This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Frontier. This story is co-published with Grist, which contributed to its development. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
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In January 2020, Danny Ray started a complicated job with the Oklahoma agency that regulates oil and gas. The petroleum engineer who’d spent more than 40 years in the oil fields had been hired to help address a spreading problem, one that state regulators did not fully understand…