by Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Nick Bowlin, Capital & Main

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The first sign of trouble bubbled up from gopher holes a stone’s throw from Stan Ledgerwood’s front door. The salt water left an oily sheen on the soil and a swath of dead grass in the yard.

It was June 2017, and Ledgerwood and his wife, Tina, had recently built a home on the family farm, 230 acres of green amidst the rolling hills and long horizons of south-central Oklahoma. There they planned to spend their retirement, close to Stan’s parents on land that has been in the family since 1920.

The view from the porch took in Stan’s parents’ house, two rows of pecan trees his great-grandfather had planted in the 1930s, and the forest shielding the Washita River, a muddy brown ribbon flowing along the southern edge of the farm. The nearest town, Maysville, has a population of 1,087.

“The only people who come down our road are either lost or the mailman,” said Stan, a husky man with a biting sense of humor.

Also visible from the porch was metal piping in a red-gated enclosure: an aging oil well.

Like many property owners in this rural farming community, the Ledgerwoods own their land but only a meager percentage of the oil beneath it. Pump jacks nod up and down in nearby fields of soybeans and alfalfa.

Stan’s 84-year-old parents, Don and Shirley Ledgerwood, have watched oil companies drill multiple wells on their farm, where the family had grown crops and run cattle. The family received small royalty payments from the oil production. And decades later, they had to allow a wastewater pipe to cross the farm when another company, Southcreek Petroleum Co. LLC, redrilled the well behind the red gate. The well, which plunged about 9,000 feet into the earth, was repurposed to inject salt water into the geologic formation and push any remaining oil up to other wells.

A new production boom never materialized for Southcreek in this slice of Garvin County, and the family didn’t hear much from the oil company.

“When they were through here,” Don said, “we thought we were finished with the oil business.”

But then a corroded valve malfunctioned underground, injecting brine into the soil, according to a report by a Southcreek contractor.

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A few days after the release was discovered in June 2017, Stan met with Southcreek and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulatory agency. At the meeting, the company characterized the incident as a “small spill,” the Ledgerwoods later alleged in court. It was unclear how long the leak lasted, but the saltwater plume had already saturated the soil and killed 2 acres of vegetation by the time it broke the surface, according to state oil regulators.

Samples analyzed a month later by Oklahoma State University found that the soil’s concentration of chloride, which occurs in the type of salt water injected into the well, had risen to more than 12 times the state’s acceptable level and was “sufficiently high to reduce yield of even salt tolerant crops.”

Other tests showed that chloride levels in the family’s water well had spiked to more than five times what the Environmental Protection Agency deems safe. The tests didn’t look for other contaminants like heavy metals that are often left behind by the oil production process.

The Ledgerwoods entered a grim limbo, wondering what toxins might be in the cloudy water coming from their faucets and waiting for someone to address the problem.

They experienced firsthand the policy failures that have allowed the oil and gas industry to reap profits without ensuring there will be money to clean up drill sites when the wells run dry and the drillers flee. A recent ProPublica and Capital and Main investigation found a shortfall of about $150 billion between funds set aside to plug wells in major oil-producing states and the true cost of doing so. When the Ledgerwoods later sought to hold the drillers accountable, the family learned how easily oil companies can use bankruptcy to leave their mess to landowners.

Don began traveling 30 miles round-trip to Walmart to buy bottled water. Stan and Tina’s steel pots rusted after being washed, and their 2-year-old great-niece’s skin became irritated and inflamed after repeatedly washing her hands while they potty-trained her. In a text message, the girl’s mother described her hands as looking like they had “a burn.”

Southcreek did not respond to ProPublica and Capital & Main’s requests for comment. In court, the company denied calling the release “small” and argued that the groundwater contamination was contained to the two impacted acres the state identified.

The Ledgerwoods watched in horror as the farm that represented their past and their hope for the future languished. Somehow it had to be fixed, they believed. The rest of the family had also considered retiring to the farm, said Steve Ledgerwood, Stan’s brother and a lawyer in nearby Norman, but that plan was going up in smoke.

“We’ve gone out and made our living and done what we were supposed to do, and we wanted to have a relaxed, peaceful life,” Steve said. “And it has been anything but that.”

The Ledgerwoods and other farmers in Garvin and McClain counties started worrying the moment the oil industry returned in 2012.

Southcreek and other oil companies wanted to resume extraction from the oil field underlying Maysville. But the reservoir was old, so they proposed flooding it with water to force the oil to the surface. Don Ledgerwood and other local farmers signed a petition beseeching the Corporation Commission to reject the companies’ plans.

“This aquifer is our only source of fresh water for our homes, families and........

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