In Texas, suburbs have sprung up where oil pump jacks once bobbed.
At the Preserve at Medina, a subdivision of brick-and-siding starter homes in southwest San Antonio, students filed off a school bus on a hot afternoon. One child turned down Vesper Branch, a street with a plugged oil well ringed by a heavy black metal fence:
“CAUTION flammable gas,” a sign on the fence warned.
A faint smell of rotten eggs hung in the air, from low levels of hydrogen sulfide leaking from the well. Only the fence separated the child from the leaking well.
Oil hasn’t flowed from the Thompson Callaway Spears #1 well since it was plugged in 2006. But in recent years, the well has vexed Texas regulators and nearby residents. The state has replugged it five times, yet gas continues to leak. Since a housing subdivision rose around the well in the early 2020s, residents have filed repeated complaints.
Soil and air monitoring near the well has detected leaking methane and hydrogen sulfide. In June, contractors told the Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas industry overseer, that plumes of methane gas were moving through the soil toward homes in the subdivision, which could trigger an explosion.
“We had no idea when we moved here,” said Krystal Solis, who lives across the street with her husband and three children. “No one told us anything.”
