Read the full article by Saul Elbein (The Barbed Wire).
“Sure, Lee Oldham told me, he had spread radioactive fracking waste on Texas farmland. But in his defense, he never in a million years thought anyone would put a school there.
We were standing in the frigid wind on a field in Johnson County. It was January, and 52-year-old Oldham wore a heavy flannel sweatshirt pulled tight over his belly.
In the early 2010s, when the region was ground zero for the biggest fossil fuel production boom in human history, Oldham worked in waste disposal for a company that helped get rid of the millions of pounds of solid waste that came out of tens of thousands of natural gas wells about two miles underground.
That work, Oldham believes, exposed him to a witches’ brew of chemicals that, even now, likely lurked inside the fabric of his cells. His doctors have diagnosed him with injuries consistent with radiation exposure. Though he has no definitive proof of the cause, he believes the dust he inhaled during his time in the land farm melted the bones in his jaw and neck.”…