Drinking poison

Puerto Ricans resorting to contaminated water should be a warning for Houstonians.

He had heard the stories of dead bodies rotting in the streets.

He knew that the city of New Orleans had totally broken down.

But for Fox correspondent Jeff Goldblatt, the depth of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction was finally made clear in the lobby of the W Hotel when he saw a bedraggled old man try to drink out of an ornamental fountain in a desperate search for clean water.

Any sense of optimism the reporter had for the Crescent City’s recovery suddenly went dark. It was “the moment went the bottom had fallen out,” as Douglas Brinkley documented in “The Great Deluge.”

Today, in Puerto Rico, they’re not drinking out of hotel fountains. They’re drinking out of Superfund sites.

Fences around a toxic well were torn down and the water contained was pumped out to citizens desperate to bathe, wash dishes and, yes, imbibe, CNN reported last week. A month has passed since Hurricane Maria struck the island territory, and more than 35 percent of the populace is still without access to safe drinking water. So they’ve been forced to resort to sources like the Dorado Groundwater Contamination Site, which is polluted with industrial carcinogens including tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene.

This can’t be the bottom falling out, because somehow EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt wants to keep digging. He has proposed an EPA budget that slashes 30 percent from Superfund cleanups and 37 percent from Superfund enforcement, according to a report by the Environmental Defense Fund.

Pruitt is in town today to speak during a closed door session at the Texas Oil and Gas Association’s Lone Star Energy Forum, and he deserves praise for his promise to clean up the San Jacinto waste pits. Pruitt has said before that he wants to focus on these sorts of cleanup efforts. Looking at his budget, we have to wonder how he’s going to pay for it.

And for Washington, D.C. types who have never seen a barn and don’t know why it doesn’t make sense to close its door after horses get out, let us recommend a new idiom worth trying: Cleaning up the waste pits after the hurricane.

Houstonians warned for years a natural disaster could rupture the storage tanks filled with dioxin and wash the carcinogenic chemical into the San Jacinto River.

“Not if, but when,” might as well have been the motto of groups like the Texas Health and Environment Alliance. A dozen-plus other Superfund sites dot the Houston region, waiting for the next major hurricane to wash chemicals and poisons across our playgrounds, bayous or into Galveston Bay. Meanwhile, the petrochemical industry remains vulnerable to a storm surge washing a wall of water up the Houston Ship Channel that would destroy storage tanks and rupture pipelines, drowning our city in a toxic stew of petroleum products.

Only the federal government can rally the resources necessary to clean up these Superfund sites and build a coastal storm surge barrier. If Washington doesn’t act, we may one day find ourselves like Puerto Rico, where the EPA can merely respond by hiring crews to rebuild the fences.

Houstonians warned for years a natural disaster could rupture the storage tanks filled with dioxin and wash the carcinogenic chemical into the San Jacinto River.