FLOODING AT toxic waste sites near Houston raises concerns pollution will spread.
HIGHLANDS, Texas — Floodwaters have inundated at least seven highly contaminated toxic waste sites near Houston, raising concerns that the pollution there might spread.
Long a center of the American petrochemical industry, the Houston metro area has more than a dozen such Superfund sites, designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as being among the most intensely contaminated places in the country.
On Saturday, hours after The Associated Press published its first report, the EPA said it had reviewed aerial imagery confirming that 13 of the 41 Superfund sites in Texas were flooded by Harvey and were “experiencing possible damage” due to the storm.
The statement confirmed the AP’s reporting that the EPA had not yet been able to physically visit the Houston-area sites, saying the sites had “not been accessible by response personnel.”
AP journalists used a boat to document the condition of one flooded Houston-area Superfund site, but accessed others with a vehicle or on foot. The EPA did not immediately respond to questions about why its personnel had not done so.
Near the Highlands Acid Pit, across the swollen San Jacinto River from Houston, Dwight Chandler sipped beer and swept out the thick muck caked inside his devastated home. He worried whether Harvey’s floodwaters had also washed in pollution from the Superfund site just a couple of blocks away.
In the 1950s, the pit was filled with toxic sludge and sulfuric acid from oil and gas operations. Though 22,000 cubic yards of hazardous waste and soil were excavated in the 1980s, the site is still considered a potential threat to groundwater, and the EPA maintains monitoring wells there.
In Crosby, across the San Jacinto River from Houston, a small working-class neighborhood sits between two Superfund sites, French LTD and the Sikes Disposal Pits. The area was wrecked by Harvey’s floods, with only a single house among the roughly dozen lining Hickory Lane still standing.
After the flooding receded on Friday, a sinkhole the size of a swimming pool had opened up and swallowed two cars. The smell of creosote filled the air.
The water had receded by Saturday at Brio Refining Inc. and Dixie Oil Processors, a pair of neighboring Superfund sites in Friendswood. Both sites were capped with a liner and soil as part of EPA-supervised cleanup efforts aimed at preventing the contamination from spreading during floods.
A security guard at the Patrick Bayou Superfund site, located just off the Houston Ship Channel in Deer Park, said on Saturday that floodwaters came hundreds of feet inland during the storm. The water had since receded into the bayou, where past testing shows sediments contain pesticides, toxic heavy metals and PCBs.
The San Jacinto River Waste Pits Superfund site was completely covered by water when an AP reporter saw it Thursday. According to its website, the EPA was set to make a final decision this year about a proposed $97 million cleanup effort to remove toxic waste from a paper mill that operated there in the 1960s.
The flow from the raging river washing over the toxic site was so intense it damaged an adjacent section of the Interstate 10 bridge.
There was no way to immediately access how much contaminated soil from the site might have been washed away. According to an EPA survey from last year, soil from the former waste pits contains dioxins and other long-lasting toxins linked to birth defects and cancer.