GUTHRIE, Okla. (KFOR) — A Logan County landowner says hydraulic fluid from an oil pipeline project is still contaminating his land near the Cimarron River, despite claims from the oil company that cleanup efforts met environmental standards. Lane Garrett and his family bought their land along the banks of the Cimarron River 16 years ago. “It’s real quiet out here,” Garrett said. “There’s lots of wildlife out here—turkey, quail, deer. There’s a river right over there.” The property sits at the very edge of Logan County, far from the noise and pollution of city life. “Very few people get to look out their kitchen window and see a river,” Garrett said. That’s why he and his family were frustrated when, in June 2024, they learned a pipeline would be running through their land.
Phillips 66 went through the courts to condemn part of the family’s land, securing an easement to build the oil pipeline.
“They said we’re going to put a pipeline in on your place,” Garrett said. “We ended up losing. It was kind of like, all right, well, y’all win. Come on out.” Construction began in January. “They bored underneath the river, and then it came up there on that north bank,” Garrett said. But with the work came a mess. “Just trash, you know, pop cans, chip cans,” Garrett said. “Cigarette butts, things like that.” Then, his brother, William, smelled something near the crew’s boring machine. “I was like, What? What is that? I know that smell, and I know it’s not good. What is that?” William Garrett said. “And then finally looked down and just a pool of hydraulic fluid.” Hydraulic fluid—and a lot of it—was seeping into their pasture. “I would say a good 20 feet to the north, you’d find it on the mud, little drops of where hydraulic fluid had just been sprayed in kind of a west-out direction,” Lane Garrett said. William took photos of the contamination. They alerted the project manager. “He said he didn’t know anything about it,” Lane Garrett said. But as the Garrets pushed for answers up the chain at Phillips 66, they kept getting that same response. “When we found it, that chemical had already been sitting there for a minimum of about 18 to 20 days,” Garrett said. “I asked the guys, I said, ‘okay, well, somebody knew. Somebody knew about this. This got dumped on the ground.’ You know, that was the plan just to, you know, kick some dirt over it and hope nobody noticed or what?” Eventually, he said the company acknowledged the spill and began a cleanup. “They built what they call a containment wall,” Lane Garrett said. “It just seemed like they’re just kind of pushing dirt around and running it over and pushing it rather than having a big goopy mess… They came out with an excavator, and then they just, you know, took a few little scoops off the surface and then pushed it, you know, just filled that hole and said, we’re done.” “They’re just burying it so someone can come and take a topsoil sample and go, ‘Oh, this is all clean,’” William Garrett said. Later, he dug a core sample few feet down into the area Phillips 66 claimed they had cleaned up…