Well, this I didn't know! A growing salt sea...polluting the local groundwater in Texas. It's been growing since 2003..a toxic leak from an old oil well..converted to a water well, and then abandoned.
Everyone is kicking the can as to clean-up and they can't even find a putative owner.
It's pretty...and poisonous.
The Dead Sea of West Texas
About twenty-five miles north of Fort Stockton sits what looks, at first blush, like an oasis amid the West Texas desert. When I recently visited what might be Texas’s newest sizable body of water, its color was a pleasant sea green. A flock of ducks circled in the sky above and landed on the choppy surface.
Yet Lake Boehmer covers more than sixty acres of scrubland with a noxious brew. You wouldn’t want to sate your thirst with its water, which is three times saltier than the ocean, with a sulfate level twenty-five times greater than legally allowed for drinking. Lake Boehmer belches hydrogen sulfide gas, which at low concentrations generates a rotten egg smell and at higher concentrations kills the occasional waterfowl and causes headaches and nausea in humans.
A muddy jetty pokes a couple of dozen feet out into the shallow lake. At its end is a partially submerged cement box around a wellhead. Spouting there is a toxic fountain, a mushroom head of water gushing at two hundred gallons a minute. It first appeared around 2003, though it’s unclear why the water started flowing then, and the lake has been growing ever since. Thanks to bureaucratic buck passing, it shows no sign of stopping.
Lake Boehmer flows from one of several abandoned wells near the tiny community of Imperial. Each of these wells appears to have been drilled in the forties or fifties, when wildcatters were plumbing the area in search of oil. Most of their wells came up dry for petroleum, but produced water of decent quality. Rather than plugging the wells, the oil companies deeded them over to landowners. For a time, they were used to irrigate farms, but most appear to have fallen into disuse in the decades since.
No one is sure who owns the Lake Boehmer well property. Forty different absentee owners have some shares of the various parcels onto which the lake flows, but the Pecos County Appraisal District doesn’t know for sure who owns what.
Everyone is kicking the can as to clean-up and they can't even find a putative owner.
It's pretty...and poisonous.
The Dead Sea of West Texas
About twenty-five miles north of Fort Stockton sits what looks, at first blush, like an oasis amid the West Texas desert. When I recently visited what might be Texas’s newest sizable body of water, its color was a pleasant sea green. A flock of ducks circled in the sky above and landed on the choppy surface.
Yet Lake Boehmer covers more than sixty acres of scrubland with a noxious brew. You wouldn’t want to sate your thirst with its water, which is three times saltier than the ocean, with a sulfate level twenty-five times greater than legally allowed for drinking. Lake Boehmer belches hydrogen sulfide gas, which at low concentrations generates a rotten egg smell and at higher concentrations kills the occasional waterfowl and causes headaches and nausea in humans.
A muddy jetty pokes a couple of dozen feet out into the shallow lake. At its end is a partially submerged cement box around a wellhead. Spouting there is a toxic fountain, a mushroom head of water gushing at two hundred gallons a minute. It first appeared around 2003, though it’s unclear why the water started flowing then, and the lake has been growing ever since. Thanks to bureaucratic buck passing, it shows no sign of stopping.
Lake Boehmer flows from one of several abandoned wells near the tiny community of Imperial. Each of these wells appears to have been drilled in the forties or fifties, when wildcatters were plumbing the area in search of oil. Most of their wells came up dry for petroleum, but produced water of decent quality. Rather than plugging the wells, the oil companies deeded them over to landowners. For a time, they were used to irrigate farms, but most appear to have fallen into disuse in the decades since.
No one is sure who owns the Lake Boehmer well property. Forty different absentee owners have some shares of the various parcels onto which the lake flows, but the Pecos County Appraisal District doesn’t know for sure who owns what.
