In Halliburton’s hometown, oil giant is both hero and menace

DUNCAN, Okla. — Voris “Pee Wee” Owens and his wife, Charlotte Owens, used to love to sit together on their back porch, looking out over their nearly 4 acres of land, the geese and mallards in the pond, the goats that kept the lawn as tidy as a city park, the racehorses that Pee Wee trained and a large garden that yielded so much produce that the couple shared the bounty with neighbors and almost never bought vegetables at the store. He filled his pond and watered his animals and garden with the water from their well, which was also the couple’s source of drinking water.

Since moving to the property in 1987, the land and little home on it had been the Owens’ paradise. But from their vantage point on the back porch, the couple saw troubling things too. Smoke plumes rose from the fenced-in Halliburton property locals call the North 40, less than a half mile west of their house in semirural northern Duncan, Oklahoma. Twice in the 1990s, Pee Wee stocked the pond with fish, but they all turned belly up. His horses refused to drink from the pond. Some of his nanny goats had so many stillborn kids, he lost count, and a few of the newborn goats couldn’t move their legs.


What the Owenses didn’t know is that Halliburton carried out Cold War–era work cleaning solid rocket fuel from spent missile casings for the Department of Defense and burned the fuel in open, unlined pits from 1965 to 1991. In 1988 the company acknowledged in a letter to the state health department that ammonium perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel, leached into the groundwater at the site — a disclosure that was not publicized at the time.

The company alerted the Owenses and their neighbors to the contamination 23 years later, in 2011, when tests conducted by Halliburton contractors showed perchlorate had leached into groundwater beyond the barbed-wire-topped fences that hem the Halliburton property and into 60 private wells, including the Owenses’. Perchlorate is linked to hypothyroidism, and unborn babies are especially vulnerable to it.

Of the 60 homes with perchlorate-tainted wells, the company has purchased a patchwork 17 homes south and southeast of the site for $3.9 million, Stephens County property records show. Sales records show Halliburton often paid double or triple the assessed value. Residents who sold their properties signed confidentiality agreements as part of individual settlements and agreed to drop claims, the records indicate.

In the meantime, Halliburton connected other affected residents to the city water supply. But Duncan’s public drinking water is tainted with trihalomethanes, chemical compounds that are byproducts of the chlorination process and are linked to an increased risk of cancer. The Owenses, on the advice of their family doctor, drink only bottled water now, which they pay for themselves.

The Owenses are plaintiffs in one of at least 15 ongoing lawsuits against the company; claims include personal injury, property damage and loss of property value.


The two don’t sit contentedly on the back porch any longer. The pond was low until a recent deluge of rain alleviated drought conditions throughout the state; the garden is gone; they have sold the horses. Pee Wee Owens, 74, takes medication for hypothyroidism and depression. Charlotte Owens, 68, has been battling cancer since 2012.


The North 40 contaminated not only the Owenses’ well, but the way of life for the couple, married 52 years.

The retired trucker shook his head.



“My stomach’s torn up all the time,” he said. “I can’t sleep anymore.”


Randy Walls, 60, worked for Halliburton and its subcontractors for nearly 30 years from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, sometimes on faraway assignments in the United Arab Emirates and Ecuador. His work mostly revolved around hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. During the fracking process, chemicals, sand and water are injected in the ground at high pressure to crack open layers of rock and release gas or oil inside. Specifically, his work entailed cementing — sealing the ring between the well casing and the drilled hole with cement. The aim of cementing is to control corrosion and stabilize the well, pipe and rock formation while it’s fracked for oil and natural gas. He often blended sand and chemicals for fracking operations.

Sometimes he was called to help with cleaning rocket fuel from spent missile casings the North 40, he said from his home in Comanche, about 10 miles south of Duncan.



He recalled how each missile casing was hoisted into the air so water could be shot in at high pressure. Red, rubbery pieces of spent rocket fuel, some granular and others as big as a shoe, would fall to a concrete slab. The same water cycled through again and again. He said he and other workers then looked into each missile and felt to make sure the inside was clean, scooping out any remaining material.

“They had to be perfectly clean,” he said of the missile casings. “That’s the way they wanted them.”



He said that he never wore gloves, a mask or any other protective gear and that the job soaked the workers.

“In cutting the fuel out of the solid rocket boosters, we were never told there was any danger with that,” he said.

Walls doesn’t recall any signs or educational materials that warned of potentially hazardous chemicals in the rocket fuel or of any other contamination on the site.

In a separate endeavor on the same site during the 1980s, workers at the North 40 attempted to decontaminate racks that had held uranium nuclear fuel rods. Twenty-one racks were shipped from the Ft. Calhoun nuclear reactor in Nebraska to the North 40 to be cleaned and sold as scrap metal in 1983 and 1984, according to 2011 correspondence to Duncan residents from Halliburton that residents showed to an Al Jazeera America reporter. Workers burned their contaminated coveralls and gloves in outdoor pits. The company discontinued the program in 1985; workers torch-cut the racks into pieces and sent them to a South Carolina facility for disposal, the letter states.

In a February 2013 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Halliburton stated, “To date, soil and groundwater sampling relating to the allegations discussed above has confirmed that the alleged nuclear or radioactive material is confined to the soil in a discrete area of the on site operations and is not presently believed to be in the groundwater on site or in any areas off site.”

The waste disposal practices related to the cleaning of U.S. military missile casings at the North 40 — using water to remove spent rocket fuel, dumping the waste in open pits and then burning it — were once commonplace before the enactment of key environmental laws, like the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, according to interviews with Department of Defense officials in a 2010 report by the United States Government Accountability Office.

An ongoing federal lawsuit alleges the company continued with such practices years after that act was passed. It states that while Halliburton knew the unlined burn pits were an environmental problem in the late 1980s, the company kept using them until the early 1990s.

Signs ward off potential trespassers at homes purchased by Halliburton in the semirural area south and southeast of the North 40. Security guards in white Halliburton trucks drive among empty homes with well-kept yards.

 A 2013 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows Halliburton has spent more than $25 million in its initial response to the pollutants on its northern Duncan site. While the company has likely spent more by now, officials have not disclosed the amount.

Al Jazeera America located 14 of the 17 purchased homes’ well readings in ODEQ documents obtained through state open records laws. Those records indicate the homes purchased by Halliburton had wells with perchlorate readings of 17 to 40,000 ppb.



Down the street from the Owenses, Barbara Wilkinson lives in a ranch home with her husband.

 She said tests conducted by Halliburton show that while her well is contaminated with perchlorate — ODEQ records show a 2011 reading of 1.3 ppb —  Halliburton has indicated it’s not contaminated enough for the company to buy her home.


She wants to move, but when she called a real estate agent, he laughed at her.

“‘You couldn’t give this house away,’” she recalled him saying.

“We’re just stuck,” she said.



Halliburton extended the municipal water supply, which was not contaminated by perchlorate, to residents with affected wells like Wilkinson and pays those residents’ water bills — but that hasn’t solved their water woes.

 Duncan sent notices to residents in late 2014 that the city water supply is polluted with trihalomethanes, chemical compounds that are byproducts of the chlorination process. The city warned residents that the water is unsafe to drink for the elderly, infants and those whose immune systems are compromised. Excess exposure over “many years” may increase the risk of having cancer or cause problems with liver, kidneys or central nervous system, states the letter sent to Duncan residents.

 The city did not return calls for comment.

Wilkinson said she and her husband drink bottled water they buy themselves.

Sitting on a couch in her living room in northern Duncan, she holds up a map that features a multicolored plume indicating perchlorate levels and points to her house. Next to her sits a pile of documents as thick as a phone book. It contains newspaper articles, plume maps and letters from Halliburton and from Duncan officials. 

She has lost patience and accuses Halliburton of delays, echoing the sentiments of several others who live in the area but did not want to speak on the record.



“Halliburton is a big corporation,” Wilkinson said. “I know they have the money to wait everybody out, wait until everybody’s dead. They know what they’re doing.”