When a crisis hits, the instinct for many companies is to fight back, minimize and deflect. Occasionally, this instinct is right. More often, it transforms a manageable problem into a slow-motion catastrophe where every new statement becomes a headline and every attempt at reassurance deepens the public’s suspicion that the company is hiding something.
A dispute between a developer, Terra Manna Homes, and residents in one of its communities in Johnson County, Texas, represents a near-perfect case study in that second kind of crisis. When The Barbed Wire and Texas Observer reported that Silo Mills—a residential development with an on-site elementary school—may have been built on a site where radioactive fracking waste had been dumped, the companies involved had a choice. They could get ahead of the story with transparency, urgency and accountability. Instead, they gave communicators a masterclass in what not to do.
Here are 10 things they did that you shouldn’t do:
1. Attack the Messenger
When developer Bret Pedigo addressed worried homeowners on a Zoom call, he reportedly told them his company was being “attacked or terrorized by irresponsible media stories.”
This is a textbook example of DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender Order. This approach tells frightened parents that their concerns are the product of bad journalism rather than legitimate questions about the what’s in the ground under their children’s school.
Even if you believe media coverage is unfair, attacking it publicly signals defensiveness, not confidence, and it makes you look like you’re more concerned about the story than the people in it.
2. Talk to the Reporter Anyway
DARVO only works if you follow through. The attorney for Terra Manna Home, Jeffrey Harper, and its private equity backer, Prophet Equity, apparently did not get the memo that the media can’t be trusted. Despite the company framing the coverage as a bad-faith attack, Harper gave The Barbed Wire an extensive on-the-record interview.
This is a cardinal crisis communications error. Granting a lengthy interview to a hostile outlet is almost always an opportunity for your own words to be used against you. And in this case, that’s exactly what happened.
3. Open Your Mouth Before You Know What You’re Saying
Harper’s first quoted comment in the story is almost painful to read: “When the first article came out, it certainly caused a lot of stress and concern here. Did we misunderstand? Why are people making these claims? Who the heck is [self-identified whistleblower] Lee Oldham?”
This quote not only communicates confusion and dismissiveness, it also attempts to make the company, rather than concerned parents, the sympathetic figure in the story. If your opening statement makes your client sound both rattled and tone-deaf, the rest of the interview is already an uphill battle.
4. Highlight What You Don’t Know
A spokesperson’s job is to be clear about what their client does know, not to casually confirm what they don’t. But Harper ended up admitting on the record that the site’s intake testing was essentially limited to whether incoming trucks smelled like petroleum. His response when pushed on what potentially harmful chemicals the site had actually tested for: “Other than avoiding oil, I don’t think that they were making any particular test.”
If you don’t know the answer to a question that is central to your client’s claim that the site is safe, the answer is “I’ll follow up,” not a candid admission that your client’s safety controls were effectively a sniff test.
5. Release Documents that Raise More Questions than Answers
Releasing documents without first understanding what they say, and how a hostile reader will interpret them, is a classic crisis communications mistake. In this case when the school superintendent, hoping to reassure parents, released the environmental records the district had used when approving the school site, it backfired badly. Parents and reporters quickly realized those records reflected a cursory review, not actual soil or groundwater testing. The records had even flagged this directly, noting that the only way to confirm the site’s safety was through soil and groundwater testing that was not performed before construction.
Incomplete or confusing disclosure is often worse than no disclosure because it reinforces a negligence narrative and raises new questions.
6. Make Claims You Can’t Substantiate
The company argued that the landfarm site had been thoroughly tested during its operational years, but that the records had been lost. Harper also told the reporter that the company had been in contact with former landfarm employees who could dispute the whistleblower’s account, but did not provide their names or make them available to reporters or law enforcement investigating the matter.
In a crisis, unverifiable claims are almost always worse than silence. They invite follow-up questions you cannot or will not answer, and they make your credible claims look suspect by association.
7. Assume the Other Side is Playing Fair
Terra Manna and Prophet Equity reportedly invested more than $1 million in follow-up environmental testing, drilled more than 60 boreholes around the school and common areas, and came before residents with nearly 2,000 data points showing contaminants were below regulatory limits. The response from hostile media? An immediate challenge that the testing company hadn’t looked for the right contaminants, hadn’t sampled soil from under actual homes, and hadn’t consulted with the whistleblower who claimed to have dumped radioactive material on the site.
If a reporter or advocacy group is operating in what you believe to be bad faith, releasing new data to them doesn’t resolve the crisis, it gives them new material to pick apart. You must model the most adversarial possible interpretation of your evidence before you release it, and close those gaps first.
8. Speak in Absolutes You Can’t Defend
When Harper told the outlet that the testing firm had expressed “100 percent certainty” that the site was clean of radiation and there was “no point in doing any further testing,” he handed critics a gift. As the outlet noted, absolute language is almost always a mistake in environmental science. It’s also almost always a mistake in crisis communication.
When you declare 100 percent certainty, you’re not projecting confidence as much as you’re setting up a single-point failure. One positive test result, one missed compound, one gap in the sampling grid, and your “certainty” becomes the story.
9. Let Your Body Language Color the Story
Crises are increasingly fought on video, and everything on camera is on the record. The story notes, almost as an aside, that “Prophet Equity founder and managing partner Ross Gatlin scowled, on-camera, through the Zoom town hall.” You may feel that the reporter’s inclusion of this detail is petty, but that doesn’t make it irrelevant.
When frightened homeowners are tuning in to hear whether the land under their children’s school is safe, a scowling executive communicates contempt regardless of what he says.
10. Apologize Without Apologizing
The closing statement from Harper in The Barbed Wire’s story captures everything wrong with how this crisis was managed in a single quote: “If there is a thought by somebody that they would have liked to have known more, I’m sorry they feel that way. I’m not disputing that somebody out there says, ‘Gee, I wish I’d known.”
This is the non-apology apology in its purest form: an expression of regret for someone else’s feelings rather than accountability for your (or your client’s) actions. It also arrived after Harper had rationalized and shifted blame for the company’s decision not to disclose the site’s history as a landfarm. That framing reads as an admission that the company knew there was something worth disclosing, and chose not to.
Every one of these mistakes shared a common root: looking for magic words that will make a crisis go away instead of taking the hard steps to doing the right thing so you have something good to talk about. The outcome of a crisis response that answered parents’ questions with urgency, humility and genuine transparency might have looked very different. Instead, Terra Manna and Prophet Equity produced a case study that crisis communications professionals will be citing for years.
Nathan Burchfiel is Senior Vice President at Pinkston.