The bonkers level of pollution at Deer Creek from a small oil company

On May 9, 2024, an EPA inspector stood at the edge of a wetland near Smackover, Arkansas, looking at a dirty disaster. Water that should have been teeming with life was poisoned. It was flowing from the wetland into a stream called Deer Creek, a place that, by law, is one of the protected “waters of the United States”. But on that day, it was a corporate dumping ground.

The inspector’s equipment told a story more depressing than their eye could see. The water was choked with “oil field wastes and produced water,” a toxic brine from nearby oil production. The concentration of contaminants, measured as Total Dissolved Solids, was 53,924 milligrams per liter.

Let’s put that number in perspective.

Clean drinking water usually has less than 500 mg/L. The salt water of the Atlantic Ocean has about 35,000 mg/L. This little corner of Arkansas, this freshwater wetland and the creek it feeds, had been made significantly more toxic and contaminated than the sea itself.

This was the result of a leaking flowline, a pipeline owned and operated by a local company: Jerry Langley Oil Company, LLC. And for this violation of the Clean Water Act, they would be asked to pay a fine. That fine, meant to be a punishment for poisoning a public waterway, was just $14,000.

The Cost of a Leak

Jerry Langley Oil Company has responsibilities. One of those responsibilities, under the federal Clean Water Act, is to not discharge pollutants from a “point source”—like a pipe or a flowline—into the nation’s waters without a permit. Discharging oil field brine is a non-permitted activity, plain and simple.

The company failed that responsibility. Their flowline, used to transport the waste products of oil extraction, became a conduit for pollution, spewing toxic brine into the fragile ecosystem of a wetland and Deer Creek. Each day the leak continued was a separate violation of federal law.

The ripple effect of such a spill is devastatingly simple. The super-salty, chemically-laden water kills freshwater plants on contact. It poisons the soil. It makes the water uninhabitable for fish, frogs, and the insects they feed on. It turns a living creek into a sterile drainage ditch. The damage can linger for years, a salty scar on the landscape where nothing will grow.

This isn’t just about one company or one leaky pipe. It’s a snapshot of a much larger issue. Across the country, thousands of miles of aging energy infrastructure are quietly rusting, cracking, and waiting to fail. The business model often favors production over prevention, leaving communities and ecosystems to bear the cost when things inevitably go wrong. It’s a system that treats pollution not as a disaster to be avoided, but as a risk to be managed, often with a checkbook after the fact.

The Price of Pollution

When the EPA came knocking, Jerry Langley Oil Company chose to settle. This is common. A legal battle is expensive and time-consuming. A settlement is quick. But it’s what’s inside the settlement that really tells the story.

The oil company was liable for a Class I civil penalty. Under the law, that penalty could have been as high as $27,378 per day, up to a maximum of $68,445. What they actually agreed to pay was $14,000. That’s about 20% of the maximum possible fine. For a company in the business of oil extraction, $14,000 is basically a rounding error. It’s just the cost of doing business on the way to generating profits.

But here’s the real kicker. As part of the deal, Jerry Langley Oil Company “neither admits nor denies the specific Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law”.

Think about that. They are paying a penalty for polluting a creek, but they are not required to admit that they actually polluted the creek. This legal two-step allows the company to resolve the federal violation without creating a paper trail of guilt that could be used against them in other lawsuits, say, from a landowner whose property was damaged. It’s a shield, bought and paid for.

Real Solutions Don’t Fit on a Check

So, a creek was poisoned. A fine was paid. No one had to admit they did anything wrong. Does anyone feel like justice was served?

This outcome isn’t an anomaly; it’s the system working as designed. It prioritizes efficient resolution over true accountability. It sets fines that are often too small to force meaningful changes in corporate behavior. Why spend millions on preventative maintenance for your pipelines when the penalty for a disastrous leak is less than the price of a used pickup truck?

Meaningful change doesn’t look like a $14,000 check. It looks like regulations that mandate proactive maintenance and regular inspections of aging infrastructure. It looks like penalties that are so financially painful they make pollution the most expensive option, not the cheapest one. It looks like a system where admitting fault is a prerequisite for settling the score.

Until then, communities across the country will be left watching their own versions of Deer Creek, wondering if the company responsible will be held to account, or if they’ll just pay a small fee to wash their hands of the mess they made.

All factual claims and statements in this article are sourced from the public court document In the Matter of: Jerry Langley Oil Company, LLC, Docket No. CWA-06-2025-1733, filed on August 25, 2025.

The EPA consent agreement can be found here: https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2025-07/jerry-langley-oil-company-llc-aru002237-proposed-cafo.pdf