Texas must do better at addressing the environmental impact of Hurricane Harvey.

Chemical spills during Harvey created untold environmental damage along the Texas coast.

Bret Simmons literally didn’t know what he was getting into.

As he staggered and pushed his motorcycle through Hurricane Harvey’s floodwaters, his wife Phyllis balanced on the seat and kept her legs out of the water. So she didn’t feel the intense burning sensation her husband remembers. He cried out in pain, he recalled, as the skin on his legs erupted in blisters, burns and lesions.

On the same day the Simmons evacuated from their home, state officials were informed that chemicals were spilling into the floodwaters around the nearby Arkema plant in Crosby. Many of the Simmons’ neighbors didn’t know about the danger. Indeed, seven months later, people who live around the plant still don’t know what chemicals they’ve been exposed to. They still worry about what’s in the air they breathe and the water they drink.

Explosions and fires rocked the site for days, so it was impossible to ignore what happened at the Arkema plant during Hurricane Harvey. But it’s now clear this was only the most conspicuous incident in a broader environmental disaster. An investigation conducted jointly by the Houston Chronicle and the Associated Press has exposed that the impact of chemical spills during the storm was far more widespread than authorities have reported.

The toxic legacy documented in our “Silent Spills” series makes it abundantly evident that our state’s industryfriendly government is falling down on the job of assessing the storm’s environmental impact. State lawmakers and other elected officials need to demand that regulators provide a full accounting of the damage wrought by chemical spills during Hurricane Harvey. At the same time, they need to learn some lessons from this storm to protect us from future environmental disasters.

The Chronicle’s Lise Olsen and AP’s Frank Bajak investigated more than 100 Harvey-related toxic releases. Most of them were never previously publicized, and only a few of them have been investigated by federal authorities. State regulators say they’ve investigated 89 of these incidents, but they haven’t announced any enforcement action.

Any testing of soil and water was restricted largely to Superfund sites. That’s in contrast to what happened after Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, when state and federal regulators examined about 1,800 samples over 10 months. Scott Frickel, an environmental sociologist formerly with Tulane University in New Orleans, called that response to Harvey “unconscionable.”

What’s especially galling is that the state’s top environmental regulator refused to answer questions about these spills posed by state lawmakers. When legislators at a subcommittee hearing in January asked the chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Bryan Shaw, to identify the worst spills, he told them he couldn’t publicly discuss them until his staff completed a review. We’re not sure with whom we should be more disgusted: the regulator who uttered that excuse or the lawmakers who let him get away with it.

State legislators should insist the TCEQ fully document and publicize not only what went wrong during Harvey but also what went right. Regulators should investigate not only tank farms that leaked during the storm but also tank farms resilient enough to withstand the disaster. The lessons learned during that review can only help the industries under the TCEQ’s purview.

Some lessons are already clear. Industrial plants should be required to report hazardous leaks and spills not only to state regulators but also to local and county law enforcement authorities who are better equipped to respond to emergencies. TCEQ needs mobile monitoring equipment that can be deployed quickly during events like Harvey, rather than counting on federal authorities, who take longer to respond. And citizens should be able to report environmental hazards to a pollution hotline, rather than getting juggled around by emergency police and fire dispatchers busy with other emergency calls.

Our area is home to the nation’s largest energy corridor, with some 500 chemical plants, 10 refineries and more than 6,000 miles of oil, gas and chemical pipelines. Our state needs to quit shrugging off environmental regulation as a pesky intrusion on industry and start treating it as a core government function. Texas can’t adequately protect its citizens from future disasters until it fully understands the environmental impact of Hurricane Harvey.

Because there will be another storm, and Texas has to be ready.