As Cathy McMullen surveyed the Rayzor Ranch gas well site on Friday afternoon from nearby McKenna Park, she felt her eyes water and nose burn.

Smoke and a steady roar of noise rose from the 3-acre drilling site at Bonnie Brae and Scripture streets in Denton. To McMullen, the air smelled like pesticide.

Several families came to play at the park, but they didn’t stay long, she said.

“It was just that bad,” said McMullen, who lives several blocks away from the site and has vocally opposed the drilling. “That was a god-awful day out there.”

McMullen and other neighbors blamed the problems on the start of hydraulic fracturing, a stage in the drilling process, but an official with the drilling company said the fracturing started days before, on Feb. 1.

Onsite workers “can’t think of anything on Friday that was unusual that would have occurred out there,” said Rodney Waller, senior vice president of Fort Worth-based Range Resources. “I don’t know what they [neighbors] were particularly concerned about, but it doesn’t appear that anybody found anything wrong with what we were doing.”

Neighbors complained to the city and state environmental regulators Friday about the noise, smell and exhaust at the Rayzor Ranch gas well, where Range is drilling the first of up to five wells behind 14-foot-tall sound barriers. The city found no noise violations, and a fire inspector tied the exhaust to a diesel generator used in the fracturing process, Fire Marshal Rick Jones said.

Neighbors said workers with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality were on site Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. Calls seeking comment from the commission were not returned Monday.

Waller said he believed TCEQ had inspected the site and found “no irregularities.” He blamed the noise complaints on changes in wind direction, which can affect how the ear perceives sound.

Waller said the company monitors noise continuously and has not surpassed the city-imposed limit of 79 decibels, as measured at 300 feet from the edge of the site.

“It was no noisier on Friday than it was on Thursday or Saturday,” he said.

The wind was variable Friday morning, but by the afternoon it was blowing mostly from the west and northwest, said Jessica Schultz, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. McKenna Park is just east of the drilling site.

Workers should be through fracturing the well by Thursday evening, Waller said. Company officials will decide whether to drill a second well based on the performance of the first, he said.

The City Council approved a zoning permit in October allowing gas drilling at the site despite widespread opposition to its location near the park, neighborhood, a hospital and other medical facilities.

The permit includes 21 conditions on top of the city’s normal rules aimed at limiting noise, traffic, light pollution and health and safety hazards, but critics said the conditions didn’t go far enough to protect the public.

Margarete Neale said she called the state environmental commission Friday after smelling chemicals in the air outside her house, several blocks from the drilling site.

“The noise is obnoxious to me,” she said. “But when you’re talking about the exhaust and emissions, that is what’s truly concerning.”

Neale was one of the leaders in a neighborhood effort to raise money for independent air and water testing near the drilling site. Results from those tests have not yet been released.

A TCEQ report released in January said state inspectors found elevated levels of cancer-causing benzene at nearly one-fourth of natural gas facilities they visited last year. The report included testing at well heads, compressors, disposal wells and related facilities. Earlier independent testing in Dish, a Denton County town with multiple gas compression facilities, found several carcinogens and neurotoxins at levels that exceeded state limits.

Fracturing, commonly known as “fracking,” involves pumping water, sand and chemicals underground to break up rock and free gas. The process, regulated by the state, is facing increasing scrutiny from environmentalists and others who say more laws are needed to protect drinking water supplies.

Bills before Congress would offer federal regulation of fracturing, force companies to disclose exactly what chemicals they use, and overturn parts of a 2005 law that exempted the process from the Safe Drinking Water Act. The Environmental Protection Agency is also planning a new review.

LOWELL BROWN can be reached at 940-566-6882. His e-mail address is lmbrown@dentonrc.com.