GALVESTON
This is the fourth year the bay has been graded and the report covers six total categories: human health risks, water quality, wildlife, habitat, coastal change and pollution. Only water quality received an excellent grade, despite the gallons of toxic sludge that spewed into the waterways during Harvey.
Some of the information collected for the report card — about birds, water temperature and freshwater inflows, for example — was gathered before Harvey. Other information was gathered after the storm, but it took some time for agencies to resume sampling schedules because of unsafe conditions, according to the report card.
“In most cases, the gaps were short and likely still include some impacts of Hurricane Harvey,” according to the report card.
One of the problems is the lack of monitoring data, both during and after major storms, researchers have said.
Earlier this year, the Chronicle and The Associated Press published a series on the government’s inaction following more than 100 toxic spills on land, in water and in air during and after Harvey, even though documents show that benzene, vinyl chloride, butadiene and other known human carcinogens were among the dozens of tons of industrial chemicals released throughout Houston’s petrochemical corridor and surrounding neighborhoods and waterways.
The news organizations found that testing by state and federal regulators of soil and water for contaminants largely was limited to Superfund toxic waste sites.
Kinney added that the bay report card was not designed to determine the impacts of one particular event, but to look at the watershed’s health as a whole.
The report’s goal is to look at “longer term scale impacts,” she continued.
Researchers looked at two other indicators of unsafe waters that would have been impacted by Harvey.
In the human health risk category, they examined how much enterococcus — an indicator of fecal bacteria in salt water — was in the bay in 2017. They gave the bay an “A,” or “excellent,” grade in this category as well because only 7 percent of the samples collected exceeded screening levels.
“The risk of bacterial infection while swimming in the open waters of the bay remain low,” the report states.
It wasn’t immediately clear when those samples were taken.
“Water samples tested immediately following rain events often show a spike in bacteria levels,” the report stated. “Storm water can cause wastewater treatment facilities and septic system overflows … Investments in wastewater treatment infrastructure are needed to improve water recreation safety.”
Environment Texas recently released a report about bacteria pollution, which showed that six beaches along Galveston Bay were unsafe to swim in five or more times throughout the year.
Researchers also look at toxics in the bay’s sediment — based on testing conducted by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — over a period of more than 10 years. These contaminants include PCBs, dioxins, PAHs, pesticides, and metals such as mercury, lead and zinc. But the only sediment testing done by the state after Harvey was in November, Kinney said, several months after Harvey’s devastation.
“Those toxics are not what was in the water; that’s what was in the sediment,” she added. “And again, it is for more than just 2017, because there’s not enough data points for those data sets to just look at one year at a time.
“It’s more of a moving average.”