State ignores the spread of dioxin in key waterways
HIGHLANDS — Evelyn and Jerome Matula were still polka-dancing newlyweds in 1950 when they spotted a tiny, half-finished “dollhouse” tucked into a patch of woods along the San Jacinto River on Harris County’s eastern edge.
It seemed like a dream — a bluff out back offered panoramic views, and a sandy path wound down to the river, where their three children and later their grandchildren all fished. But now, the retired refinery worker and former educator, 91 and 88, fear that all of their kin were poisoned by carcinogenic dioxin in the fish and in the well water.
Decades ago, paper mill waste was barged down the Houston Ship Channel from Pasadena and quietly buried in a sand pit just across the river. From their bluff today, the Matulas can hear traffic on the busy Interstate 10 bridge and see orange buoys that mark the boundaries of a federal Superfund hazardous waste site established around those pits in 2008 that, after an agreement announced last month, is finally on the way to being cleaned up.
But dioxin damage already has spread far beyond the boundaries of the waste pits, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the Associated Press shows.
More than 30 hot spots — small sites where dioxin has settled — have been found in sediments along the river, the Houston Ship Channel and into Galveston Bay, the state’s most popular recreational fishing area, according to University of Houston research conducted from 2001 to 2011 and pieced together by the news organizations.
The affected areas are in waters alongside parks and residential neighborhoods with thousands of homes in communities such as
Pasadena, Deer Park, Channelview, Baytown and Highlands. But none of those people’s wells or yards has been tested by state health officials.
Details about the toxic hot spots, never before made public, were withheld by Texas environmental regulators, who used more than $5 million in federal money to pay for research. In 2012, they shut down a fact-finding committee that oversaw the project and had proposed new standards for dioxin and PCBs that could have been costly to politically powerful corporate polluters.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality refused to release the full results of the studies that identified the waste pits and other major sources of dioxin and PCBs, even to academic researchers, Harris County officials and lawyers who later sued companies over environmental damages. Funding for UH research that identified the hot spots ended in 2011, leaving unanswered questions about whether toxic damage spread farther during hurricanes Ike and Harvey.
The UH data linked hot spots primarily to three industrial sources: the leaking waste pits, the original site of the paper mill in Pasadena and a major chemical complex in Deer Park that is part of another Superfund site, records obtained by the Chronicle show.
None of the hot spots has been cleaned up.
Under the Clean Water Act and state law, Texas authorities were legally bound to take action to address dioxin and PCBs that still taint fish and threaten the health of people who eat them in the river and Ship Channel, waterways officially designated as “impaired.” Setting such standards could have resulted in regulatory action and forced the responsible companies to conduct cleanups and further upgrade treatment of contaminated stormwater and wastewater.
All three TCEQ commissioners, appointed by the governor to oversee the agency, declined a request for an interview.
Ultimately, state regulators failed to do their duty under state and federal law, said Carl Masterson, a former Houston-Galveston Area Council staffer who for years served as a facilitator for the committee. Once “the meetings were done, the project was over and the findings were in, the TCEQ should have approved” the committee’s recommendations, he said.
In a statement, the agency denied abandoning the project and said it’s still working on “a document summarizing the source characterization of dioxin loads in the Houston Ship Channel/Upper Galveston Bay system.” The agency said that since the primary pollution sources were not modern wastewater emissions, but rather historic waste dumps, the problems could be better addressed through the EPA’s Superfund work or the state’s own hazardous waste cleanup initiatives.
The state’s approach to Houston-area waterways’ dioxin problems follows the same pattern that the Chronicle and AP identified previously in Silent Spills, an investigation into air and water pollution releases during and after Hurricane Harvey. The news organizations revealed that state and federal regulators did little testing in response to massive releases of pollution reported during Harvey’s torrential rains and so far have announced only one enforcement action against a polluter.
In the same manner, Texas regulators have not followed up on the dioxin research with additional testing to see if wells, parks or property also had been contaminated by the pollutants that formed toxic hot spots in sediments in waterways that run through residential neighborhoods.
In the Matulas’ case, their grandson Sean, a 33-year-old emergency manager, paid to have samples from the cottage’s two wells tested. He only began to wonder about whether the water was tainted in 2015 after learning he suffers from longhidden heart and kidney defects that may shorten his life.
His mother moved to the cottage when she was pregnant with him. Recent test results showed that the family well used at the time he was born tested at twice the level of dioxin considered healthy for human consumption under EPA Safe Drinking guidelines.
“I have been told,” Sean Matula said of conversations with his doctor, “that I am lucky to be walking.”
Leaking waste pits
“I have been told,” Sean Matula said of conversations with his doctor, “that I am lucky to be walking.”
In 1990, the Texas Department of Health Services first issued warnings that catfish and crabs in the San Jacinto and in parts of upper Galveston Bay area contained so much dioxin that consuming local seafood posed potential health risks — and banned its consumption by children and pregnant women.
The Environmental Protection Agency already had been funding initiatives to clean up the nation’s impaired rivers and identify sources of toxic substances in sediments and water that, in turn, have poisoned fish. The actions came in response to revelations in the 1980s that one of the most toxic forms of dioxin had been unleashed into the environment as an unwanted byproduct of paper bleaching and chemical manufacturing.
Even in microscopic doses, those types of dioxin have been linked to birth defects as well as cancer and reproductive problems. The World Health Organization deems dioxin one of the “dirty dozen” most dangerous chemicals for human health.
Some of the most likely industrial sources were obvious — two former paper mills and the huge chemical complex in Deer Park. Then a state park employee discovered sand pits near a highway bridge where pulp from the larger paper mill in Pasadena had been barged in the 1960s, buried and forgotten.
A video from a site visit from around 2009 shows that fishermen and other visitors had carved a path across unmarked sand pits partially submerged by the river. On the riverbank, particles of what looks like an egg carton were shearing off the shore into the water. Those gray fragments are examples of dioxin particles that end up in the sediment, said Larry Koenig, who worked for 10 years as the TCEQ staff member assigned to the dioxin study.
Based on the committee’s hot spot research and reviews of aerial photos of damage from sand mining and erosion, he and other experts have estimated that about half the waste originally buried in pits already had escaped into the environment before the site was rediscovered.
Koenig retired in 2010, in part because of his frustration about the lack of action on any proposed water quality standard.
“I wrote it and rewrote it for several years, but the agency never adopted it,” he said.
A dozen hot spots identified by teams of University of Houston researchers were scattered around those pits, both north and south of what’s now the I-10 bridge in east Harris County, the research shows. Pits north of the river were leaking; those south of the river sit underneath an active shipyard and a towing vessel operation.
Some the worst hot spots became part of the San Jacinto Waste Pits Superfund site a decade ago. But others are well outside EPA cleanup boundaries — miles downstream in shallow side bays near residential neighborhoods in Baytown and La Porte.
Another major source of hot spots in the Ship Channel came from chemical plants along a shallow tributary called Patrick Bayou in the city of Deer Park, according to the committee’s reports and research. The bayou had been identified as a priority site for Superfund cleanup — even before the state committee’s dioxin water quality work began.
Polluters on the committee
The committee formed by state regulators to study the source of dioxin in the Ship Channel, the river and Galveston Bay included representatives of two companies that were ultimately found to be major sources of the contamination: Shell Chemical and OxyVinyls, a subsidiary of Occidental Chemical.
The group’s research showed that a long stretch of the Houston Ship Channel near Patrick Bayou had some of the region’s worst dioxin and PCB contamination.
By 2009, corporate representatives on the committee, along with environmentalists and government officials, had reviewed draft proposals and proposed standards for PCB and dioxin water quality that could have sparked regulatory or legal action against their companies.
Most of Patrick Bayou’s dioxin and PCB pollution was from historic industrial activities. But Shell and Occidental Chemical would likely have faced pressure to address contaminated runoff and further upgrade wastewater treatment to clean up the bay and the Ship Channel, according to TCEQ documents, UH research, EPA records and interviews with Koenig and Hanadi Rifai, the University of Houston environmental engineering professor who oversaw the research teams.
Representatives of OxyVinyls and Shell expressed no objections to proposed pollutionreduction reforms in public meetings, according to minutes and interviews.
But EPA records show that during the time the dioxin cleanup committee was making its Clean Water Act recommendations, neither company had agreed to pay to address polluted Patrick Bayou as part of related but separate Superfund negotiations. The EPA subsequently named Shell Chemical, Occidental Chemical
and Lubrizol, all chemical companies with operations in Deer Park, as “potentially responsible parties” — those the agency holds responsible for the site, according to EPA records.
The companies still have not agreed to fund cleanup of Patrick Bayou, 16 years after the area was designated as a Superfund site.
Progress has gone a little faster at the other Superfund site identified as a major dioxin source — the San Jacinto Waste Pits. Federal officials said in April that they now have an agreement to clean up the waste pits — 10 years after it became a Superfund site. International Paper Co. and McGinnis Industrial Maintenance Corp. have pledged to pay design costs for the plan to remove 161,000 tons of carcinogenic paper mill waste that was buried there in the 1960s.
Ray Fisher, a spokesman for Shell, said the company continues to work on the Patrick Bayou site in “collaboration with the other relevant parties under the oversight of federal and state agencies to progress the investigations and cleanup activities.”
“Our focus is on safety of our people and community, and proper stewardship of the natural environment. In areas where we have fallen short of that aspiration, we move to properly remediate, and we support the need for reasonable standards that ensure clean and safe water.”
Both Shell and Occidental Chemical have acted more quickly to address dioxin and other pollutants at multiple Superfund sites in several other states, EPA records show.
Texas-based Occidental Chemical led the way in cleaning up the Love Canal Superfund site in New York and in a major river cleanup in New Jersey. But Lois Gibbs, a former Love Canal activist and founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Health, Environment & Justice, said Texas state leaders have put little or no pressure on companies to tackle dioxin here.
“It’s really about what does the state want to do,” she said. “There’s so many big companies … and (Texas authorities) have historically shied away. … Their argument has been it takes too long. It takes too long because they’re not pushing it. The state does not have the will to do that. The bigger the corporation, the more often they turn a blind eye and a deaf ear.”
Eric Moses, an Occidental Chemical spokesman, said the company continues to work with others to complete investigation of the “Patrick Bayou site and implement effective controls and remedies that will be protective of human health and the environment.”
No known threat?
In 2012, the Texas Department of State Health Services delivered its public health assessment about dioxin in the waste pits. The report again warned of hazards posed to fish, but it didn’t address any threat to neighborhoods’ soil or well water from contamination that UH researchers had measured in hundreds of samples in the river.
Residents and Harris County officials questioned why the state failed to collect additional information even in the yards of 1,000 people who lived within one mile of the pits.
“I don’t think there was much testing done in the community,” said Lisa Gossett, an environmental lawyer, who works as a volunteer for the Texas Health and Environment Alliance, a grass-roots group that has advocated for river residents. “And I know there was no health surveys or data collected.”
From 2001 to 2011, the University of Houston repeatedly deployed teams of students in small boats who collected samples from river sediments, netted fish and pumped water through filters to collect samples, which were then analyzed by EPA-approved laboratories. That research was thorough, but it wasn’t focused on people.
Rifai told the Chronicle that UH’s studies of contaminated riverwater and sediment could not be used to determine whether yards or parks or well water was safe. She is now working with the Galveston Bay Foundation, an independent nonprofit, and Harris County to conduct more testing after Harvey’s flooding.
Striking another generation
Sean Matula spent his first five years at his grandparents’ cottage on the river bluff in Highlands. He was hospitalized as an infant and suffered unexplained respiratory and bladder problems.
Still, he was active and athletic as a boy and often scrambled down the path to the river with a fishing pole. He later joined his father as a member of the Highlands Volunteer Fire Department and grew up to become a professional firefighter and emergency manager.
Then just after age 30, he began to suffer bouts of intense unexplained pain. Tests showed his heart is deformed, he has only one faulty kidney and a mass where the second kidney should be. He struggles now to continue to work, but his long-term prognosis is worse: He faces increased risk of stroke, kidney failure and early death.
“Specialists have told me that any corrective surgery is very risky and could make matters worse,” he said. “My only real option is to bear the pain as many years as I can until I can no longer put off the surgery.”
The Matulas have two wells inside small sheds on the cottage property, the traditional setting for their gatherings and celebrations. For decades, family members drank from the older shallow well. About 10 years ago, they dug a deeper one.
After Sean paid for testing, he asked state health officials to review complex lab reports. They found the dioxin measured in the older well to be more than twice what the EPA considers dangerous for humans of any age to drink — though they noted there was no way of knowing what the levels might have been in previous decades.
Dioxin levels in the newer well represented an increased risk of cancer for children and adults but were within the EPA’s drinking water limits, the state’s letter said.
Harris County separately paid to test water from other family wells in Highlands and Lynchburg in 2016 and 2017; the labs found no dioxin levels as high as those in the Matulas’ older well. About two dozen homes had levels similar to those in the newer well, county reports show.
In 2015, the Department of State Health Services separately confirmed unexplained clusters
In 2015, the Department of State Health Services separately confirmed unexplained clusters of skin, eye and brain cancer reported among children in census tracts around the waste pits from 1995 to 2012. A much older study by University of Texas researchers uncovered elevated levels of leukemia among children who lived within two miles of the Ship Channel.
of skin, eye and brain cancer reported among children in census tracts around the waste pits from 1995 to 2012. A much older study by University of Texas researchers uncovered elevated levels of leukemia among children who lived within two miles of the Ship Channel.
Attorney Richard Mithoff, a Houston lawyer, represents the Matulas and 600 other families who have claimed their health and property have been harmed in the latest related environmental lawsuit. He says he believes he will be able to prove that cancer, birth defects and other ailments reported by many of his clients who lived around the pits are directly related to the dioxin in the river and its fish.
The EPA cleanup of the waste pits won’t undo damage done to those who lived there, Mithoff said.
“It obviously cannot undo the cancers we think have been caused by dioxin and other illnesses,” Mithoff said, “but it certainly holds great promise for the future and those living there now will be able to rest a little easier.”