‘Boom!’ As gas drilling expands in Tarrant County, east Fort Worth residents say they’re paying the price

The second Teena James stepped outside on Feb. 28, she could see clouds of black smoke filling the clear sky. It was no mystery where the exhaust was coming from: the natural gas drilling site just down the block from James’ home, where only a road and a 6-month-old wall stand between residents and fracking. Although the Mount Tabor drill site has stood on 3020 Village Creek Road for more than a decade, TEP Barnett – the Fort Worth branch of French energy giant TotalEnergies – began drilling again in January, this time creating four new gas wells. Loud booms filled east Fort Worth’s Stop Six neighborhood at all hours of the night, according to James and other homeowners, and the machines extracting gas from the ground never seemed to turn off. “When they first came in, that’s all you were going to hear,” said Dereck Collins, whose home is just a few hundred feet from the TEP Barnett property. “Boom! We used to hear this all night. Boom! You can feel it.”

The noise was one thing. Black exhaust was another. On that sunny Monday morning, James said she could taste the fumes in her mouth, causing her to vomit and later call an ambulance to check on her condition. But first, James pulled out her phone and began to record. “I don’t know who I’m supposed to tell this to, I don’t know who’s supposed to listen and who can make a difference,” James told viewers on Facebook Live, pointing her camera toward the steady stream of exhaust entering the air. “But I’m letting you know as a mother, as a homeowner, as someone who stays in the community, this is not healthy for our neighborhood.” Within hours, James called Fort Worth’s code compliance department and eventually filed a complaint with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which dispatched investigators to the site that day. Victoria Cann, a commission spokesperson, would not provide details on what was discovered at the site, but said the investigation is ongoing. In a statement, TEP Barnett said a contractor’s pump at the Mount Tabor drilling pad began to fail and blew dark smoke on Feb. 28, though neighbors said they noticed some smoke as early as Feb. 25.