Electra, Texas

Texas

A rancher drilling for drinking water kept hitting crude oil, and the water came up undrinkable.

historicalengineering

Water is scarce in this part of Texas, so William Thomas Waggoner started drilling wells to supply the town's new residents. Nearly every hole he sank came up fouled with crude oil. The water was unfit to drink. At the time that counted as a failure, and three years later Waggoner sold the land to a Fort Worth developer named Solomon Williams, who subdivided it and bought advertisements in national magazines to talk people into moving there. It worked. The population doubled from five hundred to a thousand in three years. Then on the first of April, nineteen eleven, a well called the Clayco gusher struck oil at sixteen hundred feet and started producing two hundred sixty barrels a day. Word spread fast. Oil workers commuted in from Wichita Falls. Brick buildings went up, concrete sidewalks, a telephone exchange. The Waggoner family still owns much of that same land and still drills it for oil.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
Most of these drilling sites were befouled by crude oil, which made the water unfit for drinking.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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