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Lloyd Burgess owns the Lucky B horse farm in Denton County. He made a good living raising and boarding horses there from 1993 until 2006, good enough to pay for a $350,000, 45-stall barn a few years back. These days though, it's not so lucky.

Everything changed for him in October 2006, when an explosion occurred at a gas compressor station just beyond the edge of his 30 acres. Burgess, who had been out of town, returned to discover that one of his mares had aborted her foal. Two weeks later, the same thing happened to a second mare.

Bad things just kept happening after that, on his farm in the oddly renamed town of DISH, just up the road from Justin. Several months later one of his stallions got sick and finally had to be put down. Then a mare went blind. Then another stallion, a valuable quarter horse, got sick and was saved only when a friend offered to take if off Burgess' property, away from the compressor stations on Burgess' back fence line, to nurse it back to health.

That fence used to be lined by huckleberry trees, planted as a windbreak back in the 1930s and '40s. The wind blows through pretty freely now, however, since most of the trees have recently died.

"After the explosion and what happened to my horses, all my boarders took their horses out of there," said Burgess, now 56. "Who could blame them? This was going to be my retirement, but now it's valueless."

The words "valueless" and "worthless" come up a lot in conversation with people from DISH, the two-square-mile town that back in 2005 agreed to change its name from Clark in exchange for 10 years of free satellite TV service for all of its 180 or so residents.

The town is so small that MapQuest doesn't recognize it. But the gas companies have certainly found it. Folks there say their town is under assault by the companies that profit from the Barnett Shale, their air fouled, their hearing attacked by ear-splitting noise that goes on for hours at a time.

In some places, opposition to the disagreeable and dangerous aspects of shale gas production is muted by the little royalty checks that residents get each month. Here, however, almost no one owns their mineral rights, so there is no "mailbox money" coming in to make them forget their troubles.

And those troubles, for the most part, aren't with the gas wells themselves, 18 of which have been drilled in the town. The problem is that the gas industry has picked DISH and a few acres just outside its city limits as a perfect place for not one or two but eleven compression stations, to which gas is piped from wells all over northern Tarrant and Denton counties, to be treated, compressed, and sent out into bigger transmission lines. Residents say the veritable industrial corridor thus created emits hydrocarbons that kill trees, sicken and endanger animals and people, and are making their properties worthless.

What compressor stations require, of course, is pipelines, both the gathering lines coming in and the transmission lines going out. And those lines, residents say, are the gas industry's second line of attack on their little burg. Pipeline companies have taken so much land, by eminent domain or the threat of it, that some farms have lost half their acreage. And whereas the compressor stations' dangers are all too evident every day, the pipelines represent a hidden but no less potent threat, carrying billions of cubic feet of flammable, undetectable gas a few feet below the surface, in close proximity to houses, roads and schools, and even the town hall.

But the DISHers are beginning to fight back. Their first salvo was an air-quality study the town commissioned in August that showed high concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals and neurotoxins in the air near the compressor stations - what one researcher called "a toxic soup."

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, in charge of monitoring air quality in Texas, has done nothing about DISH's problems thus far. But now, both state and federal regulators say they may look into the situation.

"Think about it," Mayor Calvin Tillman said. "We've got all that toxic waste pouring out into our town, then we've got all the potential danger from explosion. The pipelines under DISH and the compressors are each capable of moving a billion cubic feet of gas per day, so that on any given day we might be sitting on 11 billion cubic feet of gas. What happens if something goes wrong? The whole place will evaporate. And there have already been several incidents, including a lightning strike that started a fire. And at some point there is going to be a catastrophe. The gas companies have just sacrificed us.

"We're going to do follow-up studies and we're looking at all of our legal options," he said. "Litigation is not out of the question."

DISH is located just off FM 156, a few miles west of I-35 and Denton. It's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, which, from the drillers' point of view, made it the perfect place for gathering, compressing, and transmitting natural gas to and from all directions.

Though there had been some shale drilling in the area up to a decade ago, gas companies began to show up in force in 2005, taking land right and left for pipeline and road easements, land that many residents sold only under duress.

One of the hardest hit was Chuck Paul, who bought 64 acres for a horse farm in 2001. He works with civil engineers on the design of public street and utility projects. "There was one pipeline on my property when I bought it," he told Fort Worth Weekly. That was near the property line, he said, and didn't affect much. "My feeling was I'd start a horse ranch, but I've got a background in subdivisions, so if the economic boom ever got here, I knew I could sell it for a subdivision."

But in 2006 a landman representing a company collecting easements for Energy Transfer Partners asked permission to survey his land for a possible future pipeline. A year later, "they said they'd decided to lay a line on my property ... and said they'd pay for the easement."

The pipeline was to take a 2,000-foot-long, 50-foot-wide swath out of his land, a little over two acres. But the company ended up taking multiple easements and leaving small strips of unusable land in between. In all, Paul lost the use of more than 30 acres.

Paul, like many North Texans faced with similar situations, wasn't familiar with state and federal law governing pipelines. He didn't know how easy it would be for the land to be condemned. "I didn't think they could just take it pretty much at will, so I did the math and told them I'd sell them the easement for $30,000 an acre. They countered with $1,000 an acre."