SPILL ‘PUT THE BRAKES ON’ LIVES
A year later, landowners still drinking bottled water, fighting legal battles
BLANCO — Randy Hill and Becky Taylor are so passionate about sunrises they built a second-story viewing room facing east so they could soak them in, one glorious Hill Country morning at a time.
It was all part of the couple’s elaborate retirement plan to leave behind the hustle and bustle of Austin for a calmer life in the country. He’d restore his beloved Corvettes. She’d plant a vineyard and make wine. And then by the time some drinkable grapes got ready to harvest, maybe there’d be some grandkids playing out in the yard.
But their dreams of riding off into the sunrises of Blanco County were shattered last year when pipeline giant Kinder Morgan spilled tens of thousand of gallons of drilling fluid — containing a gel the manufacturer’s safety data sheet says is “carcinogenic to humans” — into the underground aquifer, leaving a giant question mark hanging over their future and their property values.
Now, over a year after the spill, Hill and Taylor are wondering when their lives will get back to normal.
“When this happened it was ‘put the brakes on,’ ” Hill said.
Hill and Taylor are among more than two dozen property owners along the route of the new Permian Highway Pipeline, stretching from West Texas to Katy, who are still drinking bottled water that Kinder Morgan provides, according to their lawyers. Even more are facing drawn-out legal battles over how much they’ll get paid for property they had to give up long ago — property many say will never be the same.
Rocks and weeds now dot a rancher’s once-productive hay field where the spill occurred. A nearby organic farmer is worried about the water he puts on his tomatoes. And several property owners turned over land to Kinder Morgan for easements, giving them permanent rights to use the property, that the company decided it no longer needs — but has yet to relinquish.
While landowners fret about their well water and property values, Kinder Morgan is already cashing in on the natural gas that’s been flowing beneath their land since at least early December. The company recently reported it made a $1 billion windfall from the weeklong winter storm that caused gas prices to soar by 10,000 percent or more amid massive power outages in mid-February.
The profits only make the anger burn hotter in the Hill Country, where residents have had to learn the hard way that they have no say in pipeline routes and are powerless to stop a forprofit corporation from taking private land to build it.
“A group of people came into the community of Blanco and dictated the way that a whole lot of land would be disturbed, all the while making vague promises about safety and economic development,” Taylor said. “Without apology, they planted a few acres of grass on top of the mess, and they left without a backward glance or checking in on the people whose property and dreams they have probably permanently destroyed or certainly damaged.”
Black-colored slime
When Randy Hill and Becky Taylor bought their 44-acre dream property in August 2018, they didn’t have a clue that a natural gas pipeline would come to the edge of their land, let alone affect the water they’d drink, cook with and bathe in.
They closed on the ranch weeks before the pipeline company’s board officially launched the project, and months before its route would come into focus in the Texas Hill Country. When it did, the couple took it like a “punch in the stomach,” Taylor said.
Taylor, a startup consultant, and Hill, chief technology officer at a tech company in Austin, got an even bigger shock in the spring of 2020 when word of the drilling accident reached them.
Crews working for Kinder Morgan, while attempting a boring operation aimed at running a stretch of pipeline under the Blanco River, spilled tens of thousands of gallons of drilling fluid into the underground aquifer on March 28, 2020. Soon Hill and Taylor saw news reports of milk chocolate-looking sludge pouring out of the wells of a neighbor, and later found out their own water had increased turbidity, the couple said.
Because of the accident, the house and property improvements the couple was making at the time just sort of froze in place. Now in the main house, tufts of pink insulation jut out from the exposed framing in the sunrise viewing room, crisscrossed by wires and pipes waiting to be covered by drywall.
Plans for a guesthouse and pool next door also fell apart. They poured the foundation and then abruptly stopped.
A few weeks ago, in late March, Hill says their home water filter caught black-colored slime that “smelled like sewage,” which he blames on the spill. He and Taylor have since joined a lawsuit against Kinder Morgan.
“Basically we’ve spent the better part of threequarters of a million to a million dollars on something that we can’t use,” Taylor said. “That pisses me off.”
Kinder Morgan Vice President and spokesman Allen Fore declined to comment on the details of cases that are still being litigated. But he said the company is providing bottled water to residents not because the company acknowledges their wells are contaminated but because that is what the landowners requested.
“Anything that’s directly attributable to the incident, that’s what we’re responsible for,” Fore said.
Texas pipelines get broad condemnation powers if they benefit the public, but that is a determination the company — not the government — gets to make. Apart from building vital energy infrastructure and transporting fuel consumers need, Kinder Morgan has emphasized the positive environmental impact of bringing gas to market that might get wasted though flaring, or burning off the gas.
Costing $2 billion, the now-completed, 430-mile pipeline moves 2.1 billion cubic feet of gas per day, representing more than half the amount of gas used to generate electricity in Texas on an average day in January.
‘Blood, sweat and tears’
After the 2020 spill, Kinder Morgan pulled the plug on its Blanco River tunneling operation. But it didn’t end landowners’ woes.
To date, the company has settled lawsuits with at least three Blanco County families who said their water wells were contaminated with drilling fluid, including one whose water was found in laboratory tests to have dangerous levels of lead, arsenic and other metals and contaminants a few days after the spill, records show.
Subsequent test results of samples of the affected wells, conducted by the local groundwater district and others, have shown heavy metals in allowable ranges, but the well owners said they were still seeing cloudy water months later.
Under confidentiality agreements they’re not allowed to discuss the terms of the settlement. Before they signed it, two of the families told the Houston Chronicle last year that Kinder Morgan offered them rainwater collection systems that cost about $50,000 each.
Bill and Dianne Fojtasek, who live on a 15-acre tract just up the road from Hill and Taylor, are also drinking and cooking with Kinder Morgan-provided bottled water. And to this day, the company is holding on to a permanent easement, measuring approximately 1 acre, even though the pipeline went elsewhere after the accident.
The company made an initial offer of just $25,000 for property, which included use of temporary workspace for construction of the pipeline, but court-appointed commissioners awarded them over $400,000, they said. Kinder Morgan appealed and now the case is slowly crawling through the court system. Since both are cancer survivors in their late 70s, the Fojtaseks are afraid they’ll die before the matter is resolved — or face a quick sale at a greatly diminished price.
They are among dozens of landowners along the pipeline’s route who are confronting drawn-out disputes and mounting legal bills as Kinder Morgan fights one condemnation award after another.
“What if we had something happen and we want to sell it tomorrow? We got that condemnation suit still going, the pipeline within sight. Property value is diminished considerably,” Dianne Fojtasek. “It's very frustrating. I mean, at our age, they're saying that these hearings can take years to get around to.”
Fore, the Kinder Morgan vice president, said moving the pipeline off property it initially condemned for the project changes the calculation for what’s owed, so the process for determining a final value remains pending.
He noted the majority of landowners whose property was used for the Permian Highway Pipeline agreed on a price without court intervention and said the company made numerous voluntary tweaks to the route after hearing landowners’ concerns.
Asked why a company that made a $1 billion windfall off a catastrophic storm can’t just settle the remaining disputes, Fore said in many of the pending cases there is a “strong disparity between what we believe is the value and what the condemnation court directed.”
“We would love to settle and resolve all of these, mutually agreeable, and that is our goal on every single one,” Fore said. “And we'll work very hard to do that.”
Then there’s the altered landscapes. Though Kinder Morgan CEO Steve Kean promised the company would “restore the land when construction is complete,” Bill Fojtasek says his organic farming operation has been negatively impacted by deep digging that caused an explosion of weeds and cockleburs he’d spent decades getting under control with natural herbicides. He’s also worried about what may be in the water he’s using to irrigate his crops.
Likewise, their neighbor Randy Oakes, whose ranch was used for the ill-fated drilling operation that fouled nearby wells, said his hay fields are now covered in weeds and thistles instead of the kleingrass he grew before the pipeline came along.
Even worse: Crews dug up a sea of buried rocks on a large stretch of the land the pipeline condemned, making it impossible to harvest hay there until Oakes can remove them. Kinder Morgan, which provides his drinking water, is still holding on to the 3-acre permanent easement it took from his family despite moving the route off their land.
When he was a kid Oakes said he and his dad would spend hours handpicking rocks from the fields. Now, to see their work undone years after his father died makes Oakes feel defeated.
“My dad is probably turning over in his grave to see all that stuff that came through here,” he said. The 71-year-old rancher apologized for getting choked up when he started talking about how much his father loved the place. It’s been in their family for more than half a century.
“Sorry,” he said, his voice cracking. “A lot of blood, sweat and tears here, but a lot of laughter and a lot of good times.”
Fore said Kinder Morgan remained committed to ensuring full land restoration along the pipeline route and if there are still dissatisfied property owners, “we’re gonna fix it.”