The Observer has a folo to a piece a few months ago about a Johnson County residential development being built on an oilfield waste dump site. The new piece looks at how little legal recourse new homeowners may have, and also about how both state and private business agencies that should be able to provide legal liability answers refuse to do so, and about how the Railroad Commission has refused to test the site.
The story is disgusting, especially with the mention of arsenic. I am reminded of the infamous Voluntary Purchasing Groups of the 1990s and their use of arsenic compounds, federally- and state-licensed in agriculture only for cotton desiccation, as part of general-purpose weedkillers, and not telling neighboring farms and ranches that the air out of their smokestacks west of Bonham might have arsenic.
This story peaked at the time a Democrat-turned-Republican state senator, Rick Perry, decided to challenge Jim Hightower as Ag Commish. Politics got involved there; Perry's campaign staff allegedly told VPG to stall out the investigation until after November 1994, because he would win.
He did and the rest is history.
The two stories have other parallels. Residents in the area in the 1990s accused the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission, today's Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, of going in the tank like the RRC seems to have done on this.
Voluntary Purchasing Groups, or VPG, is the organization that also has, or had, an EPA Superfund site near Commerce.
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