How to check everything on this site.
Every factual claim here should be traceable to a document you can open and read yourself.
This page explains where the records come from, how they are handled, what separates a source document from my own analysis, what is deliberately not published, and how to tell me I have something wrong. If any of it does not hold up, that is worth knowing — and this page tells you how to say so.
Where these records come from
Nothing on this site was obtained through any means other than public records law, published sources, and material people chose to share with me.
Public information requests
Requests under the Texas Public Information Act to the City of Wichita Falls and to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, including records released following Attorney General rulings.
Federal FOIA requests
Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Already-public records
Material published by EPA, TCEQ, the Texas Water Development Board and the City of Wichita Falls, including federal monitoring data, permits, council materials and engineering reports.
Scientific literature
Peer-reviewed research on NDMA, nitrosamine formation and destruction, potable reuse treatment, and related public-health topics.
Shared by individuals
Documents provided by people who worked on, reviewed or followed the project, and information provided directly by families.
Provenance is stated
Where a document's date, author or origin is uncertain, the page says so rather than guessing. An unclear provenance is labeled as unclear, not smoothed over.
How records are handled
I am not a professional researcher or archivist. What follows is what I actually did, including where it falls short.
Document contents were never altered. Over roughly four years I accumulated several thousand documents — public records productions, engineering reports, correspondence, laboratory data, scientific papers. Nothing was edited, overwritten, or altered in substance. What a document says today is what it said when I received it.
Filenames are a different matter. I tried to keep documents under the names they arrived with, but I was not consistent about it, and some files were renamed along the way to make sense of what I had. I cannot state that every file in this collection still carries its original name.
They were not well organized while I collected them. For most of that period the files sat in folders that made sense to me at the time and not much else. There was no consistent naming and no index. That was a real limitation, and correcting it is why the library was reorganized.
The library was organized in 2026, by copying. Every original file stayed exactly where it was, under its original name. The organized library consists of copies. Copies are renamed for readability — so a file reads 2015-02-12 – City of Wichita Falls – UV Reactor Shutdown SOP rather than a scanner's serial number — but their contents are not altered.
An index now exists. Each file in the library is recorded with the filename and location it had at the time of that reorganization, so a published copy can be traced back to the file it was made from. Where that filename was one I had given the document rather than the one it arrived with, the index cannot recover the original name.
For many documents the source is unambiguous: it arrived in a public records production, or bears the letterhead and date of the agency that issued it. For others — files collected early, or found published online without clear attribution — I cannot state with certainty where I obtained them or when.
Those documents are flagged as having uncertain provenance rather than presented as though the chain were clean. Where a document matters to a claim on this site and its provenance is uncertain, the page says so. A document whose origin I cannot establish is not treated as strong evidence, whatever it appears to show.
If you think a posted document has been altered, request the same record yourself. Almost everything here came from the City of Wichita Falls, TCEQ or EPA and can be requested by anyone. If your copy differs from mine in any way, tell me and I will post both and say so.
Redaction policy
A small number of documents are redacted before publication. When that happens, the document is labeled as redacted and the page states what was removed.
What gets redacted: personal mobile telephone numbers, private email addresses, system login credentials, signatures, and similar operational or personal details that serve no public purpose and could cause harm if published.
No finding, figure, date, statement, conclusion or inconvenient fact is removed from any document posted here. Redactions are limited to the categories above.
Unredacted originals are preserved. If a redaction is ever questioned, the unredacted record still exists and can be produced to an appropriate reviewer.
What is a record, and what is my analysis
This is the most important distinction on the site, and the one most worth checking me on.
Sources are government records, engineering reports, laboratory data, correspondence and peer-reviewed literature. They are presented as what they are, attributed to the agency, firm or author that produced them, and linked so you can read the whole document rather than the part I quoted.
My analysis is everything else: summaries, timeline entries, the way documents are grouped, the significance I attach to them, and the conclusions I draw. It is mine. It carries no authority beyond the sources it rests on, and it should be read as one person's reading of the record.
I am not an engineer, a scientist, a physician or an epidemiologist. Where a question requires that expertise, this site says so and asks for it rather than supplying an answer.
How sources are weighted
Not every document carries the same weight. Where sources disagree, the stronger one governs, and the disagreement is noted rather than resolved silently.
Records created at the time by the people doing the work: permits, regulatory correspondence, laboratory reports, operating records, engineering submittals, internal emails. These show what was known, decided and done, as it happened.
Published research on NDMA toxicology, formation and destruction, and on potable reuse treatment. Authoritative on scientific questions; not evidence about what happened in Wichita Falls specifically.
Conference presentations, published case studies and public statements made after the fact. Valuable, but written with hindsight and often for an audience. Weighed against the contemporaneous record where the two differ.
Useful for establishing what was publicly known and when. Not treated as a source for technical facts.
Research questions, draft calculations and working hypotheses. These shape what I look for. They are not presented as findings and nothing on this site rests on them.
Where a document referenced elsewhere has not been located, this site says it has not been located. It does not say the event did not occur, the test was not run, or the record does not exist. A gap in what I hold is a gap in what I hold.
What I do not publish
Some material is withheld on purpose. These limits apply even when a document was lawfully obtained and could be published.
No medical records, no clinical details beyond what a family has chosen to share publicly.
A child is named here only where their family has given permission. Where permission has not been given, the diagnosis is described without identifying details, or not described at all.
Including the families involved in this investigation. Approximate distances are stated where relevant; street addresses are not.
Personal mobile numbers and private email addresses are redacted even when a public records production included them. Official contact information and the substance of official communications are not withheld.
Material produced through a public records request is not automatically published here simply because it was released. Each document is reviewed for privacy before it is posted.
What this site is not
It is not a scientific study. No hypothesis was registered in advance, no protocol was peer-reviewed, and no statistical analysis is offered. Documenting circumstances is not the same as testing them.
It is not a claim that anything caused anyone's illness. The water record and the cancer information are presented separately, for exactly that reason. Nothing here establishes that NDMA, drinking water or potable reuse caused any diagnosis.
It is not an accusation of wrongdoing. Records showing that monitoring was recommended, removed and never performed are presented as what they are. Whether those decisions were reasonable, lawful or ordinary is a question for regulators and for readers.
It is not complete. Public records requests remain outstanding. Some documents referenced in others have not been located. Pages are updated as material arrives, and changes are noted.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell me. I will correct it, and note the correction with the date it was made. Corrections are logged on this page rather than made silently.
This applies to everything: a misread document, a wrong date, a figure I have taken out of context, a technical description I have not understood correctly, or a conclusion the records do not support.
If you worked on this project, reviewed it, regulated it, or know the subject matter, and something on this site is inaccurate, I would rather hear it from you than publish it wrong.
Submit a Correction →Corrections log
| Date | Page | What was corrected |
|---|---|---|
|
No corrections have been made yet. Corrections will be
listed here as they occur.
|
||
Research assistance
The document library behind this site was organized and indexed with the help of AI tools. Several thousand files — public records productions, engineering reports, correspondence, laboratory data and scientific literature — were sorted, described and cross-referenced using those tools.
What that means, and what it does not. The tools helped sort, index and summarize. They are not the source of any claim on this site. Every factual statement here is sourced to a document you can open and read yourself, and the document governs — not any summary of it.
Where an AI-generated summary and the underlying document disagreed during this work, the document won, and in several cases a summary was wrong and was corrected against the record. That is the reason the source documents are published rather than only described.
The documents are the point.
Everything described on this page exists so the source library can be used the way it should be: by opening the documents.