of potential culprits: 26 oil wells are within a half-mile radius of the Boarman home, and more than half were improperly capped, making them a threat to drinking water, according to a report on the Boarman situation later commissioned by the state.

The one that stood out to Everett Plummer, director of the petroleum division at the time and one of several staffers assigned to investigate the Boarman case, was McCoon 3, an injection well that removes salty wastewater from oil fields deep underground. It is the closest active injection well to the Boarman home and is operated by Callie Oil Co., a small company owned by Rory Jett, who also owns property nearby.

State employees had difficulty properly evaluating McCoon: 12 years of forms recording injection data — which the company is required to submit by state law — were missing from the agency’s files, according to the internal report on the Boarman case. And they couldn’t find a map showing nearby objects, such as the Boarmans’ water well, that the injected fluid could impact. Under Oklahoma state rules, injection wells cannot operate without these cards.

Injection wells are supposed to be constructed in a way that only allows the emission of wastewater deep into the earth. But a previous owner of the injection well noted in a report to the state that the well was missing a layer of cement that would help prevent wastewater from escaping to shallow depths, where most drinking water sources are, Plummer wrote in an email to his colleagues at the petroleum division. The many poorly plugged wells nearby provide potential pathways for sewage to rise to the surface, he said. Other oil division employees responded that a layer of cement near the top of the McCoon well was sufficient protection and made leaks unlikely.

In early 2024, Plummer asked the agency to conduct tests to determine whether the McCoon well was leaking. But it will be another 10 months before the agency runs the tests and finds a flaw.

A swirling cloud of contamination

In the months that followed, the agency decided to conduct a different type of test, one that would give Tammy Boarman her first glimpse of the contamination that had turned her plants yellow and made her water undrinkable. It was an electromagnetic monitoring machine, a complex instrument the size of a suitcase that projects electrical currents underground to create 3D maps.

After the test was conducted in May 2024, Boarman recalled state employees huddling around a laptop in the bed of their truck, peering at the machine-generated image: a swirling red cloud hanging directly beneath his house, where his well drank from a shallow pocket of fresh water. Field staff told Boarman that the device, which measures the concentration of dissolved solids in water, showed an unusually concentrated plume of pollution.

Later tests would show that his well was buried in the center of the plume, which was thick with dissolved salts and chemicals, up to 72 times more concentrated than the EPA recommends for drinking water.

“I had a stomach ache,” she said.

The electromagnetic survey showed the degree of contamination around the Boarman water well. But the analysis is not deep enough to show the origin of the pollution.

Boarman said she and her husband took the footage to Jett, owner of McCoon Well. She said Jett, who also runs a company the state contracts with to plug wells abandoned by oil companies, told them he wasn’t surprised to learn of the water problems and offered to connect them to a water line on his property.

The Boarmans never accepted his offer; They learned from agency emails, which Tammy Boarman had obtained through a public records request, that the Jett injection well was one of the possible sources of pollution.

“Why would we accept water from a person who, at any moment, could become angry with us and cut it off? » she said.

Neither Jett nor his lawyer responded to questions about his offer to connect the Boarmans to his water line, the potential threat of pollution from the McCoon well or its missing cement liner and injection data.

Then, in August 2024, Chris had a heart attack. Tammy blamed pollution, whether the salt water harmed her directly or indirectly, from accumulated stress. Their doctor would later tell them that even if there might be a link, it would be impossible to prove.

While Chris recovered at home, Tammy frantically searched for a filtration system powerful enough to block all potential pollutants. The couple spent more than $15,000 to install one.

Regular water samples showed that the Boarmans’ water was becoming even saltier, according to test results. By this point, agency staff had also noticed pollution in the water of their neighbors, who live less than a quarter mile away. (Neighbors declined interview requests.)

On September 9, 2024, Boarman’s Republican State Senator Grant Green requested a meeting with agency leadership to discuss the couple’s case, which Chris Boarman had briefed him on. A senior official for government and regulatory affairs at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, Travis Weedn, emailed two agency executives about Green: “He will most likely be Senate Energy Chairman next session…so I would like to be prompt with his office.” »

Two days later, Trey Davis, then the commission’s public information officer, wrote an email to a number of petroleum division officials: “We are likely past the point of this complaint and must move forward with all measures at our disposal to identify the source of the contamination.” »

Green recently told The Frontier and ProPublica that the agency failed the Boarmans despite the couple doing “everything right”; he stated that he did not seem to take their situation seriously before his involvement.

“It should never take legislative intervention to get people to do their jobs,” Green said in a written statement. “This is simply unacceptable.”

Shortly after Green contacted the agency, Plummer again advocated performing mechanical tests on the McCoon well to assess whether wastewater was escaping from it — the same tests he had requested in January. An oil division official disagreed, writing to colleagues that a test to detect leaks could cost Callie Oil a “substantial” amount of money because it might require removing and replacing part of the well. Oil companies typically conduct and fund state-required testing. Tammy Boarman said agency officials also told her in a meeting that such tests would be too costly for the oil company. The agency declined to comment on the interaction.

Boarman spent weeks reviewing agency reports, test results and internal emails she obtained through her public records request, often staying up well past midnight to delve into the technical details. This is how she discovered that Plummer had for the first time proposed tests on the McCoon well at the beginning of the year.

After this discovery, Boarman dropped all niceties in his communications with agency officials.

“We are convinced that some of you are either incompetent at your job, don’t care, or are protecting operators,” she wrote in a September 27, 2024 email to half a dozen agency employees.

A week later, after meeting with Green, the petroleum division began performing mechanical tests on the McCoon well. A test measured the structural integrity of the well. It failed the pressure test, suggesting a possible leak.

Further testing discovered a hole in a steel pipe inside the well, about 2,700 feet deep, a potential escape hatch for wastewater from the oil field. Callie Oil quickly patched the hole. An agency report said the well had not operated since June, but other state data indicated the well had been injecting wastewater into the earth all summer and continued to operate for the rest of the year. Neither the agency nor Callie Oil responded to a question about this contradiction.

The petroleum division also carried out another test to detect wastewater leaks. The test revealed no problems, but it did not look for leaks at shallower depths. In a subsequent report, an environmental consulting firm recommended repeating this test, this time to study the full depth of the well.

The state has never done so. The agency did not respond to a question about why a full investigation was not carried out.

The agency conducted a more comprehensive test of the Boarman’s water for heavy metals commonly found in oilfield wastewater. The test revealed a new threat: barium, a metal that can cause heart and blood pressure problems, at a concentration three times the EPA’s limit for drinking water.

The oil division did not inform the Boarmans of the results for more than a month. In December 2024, the state Environmental Department provided the results to The Frontier and ProPublica in response to a public records request.

The next day, the oil division sent the test results to the Boarmans. The agency did not respond to a question about the delay.

Case closed

Despite finding evidence of oil and gas contamination in the Boarmans’ water during more than a dozen tests over two years, several agency leaders developed a new theory, according to internal emails dating to the fall of 2024: They sometimes suggested that the company that drilled the Boarmans’ water well had done a poor job and drilled into a pocket of natural salt water, unrelated to oil and gas operations.

Other Oklahoma Corporation Commission staff members proposed taking the Boarmans’ case to the agency’s administrative court to further evaluate the cause of the pollution and pursue possible enforcement. But some Commission staff have expressed concerns internally about the cost of hiring a consulting firm to continue investigating the matter. The oil division “does not have the funds for this,” wrote Jeff Kline, legal counsel to one of the three elected commissioners, in a digital message to himself in March 2025.

A few days later, the agency closed the case. “No one responsible has been identified at this time,” the agency wrote to the Boarmans.

Kline told The Frontier and ProPublica that he didn’t know whether cost influenced the agency’s decision to close the case. The petroleum division “bears sole responsibility for these decisions, including any cost considerations in this or other cases,” Kline said in a statement. The agency did not respond to questions about cost issues or why some executives suggested the Boarmans’ well was not drilled properly.

Undeterred, Tammy Boarman continued to make her case to several agency executives, sending them emails and calling them over the next month.

In an hour-long call with Petroleum Division Director Jeremy Hodges last May, Boarman reminded him that his own staff and consultants had recommended a closer look at his neighbor’s injection well because it was a potential threat to his drinking water. In response, Hodges relied on the same explanation his agency has relied on for months, blaming the company that drilled his water well. Issues related to private water wells are not within the jurisdiction of the petroleum division, he told her. “It’s none of my business.”

Hodges did not respond to a list of questions regarding that call and the agency declined to make him available for an interview.

Boarman also demanded answers from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, the state agency that oversees private water wells. Charlie O’Malley, director of the state water board’s well drilling program, told The Frontier and ProPublica the same thing he told the Boarmans: Their water well was drilled properly and he believed it was contaminated by historic oil field pollution.

Unlike state regulators, Green, the state senator, found a way to help the Boarmans. Last spring, he was instrumental in securing $2 million in state funding to connect the Boarmans and their neighbors to a rural water system.

“While this doesn’t change what the Boarmans and their neighbors have endured over the past two years, I hope it gives them a chance to start fresh,” Green said.

Tammy Boarman said fresh water is “a big problem for us” but fails to address the larger problem of groundwater pollution from the oil and gas industry. “The agency that’s supposed to take care of this has been given a pass,” she said.

“This place has been ruined for us,” she said. “It’s a nightmare.”