Thread regarding Halliburton Co. layoffs

Halliburton is not to blame here. The fault lies with the contractor who built the chainlink fence. A correctly built chainlink fence would not have allowed checmicals to contaminate the groundwater. I hope HAL sues them for all they are worth. I'm sure it can be proven that they used substandard galvanizing.

That worked, thanks!

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What is the source for this article please?

In Halliburton’s hometown, oil giant is both hero and menace

Duncan, Oklahoma, prominently displays a statue of Erle P. Halliburton, but pollution has sparked lawsuits.

DUNCAN, Okla. — 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 racehorses that Pee Wee trained and a large garden that yielded so much produce that the couple shared the bounty with neighbors and almost never bought vegetables at the store. 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.

Since moving to the property in 1987, the land and little home on it had been the Owens’ paradise. But from their vantage point on the back porch, the couple saw troubling things too. Smoke plumes rose from the fenced-in Halliburton property locals call the North 40, less than a half mile west of their house in semirural northern Duncan, Oklahoma. 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 acknowledged in a letter to the state health department that ammonium perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel, leached into the groundwater at the site — a disclosure that was not publicized at the time.

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 Halliburton property and into 60 private wells, including the Owenses’. Perchlorate is linked to hypothyroidism, and unborn babies are especially vulnerable to it.

Of the 60 homes with perchlorate-tainted wells, the company has purchased a patchwork 17 homes south and southeast of the site for $3.9 million, Stephens County property records show. Sales records show Halliburton often paid double or triple the assessed value. Residents who sold their properties signed confidentiality agreements as part of individual settlements and agreed to drop claims, the records indicate.

In the meantime, Halliburton connected other affected residents to the city water supply. But Duncan’s public drinking water is tainted with trihalomethanes, chemical compounds that are byproducts of the chlorination process and are linked to an increased risk of cancer. The Owenses, on the advice of their family doctor, drink only bottled water now, which they pay for themselves.

The Owenses are plaintiffs in one of at least 15 ongoing lawsuits against the company; claims include personal injury, property damage and loss of property value.

The two don’t sit contentedly on the back porch any longer. The pond was low until a recent deluge of rain alleviated drought conditions throughout the state; the garden is gone; they have sold the horses. Pee Wee Owens, 74, takes medication for hypothyroidism and depression. Charlotte Owens, 68, has been battling cancer since 2012.

The North 40 contaminated not only the Owenses’ well, but the way of life for the couple, married 52 years.

The retired trucker shook his head.

“My stomach’s torn up all the time,” he said. “I can’t sleep anymore.”

Halliburton

As a boy, Voris Owens was called Shorty, then Little Bit. Eventually, his nickname became Pee Wee. He didn’t mind, because he never much liked his real name. At 11, he bought a bike with paper route money, a red Hawthorne from Montgomery Ward. Riding it near a small airstrip in Duncan in the early 1950s, his front wheel hit a rut. He fell off his bike and toppled head over heels at least three times, nearly rolling right into Erle P. Halliburton, the founder of the Halliburton Co.

Halliburton carried the barely conscious, bloodied child to his Jeep and drove him home to his mother. Later that day, Halliburton went back to check on the boy. He returned the bike, which had been repaired. Today, decades later, Owens remembered these events in vivid detail. Halliburton’s generosity was a rarity for Owens, who grew up poor.

That summer, Halliburton told Owens to come to him when he turned 18 so he could find a proper job for the young man. Owens grew up, and, after a stint training racehorses in California, returned to Duncan and a job at Halliburton, spending most of his working years driving trucks for contractors. He and Charlotte married, and the couple had four children. At times he worked two jobs to provide for his family.

A statue honoring Erle P. Halliburton stands in Duncan Memorial Park on U.S Highway 81.

A statue honoring Erle P. Halliburton in Duncan Memorial Park on U.S. Highway 81.Robert Hughes / Zuma Press

A statue of Halliburton’s founder stands in the center of downtown Duncan. Working for the company remains a source of pride for many in the city. Founded in Duncan in 1919, the company has since moved its North American headquarters to Houston. The multinational entity is one of the world’s largest suppliers of oilfield services and equipment to the energy industry. The company reported its revenues grew nearly 15 percent in 2014, to $8.77 billion, but it’s not clear what 2015 holds for it. In February, Halliburton said it would eliminate at least 5,000 jobs in response to plunging oil prices.

Erle P. Halliburton was good to labor, to people, to the little guy, Pee Wee Owens said. He bears no malice toward Halliburton the company, because of its founder’s kindness toward him. Erle P. Halliburton died in 1957, a giant among men.

Pee Wee Owens, like when he crashed his bike, is hurting again. But he doubts that Halliburton the giant company will help him now.

“The laws are made for the big boys,” he said. “All I’d like is a little justice here. I’d like to get a decent deal. Enough to take care of my kids’ inheritance, as far as what they’re going to lose on property value.”

Owens is losing patience and losing hope.

“We're nothing but bags of meat to Halliburton,” he said.

Company spokeswoman Susie McMichael declined to comment on any aspect of this story, citing ongoing litigation. The Owenses’ attorneys also declined to comment on the case.

The North 40

A sign outside a Duncan Halliburton facility, pictured in 2007.

A Halliburton facility in Duncan in 2007.Robert Hughes / Zuma Press

Randy Walls, 60, worked for Halliburton and its subcontractors for nearly 30 years from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, sometimes on faraway assignments in the United Arab Emirates and Ecuador. His work mostly revolved around hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. During the fracking process, chemicals, sand and water are injected in the ground at high pressure to crack open layers of rock and release gas or oil inside. Specifically, his work entailed cementing — sealing the ring between the well casing and the drilled hole with cement. The aim of cementing is to control corrosion and stabilize the well, pipe and rock formation while it’s fracked for oil and natural gas. He often blended sand and chemicals for fracking operations. Sometimes he was called to help with cleaning rocket fuel from spent missile casings the North 40, he said from his home in Comanche, about 10 miles south of Duncan.

He recalled how each missile casing was hoisted into the air so water could be shot in at high pressure. Red, rubbery pieces of spent rocket fuel, some granular and others as big as a shoe, would fall to a concrete slab. The same water cycled through again and again. He said he and other workers then looked into each missile and felt to make sure the inside was clean, scooping out any remaining material. “They had to be perfectly clean,” he said of the missile casings. “That’s the way they wanted them.”

He said that he never wore gloves, a mask or any other protective gear and that the job soaked the workers.

“In cutting the fuel out of the solid rocket boosters, we were never told there was any danger with that,” he said.

Walls doesn’t recall any signs or educational materials that warned of potentially hazardous chemicals in the rocket fuel or of any other contamination on the site.

In a separate endeavor on the same site during the 1980s, workers at the North 40 attempted to decontaminate racks that had held uranium nuclear fuel rods. Twenty-one racks were shipped from the Ft. Calhoun nuclear reactor in Nebraska to the North 40 to be cleaned and sold as scrap metal in 1