"Oil companies have polluted groundwater and the environment by injecting oil field waste deep into the earth at pressures high enough to violate Oklahoma law. For years, people working for the state agency charged with regulating Oklahoma’s oil and gas industry have warned about the dangers of high-pressure injection. The regulatory agency says it ... has not fined any company for wastewater leaks in the last five years."
"In January 2020, Danny Ray started a complicated job with the Oklahoma agency that regulates oil and gas. The petroleum engineer who’d spent more than 40 years in the oil fields had been hired to help address a spreading problem, one that state regulators did not fully understand.
The year prior, toxic water had poured out of the ground — thousands of gallons per day — for months near the small town of Kingfisher, spreading across acres of farmland, killing crops and trees.
Such pollution events were not new, but they were occurring with increasing frequency across the state. By the time Ray joined the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the incidents had grown common enough to earn a nickname — purges."
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