After Harvey, red tags, but no help
A deep layer of silt still covers the wreckage of homes in Riverfront Estates, a Channelview neighborhood hit by a wall of water from the San Jacinto River during Hurricane Harvey.
Linda Bonner, 71, has flooded out three times over the years — including in both hurricanes Ike and Harvey. She camped out for days in a tent in her yard after Harvey, trying to rescue a lifetime of muddy possessions and waiting out FEMA officials who never arrived. In the past she has always rebuilt, but this time she left her little house sitting sideways in a sinkhole because she says she’s “afraid to go back or to send anybody out there to clean it out.”
No government agency has helped Bonner and other flooded-out residents figure out whether their yards or homes were safe from a leak EPA divers found in the nearby San Jacinto Waste Pits Superfund site.
Last year, researchers from Texas A&M University at Galveston collected samples at Bonner’s property and other neighborhoods near dioxin hot spots at the request of the Houston Chronicle and the Associated Press. The results from a dozen soil samples brought her some relief: The soil did not show unusually high levels of mercury, PCBs or even polychyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — toxic pollutants often found in soil near refineries and busy highways.
Instead, the properties showed evidence that the floodwaters as high as 16 feet that raged through the river bottoms during Harvey may have produced a scouring effect, bringing cleaner sediment from less industrialized areas upstream, according to data provided by Karl Kaiser of A&M’s Department of Marine Sciences.
Still, Bonner won’t be going back. No one has offered buyouts. Her neighborhood is unsafe and in ruins, her house marked as uninhabitable. “I’ve gotten red-tagged and we can’t do anything with it.”
Harris County pollution control officials recently tested for dioxin in soil from the mostly abandoned neighborhood’s park, a patch of tree-lined ponds, as well as three other parks along the river. The county plans to upgrade all four.
All four parks tested under levels that federal environmental regulars say may be unsafe for residential yards. But the results revealed higher levels of dioxin contamination in soil samples in the parks compared to yards in other parts of Houston separately tested by researchers from Texas A&M’s Geochemical and Environmental Research Group. The highest levels were found in a Channelview park that offers a public boat ramp next to the southern part of the waste pits.