In Halliburton's hometown, oil giant is both hero and menace - Al Jazeera America
— 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... 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. 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... 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... Source: america.aljazeera.com
