Oil and Gas Dumping Waste in Creek?

TxSharon did some up-close investigation the other day on a situation in rural Wise County where this hose was laid from a known gas well waste pit, down to a creek that feeds Lake Grapevine and eventually runs into the Trinity River.

I have a Google Earth map of the site as it was when she took the photos, after the jump...


Basically what you see in the diagram is an aerial view of how the hose went from the pit on the lower left, down the road to a creek.

The difference in elevation from pit to creek is 134 feet.

Since the water in the creek shown is barely a trickle, and no pump was attached to the hose, the easiest thing to believe is that the pit was being drained into the creek.

The pit had been full. When the pictures were taken, the water was low.

The driller denied that the hose was for waste. Much of the hose was picked up this week.

I suppose we are to believe that the driller went down stream from the lake at the right, and put the huge hose into a tiny trickle of a creek, with no inlet screen and no pump to suck water 134 feet uphill 1/2 a mile away. And I suppose we are to believe that sucking water into the pit leaves the pit with less water?

Or perhaps we are to believe that this waste pit with obvious crap floating in it, and that TxSharon knows to be a waste pit had been repurposed for fresh water, and that they were just offloading the clean water into the creek.