ARLINGTON, TEXAS — In early December, drilling resumed near Mother’s Heart Learning Center.
Newly installed gas wells dot property at 2020 S. Watson Road, less than one mile from the day care. One day in December, the sound of fracking machinery was so cacophonous that children couldn’t play outdoors.
For gas companies and stakeholders, the project is poised to be an economic windfall. But many Arlington residents and experts say it could come at the expense of the community — especially its children.
In January 2025, the Arlington City Council unanimously approved a permit allowing French oil and gas company TotalEnergies to install 10 new gas wells in East Arlington, which has a heavy concentration of Black and Latinx residents. It marked the first time in over a decade that the city council approved a permit for a new drill site after years of community opposition.
Named Maverick, the new site also lies near three schools — Johns Elementary, Adams Elementary and Thornton Elementary. Five wells owned by the same company already occupy the plot of land near the new drilling site, which the company has owned since 2008.
Hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — is used to extract gas by pumping pressurized water, sand and chemicals into bedrock. Texas policymakers have lauded the activity as a boon to local communities, garnering $2.48 billion in state tax revenue in 2025, according to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Arlington is choked with hundreds of these gas wells. The city, which sits atop the Barnett Shale, is a modern-day Golconda.
But fracking has drawn sharp criticism from health experts, who say it could be linked to severe conditions like preterm births, congenital anomalies, lung diseases and childhood cancers.
The practice has also elicited backlash because of its role in accelerating the global climate crisis through greenhouse gas emissions. TotalEnergies has been embroiled in legal controversies for years, and its troubles have mounted in recent months. As of February, it is facing a historic civil climate case in France, brought on by a coalition of French environmental groups and more than a dozen municipal authorities.
The company has rejected proposed limits to its fossil fuel production. “It makes no sense at all to prevent TotalEnergies [from] producing oil and gas that the global energy system still uses today,” it said in a statement. “The courtroom is not the right place to advance the energy transition.”
The 19th interviewed Arlington residents about the impact fracking has had on their lives. They shared their fears about their grandchildren’s health, their experiences living in neighborhoods impacted by fracking and their reservations about TotalEnergies expanding operations in the city.
Devastated residents throughout Arlington
Ingrid Kelley, 69, has grown tired of the gas wells sprouting throughout North Texas. Several sit less than a mile from her house in East Arlington, and a pungent lingering scent of sulfur and something else that she can only describe as “rotten” has settled into her neighborhood. She fears what might happen to her 4-year-old grandson, who lives with her and attends Mother’s Heart Learning Center.
“I can’t project and trace what all is going to affect him and all those that live around there and all those that are around these sites,” she said. “It’s very hard to project what’s going to happen, how many people are going to have increased cancer risk, respiratory disease, cardiac disease — all the things that go along with being premature or having congenital heart disease that affect you the rest of your life.”
Her grandson — who was born in Arlington with a congenital heart disease — has had to undergo intermittent nebulizer treatment since he began attending Mother’s Heart in 2024, a treatment typically reserved for those who have lung complications. He had no prior respiratory complications, Kelley said. Kelley won’t open windows at home, fearing contaminated air from nearby fracking sites will seep in.
“We’re like one big science experiment here,” said Kelley who, in 2016, became involved with Liveable Arlington, a grassroots organization targeting fracking in the city. She is now on the board.
Edgar Bunton, who is in his 60s, moved to his home in southwest Arlington six years ago and lives less than 600 feet from more than a dozen wells. His wife began to experience frequent and unexplained migraines. Two of his grandchildren who live near these gas wells have respiratory complications, which Bunton attributes to the wells.
“I really got on board because of my grandbabies,” he said.
The adverse health effects of hydraulic fracturing on children have been studied over the decades.
“This is a cumulative risk issue, because this is not just one chemical at a time people are being exposed to,” said Meagan Weisner, a senior health scientist at Environmental Defense Fund and a former public health epidemiologist who has studied health impacts related to oil and gas development in Colorado. “This is dozens of chemicals coming from more than just one site because they’re already near other wells.”
According to Weisner, the contaminants released are dangerous to nearby residents not only during the drilling phase, which emits numerous toxic chemicals, but also after.
“There were a lot of parents that were reporting their children were feeling ill during the pre-production phase,” Weisner said, which encompasses drilling. “So it would not surprise me at all if these residents in Texas that are close to these 10 wells experienced adverse health impacts because of their proximity.”
Children in particular are uniquely susceptible to harm. “We saw health impacts in children extended out to two miles from the pad,” she said. “I don’t know if that would be the exact same in Texas, but we saw adults had reported significant adverse symptoms within a one-mile radius but, for children, it was within a two-mile radius, and that does track along the lines of children are just much more vulnerable.”
The 19th reached out to the City of Arlington for comment. In an emailed response, the city only said that the drill site was approved because “it met the 600-foot spacing requirement from protected uses, as outlined in the City’s Gas Drilling and Production ordinance.”
TotalEnergies did not respond to questions from The 19th.
Before energy companies descended on Arlington, the sprawling land behind Phil Kabbakoff’s house was decorated with oak trees. When the company Chesapeake Energy arrived in his neighborhood, they were leveled and reduced to kindling. Now, a towering drill rig owned by TotalEnergies looms behind the 84-year-old’s home in their place.
Kabbakoff resides in the Glen Springs subdivision of southwest Arlington, the same neighborhood where Bunton’s grandchildren developed respiratory illnesses.
“A lot of these houses now are leased, and so people come and go, and we don’t know who they are,” he said. “We used to know everybody on the street.”
Like other residents, he was upset that more gas wells were installed by Mother’s Heart. “We were up in arms about it all the way around,” he said.
While Kabbakoff would like to see sustained changes made to fracking practices in the city, he believes that Arlington elected officials will only continue to value the interests of gas companies despite protest.
“They’re never going to change, not this council,” he said. “They don’t know anything about it. Nobody’s researched it. They could care less. They know they make money from it, and that’s all they’re worried about.”
‘Sacrifice zones are safe spaces for polluters’
In 2005, landmen arrived to secure land for mineral ownership and drilling rights from Arlington residents. Ranjana Bhandari, founder of Liveable Arlington, was approached and ultimately declined.
“This is almost 20 years ago,” she said. “Because I was a mother — I had a young child — I didn’t think that it made any sense to have that kind of pollution around our children.”
At the onset of the fracking boom in Arlington, Bhandari spent hours poring over reports from other regions that experienced similar fracking booms, hoping for a glimpse of what this new development might mean for her city.
“Very quickly, they built 56 drill sites here, and they were spread out all over the city,” she said. “There’s literally one everywhere you see, one every few minutes.”
She read studies about cancerous pollutants linked to childhood leukemia coming out of states like Colorado. In the neighboring city of Fort Worth, she saw reports that air quality was slowly deteriorating because of drilling-related emissions of benzene, a carcinogen with proven harmful reproductive effects on women and fetuses.
“Benzene is a serious, serious cat,” she said. “It’s a category one carcinogen. There’s no safe amount of it.”
Bhandari recalled a particular moment when she and her family stopped at a red light directly across from one now-defunct drill site around 2011. Within minutes, she said, they began to feel sick. “That was my first inkling that we weren’t just looking at climate harm.”
The discovery was bleak to Bhandari. By 2015, families in Arlington found themselves overwhelmed by the drill sites’ noxious fumes and the effects of fracking that rippled throughout the city — so much so that they decided to intervene. She created Liveable Arlington the same year.
“We were a mothers’ organization — mothers and grandmothers concerned about children’s health — and, through our campaigns and over the years, started learning many new things,” Bhandari said.
“We focused on the science. We focused on the community,” she continued. “I started it as a concerned parent. We were much more focused on fracking near children, fracking near day cares and schools, and so some of our most successful campaigns and most of our advocacy was to stop expansion of fracking around eight sites in Arlington, which are right next to day cares.”
Now 61 years old, she has seen the very problems she once read about penetrate her own community. And the repercussions have been more consequential for some communities than others. More often than not, Bhandari said, they’ve settled disproportionately in majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods, like the one where Mother’s Heart is located.
“The burdens of fracking were so unequally distributed,” she said. “The other bigger picture that people seem to miss when they say, ‘It’s OK to put it somewhere else, just not near me,’ is that you always will preserve a safe place. Sacrifice zones are safe spaces for polluters.”