dioxins furans
EPA removes waste at Texas toxic sites, won’t say from where.
The Environmental Protection Agency says it has recovered 517 containers of “unidentified, potentially hazardous material” from highly contaminated toxic waste sites in Texas that flooded last month during Hurricane Harvey.
By Michael Biesecker | AP September 23 at 10:44 PM
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency says it has recovered 517 containers of “unidentified, potentially hazardous material” from highly contaminated toxic waste sites in Texas that flooded last month during Hurricane Harvey.
The agency has not provided details about which Superfund sites the material came from, why the contaminants at issue have not been identified and whether there’s a threat to human health.
The one-sentence disclosure about the 517 containers was made Friday night deep within a media release from the Federal Emergency Management Agency summarizing the government’s response to the devastating storm.
At least a dozen Superfund sites in and around Houston were flooded in the days after Harvey’s record-shattering rains stopped. Associated Press journalists surveyed seven of the flooded sites by boat, vehicle and on foot. The EPA said at the time that its personnel had been unable to reach the sites, though they surveyed the locations using aerial photos.
The Associated Press reported Monday that a government hotline also received calls about three spills at the U.S. Oil Recovery Superfund site, a former petroleum waste processing plant outside Houston contaminated with a dangerous brew of cancer-causing chemicals. Records obtained by the AP showed workers at the site reported spills of unknown materials in unknown amounts.
Local pollution control officials photographed three large tanks used to store potentially hazardous waste completely underwater on Aug. 29. The EPA later said there was no evidence that nearby Vince Bayou had been impacted.
PRP Group, the company formed to clean up the U.S. Oil Recovery site, said it does not know how much material leaked from the tanks, soaking into the soil or flowing into the bayou. As part of the post-storm cleanup, workers have vacuumed up 63 truckloads of potentially contaminated storm water, totaling about 315,000 gallons.
It was not immediately clear whether those truckloads accounted for any of the 517 containers cited in the FEMA media release on Friday. The EPA has not responded to questions from AP about activities at U.S. Oil Recovery for more than a week.
About a dozen miles east, the San Jacinto River Waste Pits Superfund site is on and around a low-lying island that was the site of a paper mill in the 1960s, leaving behind dangerous levels of dioxins and other long-lasting toxins linked to birth defects and cancer. The site was completely covered with floodwaters when the AP surveyed it on Sept. 1.
To prevent contaminated soil and sediments from being washed down river, about 16 acres of the site was covered in 2011 with an “armored cap” of fabric and rock. The cap was reportedly designed to last for up to 100 years, but it has required extensive repairs on at least six occasions in recent years, with large sections becoming displaced or having been washed away.
The EPA has not responded to repeated inquiries over the past two weeks about whether its assessment has determined whether the cap was similarly damaged during Harvey.
The companies responsible for cleaning up the site, Waste Management Inc. and International Paper, have said there were “a small number of areas where the current layer of armored cap is thinner than required.”
“There was no evidence of a release from any of these areas,” the companies said, adding that sediments there were sampled last week.
The EPA has not yet released those test results to the public.
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Missing EPA report warned of flooding at Superfund dumps.
U.S. EPA officials determined in 2014 that "flooding and inundation from more intense" storms could spur Superfund sites to spew contaminants.
Missing EPA report warned of flooding at Superfund dumps
Corbin Hiar, E&E; News reporter
Greenwire: Monday, September 18, 2017
A yard just across the river from the San Jacinto Waste Pits stained white and red from receding Hurricane Harvey floodwaters. Texas Health & Environment Alliance Inc./Facebook
U.S. EPA officials determined in 2014 that "flooding and inundation from more intense" storms could spur Superfund sites to spew contaminants.
And after Hurricane Harvey's torrential rains in southeast Texas last month, their predictions seemed to have come true.
Local activists discovered mercury globules and mysterious stains left as floodwaters receded near the still-submerged San Jacinto River Waste Pits along the San Jacinto River in Channelview, Texas.
But the EPA report warning that climate change-fueled storms pose similar risks to communities near the nation's most polluted tracts is no longer accessible via the agency's Superfund climate adaptation webpage. A link to the three-year-old report, which also included steps to prepare sites for a warmer world, now leads to a page that says it is being updated "to reflect EPA's priorities under the leadership of President Trump."
While Superfund experts doubt the climate plan would have done much to directly prevent damage done by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma to the waste pits and other toxic tracts, they say the document's disappearance will leave communities with contaminated sites less informed about the risks posed by increasingly severe natural disasters anticipated by climate models.
"I think that's part of the biggest challenge we face: Information that really is public information now is unavailable as EPA reconsiders it," said former Administrator Gina McCarthy, who oversaw the preparation of the agency's Superfund climate plan. "We have to make sure that climate science and real facts are provided to people. It was funded through public dollars; it belongs to them."
EPA failed to respond to requests for comment on the situation at the San Jacinto River Waste Pits or the missing climate report. But last Friday, Administrator Scott Pruitt and other federal and state officials toured the Superfund site, which is mainly contaminated with paper-mill sludge that contains carcinogenic dioxins and furans as well as toxic heavy metals like mercury, cadmium, copper, nickel and zinc.
"EPA remains committed to providing the necessary resources and personnel to ensure those affected by the devastation of Hurricane Harvey receive proper Agency attention," Pruitt said in a statement.
In separate releases, the agency last week indicated that it was still investigating three other potentially leaking Superfund sites in Texas and Florida. EPA also noted that dozens of other sites emerged from the storms unscathed.
Jackie Young, the founder and executive director of the Texas Health and Environment Alliance, met with Pruitt after he toured the site, which her seven-member advocacy group is focused on cleaning up. Although EPA sent reporters a photo of Young and an official from the Galveston Bay Foundation laughing with the administrator, their 10-minute talk wasn't part of Pruitt's original itinerary. Young learned of his unannounced visit at 1 a.m. on Friday, she said.
She said she wanted to be there because that was "our chance to meet face-to-face with our new administrator and let him know our position, but also let him know that we are reasonable people."
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and acting Regional Administrator Samuel Coleman hold an impromptu meeting with Scott Jones of the Galveston Bay Foundation and Jackie Young of the Texas Health and Environment Coalition outside the gates of the San Jacinto Waste Pits. U.S. EPA
"We're not rock throwers. We're not just screaming just because we feel like screaming," she said. "There is a very serious situation that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible, and we wanted to get that across to him."
She added, "I don't particularly agree with taking down years of research and hard work" on Superfund sites and climate change from EPA's website, but "we had a wonderful conversation."
The smiles in the snapshot, she explained, were prompted by a promise from Pruitt, Oklahoma's former attorney general, that "we would have a record of decision by the time Oklahoma plays Texas" in college football on Oct. 14. That document will guide the long-term cleanup of the site contaminants, which are currently only kept in place by a rock-covered containment cap.
But Pruitt and other EPA officials wouldn't give her any firm timeline on when the agency would complete its assessment of the landfill's cap — which is intended to keep stormwater from filtering through wastes and contaminating groundwater. The cap has been repeatedly damaged since it was constructed in 2011.
Meanwhile, people who live along the San Jacinto River are still wondering what contaminants they may be exposed to, Young said.
"There are people's yards that have three colors," she said. "They have closest to the house some green grass, and then they have about a foot of a rust-colored layer over their grass, and then between that and the river, it's just white. What is that? Why do our communities have three different-colored yards, balls of mercury in their yards? The only thing that we know for sure is that there are multiple toxic waste sites in the near vicinity of those yards, and those sites were completely inundated by Harvey's rainfall."
Missing 'road map'
The Superfund climate adaptation plan that EPA is now reconsidering calls for the Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation to develop tools and fact sheets to help officials pre-emptively determine whether a site or cleanup effort could be imperiled by climate change.
In the years that followed the report's release, EPA organized climate adaptation trainings and workshops to help frontline staff better protect the more than 1,300 Superfund sites across the country, according to Michael Cox, a former EPA climate adviser.
The Superfund climate adaptation recommendations "were being used as a road map to figure out what we're going to do and help communicate to our state, tribal and industry partners," he said.
All that has changed since the Trump's election, Cox said. The president has repeatedly referred to global warming an "expensive hoax" and has surrounded himself with fossil fuel industry-aligned appointees like Pruitt (Energywire, Dec. 8, 2016).
"During the Trump administration, you can't even talk about climate change," said Cox, who on his last day at the agency sent a letter to Pruitt critical of the administrator's climate science skepticism (Greenwire, April 4).
Pruitt's push to stop EPA officials from asking how climate change will affect Superfund sites is likely to have hurt the $1-billion-per-year cleanup program, the recently retired climate expert argued.
Site cleanup leaders are often technically capable of "taking into account anything that could be related to a 500-year flood or a 2-foot sea level rise or a single precipitation event of 6 inches instead of a historical extreme of 4 inches," Cox said. "Engineers can do that stuff, but you have to ask the question."
Meanwhile, community leaders will find it more difficult to find resources to help protect their families from Superfund sites that may be prone to flooding, wildfire or other natural cycles that climate change will make more severe, according to Lois Gibbs, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Health, Environment & Justice.
"Little cities, little towns across America that need to understand climate and adaptation for problems such as what just happened cannot get that information," she said. While the missing Superfund climate adaptation report is still available online, people can only find it if they know exactly what they're looking for.
Gibbs acknowledged that the report's modest, capacity-building recommendations "wouldn't have done anything for what just happened."
But now, as people are rebuilding in the aftermath of two devastating hurricanes, "they want to look at it," she said. "The time when people want that type of information is in crisis."
Even before Texan activists raised concerns about mercury and other contaminants leaking in Channelview, Gibbs and other Superfund experts were concerned about the fate of the program, which Pruitt has promised to revitalize (Greenwire, Sept. 5).
McCarthy, Pruitt's predecessor, sees his attempt to limit access to the Superfund climate plan as part of a broader shift by the Trump EPA to insert politics into the environmental regulatory process.
"I think the most important message I can have is that remediation and cleanup, it all relies on sound science to dictate how you keep them from impacting public health," McCarthy said. "It is only a science and technology decision. It's not a political decision. And the minute you mix politics and science, people will lose."
Twitter: @corbinhiar Email: chiar@eenews.net
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Evidence of spills at toxic site in Texas during floods after Harvey.
The U.S. government received reports of three spills at one of Houston's dirtiest Superfund toxic waste sites in the days after the drenching rains from Hurricane Harvey finally stopped.
The U.S. government received reports of three spills at one of Houston's dirtiest Superfund toxic waste sites in the days after the drenching rains from Hurricane Harvey finally stopped. Aerial photos reviewed by The Associated Press show dark-colored water surrounding the site as the floods receded, flowing through Vince Bayou and into the city's ship channel.
The reported spills, which have been not publicly detailed, occurred at U.S. Oil Recovery, a former petroleum industry waste processing plant contaminated with a dangerous brew of cancer-causing chemicals. On Aug. 29, the day Harvey's remnants cleared out, a county pollution control team sent photos to the Environmental Protection Agency of three large concrete tanks flooded with water. That led PRP Group, the company overseeing the ongoing cleanup, to call a federal emergency hotline to report a spill affecting nearby Vince Bayou.
Over the next several days, the company reported two more spills of potentially contaminated storm water from U.S. Oil Recovery, according to reports and call logs obtained by the AP from the U.S. Coast Guard, which operates the National Response Center hotline. The EPA requires that spills of oil or hazardous substances in quantities that may be harmful to public health or the environment be immediately reported to the 24-hour hotline when public waterways are threatened.
The EPA has not publicly acknowledged the three spills that PRP Group reported to the Coast Guard. The agency said an on-scene coordinator was at the site last Wednesday and found no evidence that material had washed off the site. The EPA says it is still assessing the scene.
The AP reported in the days after Harvey that at least seven Superfund sites in and around Houston were underwater during the record-shattering storm. Journalists surveyed the sites by boat, vehicle and on foot. U.S. Oil Recovery was not one of the sites visited by AP. EPA said at the time that its personnel had been unable to reach the sites, though they surveyed the locations using aerial photos.
Following AP's report, EPA has been highlighting the federal agency's response to the flooding at Superfund sites. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt reiterated that safeguarding the intensely-polluted sites is among his top priorities during a visit Friday to the San Jacinto River Waste Pits, one of the sites AP reported about two weeks ago.
Pruitt then boarded a Coast Guard aircraft for an aerial tour of other nearby Superfund sites flooded by Harvey, including U.S. Oil Recovery.
Photos taken Aug. 31 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows dark-colored water surrounding the site two days after the first spill was reported to the government hotline. While the photos do not prove contaminated materials leaked from U.S. Oil Recovery, they do show that as the murky floodwaters receded, they flowed through Vince Bayou and emptied into the ship channel leading to the San Jacinto River. The hotline caller identified Vince Bayou as the waterway affected by a spill of unknown material in unknown amounts.
Thomas Voltaggio, a retired EPA official who oversaw Superfund cleanups and emergency responses for more than two decades, reviewed the aerial photos, hotline reports and other documents obtained by AP.
"It is intuitively obvious that the rains and floods of the magnitude that occurred during Hurricane Harvey would have resulted in some level of contamination having been released to the environment," said Voltaggio, who is now a private consultant. "Any contamination in those tanks would likely have entered Vince Bayou and potentially the Houston Ship Channel."
He said the amount of contaminants spread from the site during the storm will likely never be known, making the environmental impact difficult to measure. The Houston Ship Channel was already a polluted waterway, with Texas state health officials warning that women of childbearing age and children should not eat fish or crabs caught there because of contamination from dioxins and PCBs.
PRP Group, the corporation formed to oversee the cleanup at U.S. Oil Recovery, said it reported the spills as legally required but said subsequent testing of storm water remaining in the affected tanks showed it met federal drinking water standards. The company declined to provide AP copies of those lab reports or a list of specific chemicals for which it tested, saying the EPA was expected to release that information soon.
U.S. Oil Recovery was shut down in 2010 after regulators determined operations there posed an environmental threat to Vince Bayou, which flows through the property in Pasadena. Pollution at the former hazardous waste treatment plant is so bad that Texas prosecutors charged the company's owner, Klaus Genssler, with five criminal felonies. The German native fled the United States and is considered a fugitive. Genssler did not respond to efforts to contact him last week through his social media accounts or an email account linked to his website address.
More than 100 companies that sent hazardous materials and oily waste to U.S. Oil Recovery for processing are now paying for the multimillion-dollar cleanup there through a court-monitored settlement, including Baker Hughes Oilfield Operations Inc., U.S. Steel Corp. and Dow Chemical Co.
Past sampling of materials at the site revealed high concentrations of hazardous chemicals linked to cancer, such as benzene, ethylbenzene and trichloroethylene. The site also potentially contains toxic heavy metals, including mercury and arsenic.
A 2012 EPA study of the more than 500 Superfund sites across the United States located in flood zones specifically noted the risk that floodwaters might carry away and spread toxic materials over a wider area.
Over the past six years, remediation efforts at U.S. Oil Recovery have focused on the northern half of the site, including demolishing contaminated structures, removing an estimated 500 tons of sludge and hauling away more than 1,000 abandoned containers of waste.
PRP Group said the southern portion of the site, including the three waste tanks that flooded during Harvey, has not yet been fully cleaned. Over the years workers have removed more than 1.5 million gallons of liquid waste — enough to fill nearly three Olympic-sized swimming pools.
AP began asking the EPA whether contaminated material might have again leaked from U.S. Oil Recovery last week, after reviewing the aerial photos taken Aug. 31. The EPA said it visited the site on Sept. 4, nearly a week after site operators reported an initial spill, and again the following week. The EPA said that its staff saw no evidence that toxins had washed away from the scene during either visit.
"Yesterday, an EPA On-scene coordinator conducted an inspection of Vince Bayou to follow up on a rumor that material was offsite and did not find any evidence of a black oily discharge or material from the U.S. Oil Recovery site," an EPA media release said on Thursday.
PRP Group said the spills occurred at the toxic waste site on Aug. 29, Sept. 6 and Sept. 7. One of the EPA's media releases on Sept. 9, more than 11 days after the first call was made to the hotline, made reference to overflowing water at the scene, but did not describe it as a spill.
The company said it reported the first spill after Harvey's floodwaters swamped the three tanks, filling them. The resulting pressure that built up in the tanks dislodged plugs blocking a series of interconnecting pipes, causing the second and third spills reported to the hotline the following week.
The company does not know how much material leaked from the tanks, soaking into the soil or flowing into nearby Vince Bayou. As part of its post-storm cleanup workers have vacuumed 63 truckloads holding about 315,000 gallons from the tanks.
The Superfund site is located just a few hundred yards from the Pollution Control Services offices for Harris County, which includes Houston. Its director, Bob Allen, says his team took pictures of the flooding on Aug. 29, when the area that includes the three big tanks was still underwater. The AP requested those photos as public records, but they have not yet been released.
Allen said his staff did not note any black water or oily sheen on the surface at the time, and did not collect water samples for testing. He said the EPA later sampled the area to determine whether there was contamination.
"We knew that the water probably got into the plant, probably washed out some of the stuff that was in the clarifier," Allen said, referring to one of the old concrete tanks once used to store toxic waste. "Once they get done with the assessment of that site and the other Superfund Harris County sites, then they'll probably let us know, let the public know, what's been going on.
Biesecker reported from Washington. Associated Press reporters Reese Dunklin in Dallas and Jeff Horwitz in Washington contributed to this reporting.
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The looming Superfund nightmare.
As unprecedented hurricanes assault coastal U.S. communities, residents and experts fear the storms could unleash contamination the EPA has tried to keep at bay.
The line between the acts of God and human acts has always been too blurry for our comfort. And the distinction between the two has perhaps never been less meaningful than it is now, with the Atlantic basin churning out an unprecedented slate of storms that have threatened areas across the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the southeastern coast of the United States.
Yes, hurricanes are by definition natural disasters, spawned by the primordial forces of sun, water, air, and earth. But even as science is ever more certain that human activity has intensified hurricanes themselves, there are a slew of other anthropogenic problems that have intensified their horrific effects. Perhaps the greatest is the curse of chemical pollutants—artificial toxic substances absorbed and unleashed by Mother Nature.
The storm-fueled spread of contamination is already an acute concern among those living in the Houston area, which was battered late last month by Hurricane Harvey. The region has several hazardous-waste sites currently managed by the federal and state governments. Among them are 13 Superfund sites. These are industry-contaminated, abandoned areas that the Environmental Protection Agency has slated for clean-up, or where it has already helped launch massive construction projects to contain the chemicals. Or, at least, that’s the goal.
Parts of Greater Houston saw 40 inches or more of total rainfall as Harvey stalled over the city. The flooding caused explosions at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, which has already led to a lawsuit alleging that Arkema’s negligence exposed first responders to poisonous fumes. And pollutants have washed up in neighborhoods. Along the San Jacinto River, just across from one hazardous waste site, poisonous globules of mercury appeared on the banks days after the storm.
According to Yvette Arellano, a research fellow with Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, or TEJAS, residents have been more concerned about the chemicals from local industrial wastelands than they are about the floodwaters still lingering in many parts of the area. “I think we’re all exhausted,” said Arellano, who is local herself. “A lot of people want a lot of answers.”
Of particular concern to residents is a fenced-off Superfund site in Houston’s Fifth Ward community—where an old metal-casting foundry and chemical-recycling facility leached lead into the ground—and various sites along the San Jacinto. Residents smelled creosote, a derivative of tar, during the flood and saw sheens in pooling water that they feared might have come from petrochemical spills.
Their concerns were captured in a recent story from the Associated Press. Reporters Michael Biesecker and Jason Dearen described how in the immediate aftermath of Harvey, one particular concern was the San Jacinto River Waste Pits site, an ongoing remediation of an old paper-mill waste dump that had once leaked potentially carcinogenic dioxins into the surrounding soil and groundwater. The site had been covered by an “armored cap” of a waterproof lining covered with rocks to keep contaminants from further leaking in the case of a flood.
Biesecker and Dearen also reported that EPA officials had not yet visited the 13 Harvey-affected Superfund sites near Houston. The agency claimed the locations had “not been accessible by response personnel,” though Dearen was able to reach most of them by boat and car. The EPA criticized the story—and Biesecker personally—after it was published on September 3, though the agency did not dispute specific facts in the team’s reporting. On September 6, the EPA and its state partner, the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality, announced that TCEQ had completed initial inspections of most sites.
David Gray, the acting deputy regional administrator for the EPA’s Region 6 office, which includes Texas, told me evaluations have continued since then. “EPA completed site assessments at all 43 Superfund sites affected by the storm,” Gray wrote in an email. “Of these sites, two (San Jacinto and U.S. Oil Recovery) require additional assessment efforts.”
The “armor” part of the armored cap covering the San Jacinto waste pits—the layer of rocks—had been at least partially displaced during the flood, although no damage to the liner itself has been reported so far. At the U.S. Oil recovery site in Pasadena, where the EPA has attempted to keep used oil products from entering waterways, crews were working to vacuum flood waters from the facilities, Gray said, adding that “no sheen or odor was observed in the overflowing water.” He anticipated that further assessment at both sites would take several days.
Still, word that no major leaks have been reported may be little comfort to local communities, which already have to plan for low-level contamination incidents and the risk of further contamination thanks to regular (albeit more mundane) flooding in the area. Many of those communities tend to fall into TEAS’s “environmental justice” category; marginalized by race, income, or both, they face the greatest dangers from contamination and the longest road to recovery.
Superfund sites aren’t the only polluted zones affected by Harvey. There are several Resource Conservation and Recovery Act-managed areas—active dumping or waste sites being managed by the EPA—around Houston, too. But Superfund sites contain some of the worst hazards—old plants and dumps that operated before the EPA’s rules were in place—the mitigation of which requires federal oversight and funding. Environmentalists told me after Harvey that the agency may not be up to the task, and that its readiness is in decline.
The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 established the EPA’s Superfund program to remediate or recover contaminated sites that couldn’t continue to be used. Though federal funding kicks in if offending companies won’t foot the bill, it hasn’t always been adequate.
Originally, environmental taxes on chemical manufacturers and other companies supported the government’s share. But since the taxes were repealed in 2001, appropriations from the federal general fund have paid for the program. That money dwindled in the ensuing years, since Congress always appropriated less than the expected revenue from the old taxes, and the number of Superfund cleanups plummeted. Environmental activists and lawyers fear the EPA’s capabilities to monitor and manage Superfund sites are diminishing, too. And one key component of that monitoring and management is disaster response.
“I see a severe problem with the lack of funding for EPA, because it renders them unable to respond to a disaster like this,” said Lisa Evans, a senior counsel at the environmental-law organization Earthjustice. “One has to budget for these inevitable contingencies, otherwise you can leave those communities high and dry.”
Harvey isn’t the first hurricane to threaten people with contamination and test the EPA’s mettle. Perhaps the worst-case scenario for Houston right now is what happened in the Gulf region after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. According to Erik Olson, the director of the health program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, flooding from Katrina, and from Hurricane Rita just weeks later, clearly disrupted hazardous-waste sites at dozens of Superfund and RCRA sites.
“The problem is that you could see a lot of waste that was supposedly ‘under control’ getting mobilized into waterways and spreading throughout the community,” Olson said. Working with the NRDC and other environmental groups, local residents did their own water testing and “found widespread contamination around Superfund and RCRA sites.”
That contamination was eventually confirmed through numerous assessments by the EPA and outside researchers. A 2009 study from Mary Fox, Ramya Chari, Beth Resnick, and Thomas Burke at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that “multiple persistent contaminants were found together in the soils and sediments sampled in Orleans Parish,” and that EPA studies of individual pollutants in soil and water understated potential health effects of cocktails of multiple chemicals at once. Subsequent studies of the Agriculture Street Landfill Superfund site found that sediments deposited around the area by Katrina and Rita contained high levels of benzo[a]pyrene, a carcinogen.
Seven years after Katrina, another storm demonstrated similar environmental risks. Hurricane Sandy flooded a region with numerous Superfund sites and ongoing constructions of Superfund containment structures: New Jersey and the New York City metropolitan area have one of the densest concentrations of Superfund sites in the country. “There’s lots of local contamination that happens in a major storm,” said Burke, who once worked at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the EPA. “I think in retrospect, the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area was very lucky that in many sites the caps held, and the contamination was luckily not major.” Still, the extent of the contamination might have been underreported. As Politico reported in late 2012, minimal testing and inspection by EPA officials meant the agency often didn’t even test the water or soil at some flooded locations.
It’s not clear that today’s EPA is any more equipped to handle flood disasters than earlier iterations were. One of the few concrete policies proposed by current EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was an overhaul of the Superfund program, so that “the EPA's land- and water-cleanup efforts will be restored to their rightful place at the center of the agency’s core mission.” To that end, the EPA has commissioned a task force for revitalizing the program and is following their recommendations.
But environmentalist critics of Pruitt’s EPA argue that his plan, which will focus Superfund resources on sites “with the most reuse potential,” will merely end up channeling federal and private money into a small number of projects that can be salvaged for potential industrial or commercial use. Pruitt has also championed President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts to the agency—which would slash the Superfund by about one-third—as a way to “to reduce redundancies and inefficiencies.” While those cuts likely won’t be implemented in full, and even Republicans in Congress have balked at Trump’s proposed cuts, Superfund’s history would suggest that funding reductions lead to fewer cleanups—and cause existing sites to languish and become more and more vulnerable to disasters.
People living near Superfund sites have been afraid of that exact thing. In a bit of tragic foreshadowing, residents of the Fifth Ward, a historically black and low-income sector of Houston, held meetings in July expressing unease with the EPA budget cuts. In particular, they were concerned about any potential lapse in protection from the lead-poisoned waste in the middle of their neighborhood, where the Many Diversified Interests Superfund site covers an old industrial facility.
Officials at EPA headquarters haven’t responded to requests for comment, but the agency has pushed back against criticisms of their work during and after Harvey. On September 8, the EPA released the results of spectroscopic analysis of neighborhoods near the Valero refinery—which the agency monitors, but isn’t a Superfund site—that showed “no levels of targeted toxic chemicals were detected above the Texas TCEQ Air Monitoring Comparison Values.” Additionally, the EPA has outlined its plans to respond to any disruption of Superfund sites by Hurricane Irma, taking steps that “are consistent with how EPA has historically prepared Superfund sites for natural disasters, such as hurricanes.” On Saturday, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman told the AP’s Biesecker and Dearen that in the case of Irma, “so far no sites have risen to this level [of an immediate threat] that we are aware of.”
Still, the storm, which began battering the Florida Keys Sunday morning, could prove a challenge, both to the EPA’s response and to its reputation. On Thursday, Irma skirted Puerto Rico at category-five strength, whipping up waves that battered the coast of the main island, and hit outlying areas even harder. One of them was Vieques, a tiny island where for years residents have been battling health issues allegedly linked to a Superfund site. It contains depleted uranium and other heavy metals from old Navy munitions.
Natasha Bannan, a counsel with LatinoJustice who has worked in Vieques, said that while the island’s immediate concern is surviving the storm, there’s always a level of concern about the contamination spreading. “When you are in a toxic environment, of course there’s risks,” Bannan said. “I’m not a scientist, but when you have a hurricane come through that’s moving soil and water, of course there are going to be risks.”
Irma’s devastation won’t end in the Caribbean. Over the next few days, its projected path through southern Florida would take it over dozens of hazardous-waste sites, including several where residents have long faced higher-than-average incidences of cancer.
And Irma won’t be the last. Hurricane season is far from over, and Harvey and Irma will make large swathes of the country even more vulnerable to future storms. In all, with what seems to be an especially volatile hurricane season, multiple communities living near Superfund and RCRA sites in coastal areas will live in trepidation.
The EPA could never erase that trepidation in its entirety, even if the Superfund program were again funded by polluter taxes and the agency put full remediation plans and caps on every one. The forces of nature are unpredictable, and truly catastrophic storms can destroy even well-laid protections. But currently, as sites have languished with no plan or budget to fix them, and as protections on remediated sites age, and as the agency has historically downplayed some concerns of environmental-justice communities, residents near contaminated areas have been placed in limbo.
Even in places where caps on contaminated sites hold, risk remains. Most sites aren’t fully remediated, several have no firm timeline for remediation, and the caps in place degrade with age, wear, and exposure to floods. And all of this is happening as activists say the EPA has lost its ability to administer the program and cope with disasters. “The large majority of Superfund sites contain the nightmare in place,” Burke told me. But for how long?
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More than 40 sites released hazardous pollutants because of Hurricane Harvey.
Houston’s sprawling network of petrochemical plants and refineries released millions of pounds of pollutants in the days after Hurricane Harvey began barreling toward Texas.
More Than 40 Sites Released Hazardous Pollutants Because of Hurricane Harvey
SEPT. 8, 2017
Houston’s sprawling network of petrochemical plants and refineries released millions of pounds of pollutants in the days after Hurricane Harvey began barreling toward Texas.
Even under normal operations, the hundreds of industrial facilities in the area can emit harmful chemicals. But from Aug. 23 to Aug. 30, 46 facilities in 13 counties reported an estimated 4.6 million pounds of airborne emissions that exceeded state limits, an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund, Air Alliance Houston and Public Citizen shows.
Federal and state regulators say their air monitoring shows no cause for alarm. But the extra air pollution is just the latest concern for residents and environmental groups in the days after the storm. At least 14 toxic waste sites were flooded or damaged, raising fears of waterborne contamination. And nearly 100 spills of hazardous substances have been reported.
Air Pollutants Were Released Across the Region
Lake
Conroe
Austin
Valero Energy Refinery
3,358 lbs. of emissions resulted from hurricane damage to facility
Beaumont
Baytown
Port Arthur
TEXAS
Houston
Trinity
Bay
20 miles
Pasadena
Chevron Phillips Chemical Cedar
Bayou Plant
582,129 lbs.
Emissions resulted from shutdown for hurricane
Galveston
Bay
San Antonio
Galveston
Victoria
Formosa Point Comfort Plant 1,328,850 lbs.
Emissions resulted from start-up after hurricane
Facilities that released
airborne emissions because
of Hurricane Harvey
Gulf of Mexico
Flint Hills Resources East Refinery
98,750 lbs.
Emissions resulted from start-up after hurricane
Corpus Christi
Area of
detail
Valero Energy Refinery
3,358 lbs. of emissions
Emissions resulted from hurricane damage to facility
Austin
Beaumont
Baytown
Port Arthur
TEXAS
Houston
Trinity
Bay
20 miles
Pasadena
Galveston
Bay
Chevron Phillips Chemical Cedar
Bayou Plant
582,129 lbs.
Emissions resulted from shutdown for hurricane
San Antonio
Galveston
Victoria
Formosa Point Comfort Plant 1,328,850 lbs.
Emissions resulted from start-up after hurricane
Facilities that released airborne emissions because of Hurricane Harvey
Gulf of Mexico
Flint Hills Resources East Refinery
98,750 lbs.
Emissions resulted from start-up after hurricane
Corpus Christi
Area of
detail
Valero Energy Refinery
3,358 lbs. of emissions
Austin
Beaumont
Port Arthur
TEXAS
Houston
Pasadena
San Antonio
Galveston
20 miles
Victoria
Formosa Point Comfort Plant
1,328,850lbs.
Facilities that released airborne emissions because of Hurricane Harvey
Flint Hills Resources East Refinery
98,750 lbs.
Corpus Christi
Area of
detail
Gulf of Mexico
Valero Energy Refinery
3,358 lbs. of emissions
Beaumont
Port Arthur
TEXAS
Houston
Pasadena
Galveston
Formosa Point Comfort Plant
1,328,850lbs.
Flint Hills Resources East Refinery
98,750 lbs.
Facilities that released airborne emissions because of Hurricane Harvey
20 mi.
Area of
detail
Corpus Christi
Gulf of Mexico
Estimated data from Aug. 23 to Aug. 30, 2017
Many plants in the hurricane’s path released extra pollutants into the air when they shut down in preparation for the storm, and again when they resumed operations.
When a giant plastics plant in Point Comfort, about 100 miles southwest of Houston, started back up after the storm, it released about 1.3 million pounds of excess emissions, including toxic gases like benzene. The plant is operated by Formosa Plastics, an affiliate of a Taiwanese petrochemicals conglomerate, and has a checkered safety record. Steve Rice, a Formosa spokesman, declined to comment on the emissions.
Other facilities were damaged by wind or water and involuntarily released hazardous gases.
On Tuesday, Houston officials said they had detected high levels of benzene in a neighborhood in the city that is close to a damaged Valero Energy refinery. Loren Raun, the chief environmental science officer for the Houston Health Department, said that the readings varied depending on which way the wind was blowing but that officials were seeing “high numbers.”
And in a dramatic case, a series of explosions at a flooded chemical plant in Crosby, Tex., filled the air with smoke, triggering an evacuation of nearby residents and sending 21 emergency workers to hospitals for smoke inhalation.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state environmental regulator, said that most of its air monitors — which had been shut down during the storm — were back in service, and were not detecting emissions at levels that would be harmful to human health. The Environmental Protection Agency said that its own monitors showed that residents “should not be concerned about air quality issues related to the effects of the storm.”
Still, environmental advocates said that pollutants could pose long-term risks, even if they were not immediately toxic.
“These are cancer-causing compounds, like benzene and butadiene,” said Elena Craft, an Environmental Defense Fund senior health scientist based in Austin. “We’re very concerned about people’s long-term health in the area.”
At Least 14 Toxic Waste Sites Were Flooded
Lake
Conroe
Silsbee
Conroe
Somerville
Lake
TEXAS
Beaumont
Dayton
Brenham
Lake
Houston
Port
Arthur
Sabine
Lake
Houston
Trinity
Bay
10 miles
Columbus
Galveston
Bay
Facility that houses toxic chemicals
Superfund site
Superfund site that was
flooded or damaged
Galveston
El Campo
Gulf of Mexico
Area of
detail
Bay
City
Lake
Texana
Lake
Conroe
Conroe
Somerville
Lake
TEXAS
Beaumont
Dayton
Brenham
Lake
Houston
Port
Arthur
Sabine
Lake
Houston
Trinity
Bay
10 miles
Columbus
Superfund site
Galveston
Bay
Superfund site that was
flooded or damaged
Facility that houses
toxic chemicals
Galveston
El Campo
Area of
detail
Gulf of Mexico
Bay
City
Lake
Texana
Conroe
TEXAS
Beaumont
Dayton
Brenham
Port
Arthur
Houston
Columbus
20 miles
Gulf of Mexico
Galveston
El Campo
Area of
detail
Superfund site
Superfund site that
was flooded or damaged
Facility that houses toxic chemicals
Conroe
Beaumont
TEXAS
Port
Arthur
Houston
20 mi.
Galveston
Area of
detail
Gulf of Mexico
Superfund
site
Superfund site that was
flooded or damaged
Facility that houses
toxic chemicals
Houston’s large petrochemical industry also makes floodwater contamination a major concern. Harris County, home to Houston, hosts more than two dozen current and former toxic waste sites designated under the federal Superfund program. At least 14 of these sites — whose grounds are contaminated with dioxins, lead, arsenic, benzene or other compounds from industrial activities — were flooded or damaged by Hurricane Harvey.
April 6, 2017
Aug. 31, 2017
Sikes Disposal Pits Superfund site
Crosby, Tex.
April 6, 2017
Aug. 31, 2017
Sikes Disposal Pits Superfund site
Crosby, Tex.
Aug. 31, 2017
April 6, 2017
Sikes Disposal Pits Superfund site
Crosby, Tex.
Aug. 31, 2017
April 6, 2017
Sikes Disposal Pits Superfund site
Crosby, Tex.
Aug. 31, 2017
April 6, 2017
Sikes Disposal Pits Superfund site
Crosby, Tex.
DigitalGlobe
The E.P.A. said that it had assessed 13 Superfund sites and that two would require “additional assessment efforts.”
The sites pose serious health risks, said Luke Metzger, the founding director of Environment Texas, an environmental advocacy group.
“There’s just dozens of varieties of chemicals, all of which are hazardous to human health,” Mr. Metzger said. “Some of these sites were just protected by a tarp covered with rocks,” he said, explaining that that was inadequate for keeping toxic substances contained.
“With the floodwaters spreading these poisons to broader communities,” Mr. Metzger added, “there’s fear that more people could get sick, either from direct exposure to the water, or even down the road from eating contaminated seafood.”
Oil Spills and Other Hazardous Releases Were Also Reported
NRG Energy
Austin
Beaumont
Liberty
Arkema
chemical plant
Explosions
at facility
Houston
Port Arthur
TEXAS
20 miles
San Antonio
Galveston
Blue Cube
Operations
plant
Victoria
Valero
Flint Hills
Resources
plant
Gulf of Mexico
Facilities that had
a reported incident
Corpus Christi
Area of
detail
NRG Energy
Austin
Beaumont
Liberty
Arkema
chemical plant
Explosions
at facility
Houston
Port Arthur
TEXAS
20 miles
San Antonio
Galveston
Blue Cube
Operations
plant
Victoria
Valero
Flint Hills
Resources
plant
Facilities that had
a reported incident
Gulf of Mexico
Corpus Christi
Area of
detail
Austin
Beaumont
Arkema
chemical plant
Explosions
at facility
Houston
TEXAS
San Antonio
Galveston
20 mi.
Victoria
Blue Cube
Operations
plant
Valero
Flint Hills
Resources
plant
Facilities that had
a reported incident
Corpus Christi
Area of
detail
Gulf of Mexico
Beaumont
Arkema
Explosions
at facility
Houston
TEXAS
Galveston
Flint Hills
Resources
plant
Facilities that had
a reported incident
20 mi.
Area of
detail
Corpus Christi
Gulf of Mexico
Data through Sept. 3, 2017
The United States Coast Guard’s National Response Center tracks reports of oil spills and other chemical releases. Those reports can be filed both by companies and by members of the public. From Aug. 24 to Sept. 3, callers made 96 reports of oil, chemical or sewage spills across southeast Texas.
Though incomplete, such data provides a preliminary snapshot of the chemical pollutants released in the area, said Ilan Levin, the Texas-based associate director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“This is really just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
Sources: Toxics Release Inventory; Texas Commission on Environmental Quality; Environmental Defense Fund; National Response Center
By TROY GRIGGS, ANDREW W. LEHREN, NADJA POPOVICH, ANJALI SINGHVI and HIROKO TABUCHI
Additional reporting by Livia Albeck-Ripka, Jeremy Bowers, Jugal Patel and Adam Pearce.
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Arkema explosion after Harvey: How worried should Houston residents be?
Officials are still working to contain the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, where two explosions occurred early Thursday morning and fires continued to burn for much of the day.
Officials are still working to contain the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, where two explosions occurred early Thursday morning and fires continued to burn for much of the day. Residents within a 1.5-mile radius from the plant were forced to evacuate, and it’s still unclear exactly how far-reaching this additional catastrophe could become as Houston begins the work of cleaning and rebuilding after Hurricane Harvey.
The incident also is far from over. Arkema says it expects more fires—and possibly additional explosions—in the coming days. The chemical released into the environment (mainly organic peroxide) is a known toxic irritant.
The EPA said in a statement on Thursday that an aircraft survey determined “there are no concentrations of concern for toxic materials reported at this time.” Regardless, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board has launched an investigation into the explosions.
Newsweek spoke with Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, a public health scientist with the National Resources Defense Council, about Arkema and what information is needed to ensure the public’s safety.
How worried should Houston residents be?
This may just be the beginning of any kind of release we could see. A fair number of these chemicals are likely acutely toxic to the respiratory system, though we do not have a full picture to really be talking about that. Full containment from these kinds of facilities is the first order of business, as well as ensuring that people are not in the vicinity. At this stage we want to reduce the hazard, which is about getting people out of the way.
There’s a classification called Persistent Bioaccumulative Toxic, or PBT, chemicals. These are chemicals formed at some chemical plants called dioxins, and they can persist for very long. If these are chemicals that are known to be persistent and known to deposit in the soil, then we should be seeing soil testing as a way to verify this.
But in some ways, the specifics of each chemical and how much there is of each one is not the issue right now. The issue is how big of a radius is affected. What we don’t want to see happen is that there was inadequate communication and some people were able to leave and others stayed and suffered the consequences. History has shown that if this [communication] material is not presented in multiple formats and multiple languages that people will get left behind.
When will this area be habitable again? When can residents go back? Should they ever go back?
That’s going to really depend on the scope of what happens, not just in terms of the chemicals but what kind of containment mechanisms get blown. If we’re just talking about chemicals that get released in the air, some of those chemicals can integrate in the environment, and so there may be a period of time until people can go back to the area.
This is a reminder that communities bear the added extra burden when they live in close proximity to these facilities. Oftentimes they’re not great neighbors on a good day, and when a storm hits it’s the worst kind of neighbor you’d ever want to have.
Are other areas outside of Crosby likely to be affected?
When facilities that hold chemicals are flooded they are unable to hold the chemicals any longer. We know that flooding can take contaminants offsite. That happened after Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. We currently don’t know the extent to which that neighboring area is going to see the chemicals. That will be evaluated through testing of floodwater and the floods that remain.
After Katrina, there was a sludge that remained when the waters receded. Testing of that sludge found contaminants which can stay around for a long time. By testing the sludge, we could see that chemicals migrated off-site from industrial facilities and from contaminated sites. The containment that was in place there, by and large, did not hold the flooding. That kind of comprehensive testing is needed in order to determine the safety of returning home.
Houston officials anticipated something like this might happen at the plant. How come no one has figured a way to avert such a disaster?
It’s going to be very important that this be evaluated. It’s not a question that can be answered right at this very moment. We do want the folks in charge of these facilities to be doing their darndest to maintain as much containment as feasible given the circumstances, and actively working to identify these areas and get these people out. We’re not talking about just this one, but all of the facilities that present that risk. The vulnerability of the Gulf Coast is well-documented. The vulnerability of that portion of Texas is well-documented.
What questions should we be asking?
The question of reviewing the response plan for each of these facilities is of utmost importance—including questions like were those plans updated after Katrina and after Superstorm Sandy? Was there procedural planning, or was there nothing put in place? Did people think it wouldn’t happen? Were those lessons learned from other storms taken into account? If they weren’t what would it take to make sure they are? These facilities and the EPA and Texas Council of Environmental Quality have access to information that should be able to answer those questions. All those questions are key for the days ahead.
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Houston’s polluted Superfund sites threaten to contaminate floodwaters.
Harris County has at least a dozen federal Superfund sites, more than any county in Texas. Up to 30 percent of the county is under water, spurring worries about toxics leaking.
As rain poured and floodwaters inched toward his house in south Houston, Wes Highfield set out on a risky mission in his Jeep Cherokee. He drove in several directions to reach a nearby creek to collect water samples, but each time he was turned back when water washed against his floorboard.
“Yesterday as these large retention ponds filled up, eight feet deep in places, kids were swimming in them, and that’s not good,” said Highfield, a scientist at Texas A&M; University’s Galveston campus. The Brio Refining toxic Superfund site, where ethylbenzene, chlorinated hydrocarbons and other chemical compounds were once pooled in pits before the Environmental Protection Agency removed them, sits “just up the road, and it drains into our watershed,” he said.
Harris County, home to Houston, has at least a dozen federal Superfund sites, more than any county in Texas. On top of that, the state lists several other highly toxic sites managed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Up to 30 percent of the county is under water. Like other scientists in the area, Highfield is deeply worried about toxins leaking into the water during an unprecedented rainfall and flooding from Hurricane Harvey that caused dams to spill over for the first time in history. On Tuesday, ExxonMobil reported that two of its refineries east of Houston had been damaged in the flood and released pollutants. “I made a couple of phone calls to colleagues who said bottle up [samples], label them and we’ll run them all,” Highfield said.
On Tuesday, EPA officials in Washington traveled to Houston to monitor environmental risks. On Monday, a spokesman for the Texas commission, Brian McGovern, wrote in an email that its workers “took steps to secure state sites in the projected path of Hurricane Harvey” by removing drums with chemical wastes and shutting down systems. McGovern said that “EPA has been coordinating with potentially responsible parties” that created the federal toxic sites to secure them.
“The TCEQ and EPA will be inspecting sites in the affected areas once reentry is possible,” McGovern wrote. But Highfield and a colleague at Texas A&M;, Samuel Brody, want to know what’s in the water now, as residents with children sometimes plunge into it as they wade to safety from flooded homes.
With its massive petroleum and chemical industry, Houston, part of the “Chemical Coast,” presents a huge challenge in a major flooding event, said Mathy Stanislaus, who oversaw the federal Superfund program throughout the Obama administration.
Typically the EPA tries to identify Superfund sites in a major storm’s path to “shore up the active operations” and “minimize seepage from sites,” Stanislaus said. “This is not the time to dictate; it’s the time to work together well with state and local officials to think about needs that need to be met.”
Before Sandy, the powerful and destructive weather system that vacillated between a hurricane and tropical storm as it bore down on New Jersey and New York, the agency rushed to sites in harm’s way. Still, Stanislaus said, “There was some spread of contamination.”
The EPA tested Superfund sites after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and found that contamination was relatively contained, said Nancy Loeb, director of the Environmental Advocacy Center at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. But she cautioned that other more risky sites lie in the path of any storm that strikes a major metropolitan area such as Houston.
Risks at Superfund sites where the contamination hasn’t been completely resolved “are of the flooding picking up contaminants as it goes,” Lobe said. “If the water picks up contaminated sediment from sites, that may get deposited in areas where people frequent — residential properties, parks, ballfields — that were never contaminated before. We can’t say for sure it will happen, but it’s certainly a possibility.”
Residents who use well water are especially vulnerable, Loeb said: “There’s no testing of their water to know whether it’s been contaminated.”
In addition to the toxic pits at the Brio in Houston’s Friendswood community, Harris County’s polluted Superfund sites include the low-lying San Jacinto River Waste Pits that “is subject to flooding from storm surges generated by both tropical storms (i.e. hurricanes) and extra tropical storms” that push water inward from Galveston Bay, according to an Army Corps of Engineers report released last year.
There’s also the Many Diversified Interests site near the heart of the city, the Crystal Chemical Co. site in southwest Houston, the Patrick Bayou site off the Houston Ship Channel, and the Jones Road Plume dry cleaning waste site. They include oily sludge and contaminants dangerous to inhale or touch: perchloroethylene, trichloroethylene and chlorinated hydrocarbons, to name a few.
Highfield became alarmed Saturday when he saw teenagers swimming near a football field where water had risen to the crossbar of the goal post. He mentioned what he saw to Brody and recalled that they both reacted with worry.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this,” Brody said, so much so that the professor instructed a graduate student to analyze the distance between toxic release inventory areas such as Superfund sites and dry cleaners that store chemicals to 100-year and 500-year floodplains where housing and business developments sit.
According to the analysis, the average distance between the facilities to a 100-year floodplain in Harris County was 44 feet, compared with more than 2,000 feet in nearby Galveston and Chambers counties. The average distance to a 500-year floodplain in Harris County was about 70 feet, compared with more than 3,700 feet in Galveston County and 2,300 feet in Chambers County.
“I would love to do a study that combines sampling and physical measurements to understand the confluence of toxins to these flooding events,” Brody says. “When you get water in your home, it’s not just water, it’s sediment and debris. It’s the sediment that these toxic molecules bind to and become dangerous, like dioxins. Once you get water in the home and it has to be cleaned out, people are exposed.”
Both Brody and Highfield said Monday that they were fortunate: Water had not entered their houses. A month ago, Brody packed his family of four and moved from the Friendswood section of Houston that’s now being devastated by the flood, leaving his friend Highfield there. Brody specifically searched for a house on higher ground and is confident that water won’t enter it.
Highfield is less sure as the flood creeps toward his driveway. All around him, houses and cars are underwater. It fuels his concern about what might enter his house with the water, and what his neighbors and their children encounter when they frolic in the water.
“It was absolutely those kids swimming” that triggered his determination to test the water, regardless of whether Texas or the EPA did it. “That was kind of the aha moment. I plotted a path earlier thinking I could get kind of a back road path where I thought the water would be lower at the creek.”
But it was no use. His car was no match for what is by far the worst flooding ever in a city that has flooded since the month it was first founded. “I need it to stop raining. And I need things to drain a little bit,” Highfield said.
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