5th Ward site eyed for redevelopment

Land with history of contamination makes EPA list

The Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday it would recruit developers to help revamp a hand-picked selection of 31 old refineries, smelters and historically polluted lands that have been formally designated for cleanup under a federal program reserved for the nation’s worst toxic waste dumps.

On a list that the agency is billing as sites with the “greatest expected redevelopment and commercial potential” is a 35-acre property off Interstate 10 in Houston’s East End that developers already have proposed cleaning up and turning into a housing complex for years despite its history of lead and arsenic contamination. The site had housed a foundry known as Many Diversified Interests, or MDI, that released air pollution tainted with heavy metals from 1926 to 1992.

The property, located at 3617 Baer St. in Houston’s Fifth Ward, became an EPA Superfund site in 1999 after

studies confirmed that land and surrounding yards were contaminated with pollutants, including arsenic and lead. The EPA later removed soil from dozens of nearby properties.

After initial cleanup activities, the EPA has for years continued to monitor groundwater at the site, which is just east of downtown Houston between Buffalo Bayou and Interstate 10. But in 2010, the EPA removed part of the property off of its National Priorities List in response to a developer’s request for redevelopment. Over the years, the site has been an eyesore and a nuisance for local residents, who expressed no opposition to the redevelopment plan, the EPA said at the time.

In 2015, Houston developer Frank Liu announced plans to help rehabilitate that site and eventually develop 538 homes there. Liu could not be reached Tuesday on the status of that project.

Other sites on the EPA’s list with redevelopment potential include former chemical plants, refineries, mines and smelters once contaminated with toxic materials.

In a news release, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt promised that the EPA will be “more than a collaborative partner to remediate the nation’s most contaminated sites, we’re also working to successfully integrate Superfund sites back into communities across the country.”

“Today’s redevelopment list incorporates Superfund sites ready to become catalysts for economic growth and revitalization.”

Other sites on the federal rehab list are in small towns or rural areas. One of the best known rural Superfund sites tapped for its redevelopment potential is the so-called “Libby Groundwater Sites,” located in an asbestos mining town in Montana.

The entire town of Libby became the focus of a federal study and cleanup after a Hearst newspaper investigation by reporter Andrew Schneider revealed residents there had been poisoned by haphazard disposal of asbestos mining waste.

Libby later turned into one of the nation’s largest Superfund sites, though the groundwater sites on the EPA’s redevelopment list won their particular designation for the government cleanup program because of contamination by pollutants other than asbestos, said Celeste Monforton, a former federal government official who is familiar with the EPA’s Libby investigations and is now a lecturer in public health at Texas State University.

Monforton said she hoped the EPA would seek citizen input as it proceeds with its rehab plans.