In our latest investigation, reporter Nick Bowlin digs into a troubling question: What happens when families report salty, oily drinking water that leaves sores in their mouths — and the state declines to determine the cause? In “Salty, oily drinking water left sores in their mouths. Oklahoma refused to find out why,” Nick traces complaints of oilfield contamination, examines how regulators responded and explains why key questions remain unanswered. In this conversation, he takes us behind the scenes of the reporting, the documents that shaped the story and what it reveals about oversight of oil and gas pollution in Oklahoma.
Dylan Goforth: When you first heard about the Boarmans’ situation, what made you think this wasn’t just a private well problem but a story about the state’s oil and gas regulator? What was the moment where the story “clicked” for you?
Nick Bowlin: After my initial conversations with Tammy and Chris, I sent in an open records request with the state. Once I got the files and began to read, the click happened pretty fast. I saw that officials at the OCC had found strong signs of oil and gas pollution using a number of different metrics and tests. And this was for a house that sits in the middle of a legacy oilfield, drilled in the 1940s. Old wells plugged with mud – a common practice at the time – surround their house. But all this evidence didn’t seem to lead to urgent action. The agency slow-walked testing nearby oil and gas operations and water sampling for heavy metals. And when they finally ran those tests, they found problems. People all over the state are dealing with pollution threats from historic and current oil and gas. Tammy and Chris were unusually proactive in pushing the state to help them and trying to learn all they could about their situation. If this is how the state handled the Boarmans’ case, it didn’t bode well for other Oklahomans coming to the OCC for help.
Dylan: A huge part of this story relies on internal emails, test results and agency reports. How did you go about getting those records, and what was the most surprising or revealing document you found?
Nick: I relied primarily on open records requests to the OCC. My first one took a while, since my request covered over a year of agency work on the Boarmans’. But after that, I could submit requests covering only a few months at a time and the agency tended to return these promptly. To my mind, the most revealing set of emails come from September 2024, after the Boarmans’ state senator got involved. His arrival seemed to spur the state to finally order long-delayed tests. I was also struck by the electromagnetic survey images: For the most part, oil and gas reporters don’t get to see the pollution we report on. Leaks happen deep below our feet, while CO2 emissions are invisible. But those images taken by the agency offered a rare and disturbing picture of the pollution plume contaminating the Boarmans’ drinking water.
Dylan: There are several points in the story where agency staff appear to know more than the Boarmans do about what’s happening to their water. How did you piece together that timeline of who knew what, and when?
Nick: I built out a detailed chronology, based on the records I received and interviews with the Boarmans’. It wasn’t hard to do that with the agency emails. But I also built a timeline of the evidence. There isn’t a single test that definitively proves oil and gas contamination. Instead, the state relied on an accumulation of data, evaluating things like salts, the presence of certain metals, chemical ratios and the belowground electromagnetic maps. That was a useful exercise: to see the growing pile of evidence pointing to oil and gas, compared to the agency’s handling of the Boarmans’ pollution case.
Dylan: The McCoon injection well becomes central to the story. How did you figure out it might be a key suspect, and what did you have to learn about injection wells and groundwater science to understand what was going on?
Nick: I looked into the McCoon simply because the state flagged it as a problem well. Internal emails noted its checkered operational history and proximity to the Boarman house. And a report commissioned by the state about the Boarman case offered a number of recommendations; the McCoon was the only nearby well singled out for further testing. But near the McCoon are a number of poorly plugged wells, all of them potential pollution threats. It’s not hard to envision these wells working together, with wastewater rising up the poorly plugged wellbores. The report I mentioned just now talks about the pollution possibly spreading through“complex pathways.” That’s the thing about these oil and gas pollution cases: they’re incredibly complex and definitively proving a culprit is an enormous challenge. The state ultimately told Tammy and Chris that it could not find where the pollution originated and closed their case.
Dylan: Tammy herself becomes almost an investigator in this story, combing through records late at night. How did your reporting overlap with her own digging, and how did you verify what she was finding?
Nick: Tammy has a second career as a reporter if she wants one. She probably filed more records requests than I did, and she spent many hours learning about oil and gas operations and the pollution threats they pose. In many cases, we had the same sets of documents, since I obtained her case files independently of her. So, after our interviews, it was easy to fact-check things she’d told me, and pull up the relevant documents to get to the primary source. She was also good about taking pictures of signs of the pollution around her house, helping me verify anecdotes before I began speaking to her.
Dylan: You tie this one family’s ordeal to a much larger problem — tens of thousands of unplugged wells and weak oversight statewide. How did you balance telling such a personal story while also showing readers the systemic picture?
Nick: This story is one in a series about oilfield pollution, produced by The Frontier and ProPublica, so I have the benefit of being able to do different types of stories about different facets of this issue. The first story in this series took an expansive, statewide view of the oilfield wastewater blowouts called purges, so, for this one, I was interested in doing a zoomed-in look at the toll of pollution on a single family. Those are the stakes of bad regulation: everyday people are harmed. But I wanted to make clear that Tammy’s story isn’t just an outlier, so we made sure to talk about the issues with legacy oilfield pollution elsewhere in the Edmond area. The West Edmond Field was one of the state’s most important oil plays in the 1940s, and now, new homes are being built on land littered with orphan and mud-plugged wells, especially in the Deer Creek neighborhood. And no one knows how much old contamination there is beneath the surface.
Dylan: After months of reporting, what part of this story surprised or frustrated you the most as a reporter?
Nick: I definitely felt anger at the uncertainty of it all, a lesser version of the frustration that’s been eating at Tammy and Chris for years: there’s an obvious problem with their water, the state didn’t do everything it could to investigate it and now we will likely never know the source of the contamination. And now they just have to live with it – until they can get on rural water. In that sense, the Boarmans’ are lucky. I’ve interviewed other homeowners dealing with industry pollution on their properties who have no hope of cleanup or are too far out in the country to hook up to a water system. It’s hard to witness people forced to resign themselves to such hopeless circumstances.
