Ship channel expansion another health hazard
Diesel-burning dredges expected to release air pollutants into community
“We need to be able to get more help. My neighborhood is my neighborhood.”
Billy Lee Jr.
The east Houston neighborhood where Billy Lee Jr. grew up feels to him like it’s been forgotten. Tall weeds sprout from the ditches. Highways and railroads cut up the community. The nearest major grocery store and hospital aren’t so near.
Down from his parents’ home along Fidelity Street, industrial plants emit pollution along the Houston Ship Channel. Up the street, material sucked up from the channel bottom as part of routine maintenance is dumped behind an unkempt levee that rises above nearby homes.
Lee says he became president of his local civic club so that the voices of his neighborhood — residents call it Fidelity — would be heard. He also wanted to improve the area for his 7-year-old son. But more air pollution is coming, rather than improvement.
The Port of Houston and Army Corps of Engineers are about to begin a billion-dollar, multiyear
expansion of the Houston Ship Channel, widening and deepening it. Environmental advocates say the dredge machines and other equipment could release as much air pollution as an industrial refinery.
The port is not requiring whichever companies it ends up hiring for the proj- ect to use only the cleanest possible machines. Executive Director Roger Guenther said the port encourages it, though. And while he said he would look at other ways to reduce emissions, no additional steps were confirmed yet.
The scenario highlights what the environmental justice movement for decades has shown: Communities of color are often forced to bear the brunt of environmental harm and neglect. On the other side of Loop 610 from Fidelity, in neighboring Pleasantville, the city of Houston swimming pool is green. Mattresses, tires and discarded furniture litter a nearby roadway.
Residents such as Lee have spoken out, but it seemed no one heard.
“We need to be able to get more help,” Lee said. “My neighborhood is my neighborhood.
Suggested changes
The port is the local agency working on the dredging project with the Corps, which is named Project 11. Leaders have touted the effort as an overall environmental win, allowing bigger ships to carry additional cargo more safely and efficiently on the heavily trafficked, complex waterway that extends some 52 miles from Houston to Galveston Bay.
“It does take energy to dredge channels, right?” Guenther said. “But I think the sooner that it’s done the better because of the benefit of deepening and widening the channel that is very busy. It improves air quality in the long run.”
About 58 ships a day pass through the channel, which has also been the scene of occasional environmental incidents. Public and private facilities along the waterway provide $802 billion in yearly national economic value, according to the port.
The port’s senior director of strategic programs, Charlie Jenkins, said he and the staff work hard to be a good neighbor. They mow the levees quarterly. They pick up trash monthly, at least on their side of the street.
With the upcoming project, only so much equipment is available and it’s in high demand, Jenkins said, so staff must balance a desire to get started quickly with a possibility that the best equipment might not be available.
A short-term burden may still exist.
The work requires dieselburning dredges, which will release two types of pollutants that especially concern advocates. One is nitrogen oxides, which can combine with other compounds in the air to form ozone. That ozone in turn can cause health problems for people with asthma.
The second is small particulate matter, which can harm hearts and lungs.
Federal rules limit how much ozone and particulate matter is considered relatively safe for public health, but advocates in this case say those rules aren’t protecting the affected communities well enough.
The Houston region long has violated federal standards for ozone, so the state has a plan for getting into compliance. The state environmental agency found the dredge emissions wouldn’t knock it off track from meeting those goals.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality regulators instead offered some project suggestions, including that the Corps favor contractors that limit air emissions and use newer equipment.
The first contract is expected to be awarded in October for work to start by the end of the year.
Threatened health
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that emissions will increase with this work, said Kenneth Adler, a senior contributing scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
And local residents already dealing with other hazards will pay a price: “They’re paying for the project with their health,” said Ellu Nasser, a public health consultant and Adler’s colleague.
The Houston Advanced Research Center and a Texas A&M expert crunched the numbers. The team found that a worst-case scenario year of dredge work could increase regional health expenses by $115 million, compared with 2016 data.
Ozone levels could affect parts of the region outside Harris County but actually decrease in the county depending on the time of year. Particulate matter was expected to bring the highest Harris County health costs.
“This report shows basically a real, serious concern about public health if the dirtiest equipment is used,” said Stephanie Thomas, a Houston-based organizer for Public Citizen, which commissioned the report along with the Healthy Port Communities Coalition.
The added pollution is one more issue for people in Pleasantville to fight. They include people like Bridgette Murray, who runs a local nonprofit called Achieving Community Tasks Successfully.
Murray is a retired nurse. She grew up in Pleasantville, a historically Black community. And when she began to see changes in her own health, she started to wonder about the effects of pollutants where she lived.
On a recent morning, she pointed out a small box fastened to a pole by the green pool, measuring fine particulate matter. ACTS helped get that monitor set up, along with others in the neighborhood.
They could see trends in what pollution they breathed.
Murray is pushing for better policies with the dredging. She’s a member of the port’s community advisory group. She hopes the port and Corps will keep the community informed and follow through with mitigating the pollution.
“Not just look at it,” she said, “but pursue it.”