In our latest investigation, reporter Nick Bowlin digs into a troubling question: What happens when families report salty, oily drinking water that leaves sores in their mouths — and the state declines to determine the cause? In “Salty, oily drinking water left sores in their mouths. Oklahoma refused to find out why,” Nick traces complaints of oilfield contamination, examines how regulators responded and explains why key questions remain unanswered. In this conversation, he takes us behind the scenes of the reporting, the documents that shaped the story and what it reveals about oversight of oil and gas pollution in Oklahoma.

Dylan Goforth: When you first heard about the Boarmans’ situation, what made you think this wasn’t just a private well problem but a story about the state’s oil and gas regulator? What was the moment where the story “clicked” for you?

Nick Bowlin: After my initial conversations with Tammy and Chris, I sent in an open records request with the state. Once I got the files and began to read, the click happened pretty fast. I saw that officials at the OCC had found strong signs of oil and gas pollution using a number of different metrics and tests. And this was for a house that sits in the middle of a legacy oilfield, drilled in the 1940s. Old wells plugged with mud – a common practice at the time – surround their house. But all this evidence didn’t seem to lead to urgent action. The agency slow-walked testing nearby oil and gas operations and water sampling for heavy metals. And when they finally ran those tests, they found problems. People all over the state are dealing with pollution threats from historic and current oil and gas. Tammy and Chris were unusually proactive in pushing the state to help them and trying to learn all they could about their situation. If this is how the state handled the Boarmans’ case, it didn’t bode well for other Oklahomans coming to the OCC for help.

Dylan: A huge part of this story relies on internal emails, test results and agency reports. How did you go about getting those records, and what was the most surprising or revealing document you found?

Nick: I relied primarily on open records requests to the OCC. My first one took a while, since my request covered over a year of agency work on the Boarmans’. But after that, I could submit requests covering only a few months at a time and the agency tended to return these promptly. To my mind, the most revealing set of emails come from September 2024, after the Boarmans’ state senator got involved. His arrival seemed to spur the state to finally order long-delayed tests. I was also struck by the electromagnetic survey images: For the most part, oil and gas reporters don’t get to see the pollution we report on. Leaks happen deep below our feet, while CO2 emissions are invisible. But those images taken by the agency offered a rare and disturbing picture of the pollution plume contaminating the Boarmans’ drinking water.

Dylan: There are several points in the story where agency staff appear to know more than the Boarmans do about what’s happening to their water. How did you piece together that timeline of who knew what, and when?

Nick: I built out a detailed chronology, based on the records I received and interviews with the Boarmans’. It wasn’t hard to do that with the agency emails. But I also built a timeline of the evidence. There isn’t a single test that definitively proves oil and gas contamination. Instead, the state relied on an accumulation of data, evaluating things like salts, the presence of certain metals, chemical ratios and the belowground electromagnetic maps. That was a useful exercise: to see the growing pile of evidence pointing to oil and gas, compared to the agency’s handling of the Boarmans’ pollution case.

Dylan: The McCoon injection well becomes central to the story. How did you figure out it might be a key

Frontier: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of listen frontier today. I am joined by Hart Brown, the president of artificial intelligence and transformation at Saxum. He also helped author Governor Stitt's Artificial Intelligence strategy for the state. Thanks for joining us today. I wondered if you would tell us a little bit first about yourself, your background and how you got involved in this project and in this area.

Hart Brown: You bet. Coming out of school, I was doing a lot of work in what we now refer to as predictive analysis, so algorithmic based decision making, using math to help understand what's likely to happen and then make the best decisions you possibly can.

I had a number of people come to me and say Hart, can you build an artificial intelligence system that can do what you do on paper in real time? I answered. I said let's find out. It sounds really interesting. At that time, there was really only one system that anybody could really use, and that was IBM Watson. And so I built an artificial intelligence system on top of IBM Watson to be able to leverage this algorithm in real time. And got very good success.

Frontier: So let's talk about the governor's report a little bit. The document calls itself a forward thinking approach, which is right means, in a lot of ways, that some of it is aspirational in a sense that we're at a point where we don't exactly know where we're going to end up with AI. What are some of the concrete things that Oklahoma could do in the next six months, 12 months that are realistic to embrace AI better or better understand how it’s shaping Oklahoma?

Hart Brown: It’s really important to understand that we're really talking about a longer timeline. So some elements of that are going to happen closer to a two year time frame. Some may be a little bit further out now. We're transitioning from a period of time where artificial intelligence really kind of felt like a toy. It was interesting, it was fun. We all started to use it. We downloaded the apps. We were making pictures and lots of different things. Oklahoma is in a relatively low unemployment environment, meaning it's hard for Oklahoma employers to find good people to hire, and so with that, let's use the technology. Let's grow the businesses as quickly as we can by leveraging that in a responsible and reasonable way.

Frontier: Is it even possible at this point to have guardrails, or to know what the guardrails would even be? At some point, it will start to affect people's jobs. You mentioned low unemployment, people having difficulty filling some of these positions that maybe AI could replace, but at some point people's jobs will be what's being replaced. And so are there guardrails to protect workers? Or how should people approach that part of the discussion?

Hart Brown: From an economic productivity perspective, I need everybody working and I need everybody using the technology. If the technology replaces people in this ecosystem, I don't get the economic value out of the system at the end of the day. And really what we're seeing in the next two to three years, whichever country maximizes its potential related to artificial intelligence, is likely to be the dominant economic country for the next 75 to 100 years. So first and foremost, I need everybody in the ecosystem being productive.

It doesn't make sense for us to have a broad based disruption of the employment environment, because we don't win at the end of the day. We won't be the dominant economic country. So I'm very optimistic that if we do see that turbulence, that we have enough opportunities to resolve that before it really becomes a problem.

Frontier: Looking at the strategy and at this report, if we revisit it in five or 10 years, what would success look like in Oklahoma, and what would...

Immigration detention usually happens out of public view — inside private prisons, through sealed court filings, and far from scrutiny. But in Oklahoma, those cases are starting to surface.

In recent months, immigrants who’ve lived in the U.S. for years — some for decades — have been jailed for months without bond hearings, even when they have no criminal convictions and deep ties to their communities. Their only path to release has been through habeas corpus petitions filed in federal court.

At the same time, Oklahoma is becoming a growing hub for immigration detention as private prison companies expand their footprint.

Our reporter, Ari Fie, has been digging into these cases to understand who’s being detained, why this is happening now, and what it means for due process. I spoke with her about what she found.