Harvey may have created more Superfund mess

PASADENA, Texas — The U.S. government received reports of three spills at one of Houston’s dirtiest Superfund toxic-waste sites in the days after the drenching rains from Hurricane Harvey finally stopped. Aerial photos reviewed by The Associated Press show dark-colored water surrounding the site as the floods receded, flowing through Vince Bayou and into a ship channel.

The reported spills, which have been not publicly detailed, occurred at U.S. Oil Recovery, a former petroleum industry waste-processing plant contaminated with a dangerous brew of cancercausing chemicals. On Aug. 29, the day Harvey’s rains stopped, a county pollutioncontrol team sent photos to the Environmental Protection Agency of three large concrete tanks flooded with water. That led PRP Group, the company overseeing the ongoing cleanup, to call a federal emergency hotline to report a spill affecting nearby Vince Bayou.

Over the next several days, the company reported two more spills of potentially contaminated stormwater from U.S. Oil Recovery, according to reports and call logs obtained from the U.S. Coast Guard, which operates the hotline. The EPA requires that spills of oil or hazardous substances in quantities that may be harmful to public health or the environment be immediately reported to the 24-hour hotline.

The EPA has not publicly acknowledged the three spills that PRP Group reported to the Coast Guard. The agency said an on-scene coordinator was at the site Wednesday and found no evidence that material had washed off the site. The EPA says it is still assessing the scene.

The AP reported in the days after Harvey that at least seven Superfund sites in and around Houston were underwater during the record-shattering storm.

Following AP’s report, EPA has been highlighting the federal agency’s response to the flooding at Superfund sites. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt reiterated that safeguarding the intensely polluted sites is among his top priorities during a visit Friday to the San Jacinto River Waste Pits, one of the sites AP reported about two weeks ago.

“It is intuitively obvious that the rains and floods of the magnitude that occurred during Hurricane Harvey would have resulted in some level of contamination having been released to the environment,” said Thomas Voltaggio, a private consultant and retired EPA official who oversaw Superfund cleanups and emergency responses. “Any contamination in those tanks would likely have entered Vince Bayou and potentially the Houston Ship Channel.”

He said the amount of contaminants spread likely will never be known, making the environmental impact difficult to measure. The Houston Ship Channel was already a polluted waterway, with Texas state health officials warning that women of childbearing age and children should not eat fish or crabs caught there.

PRP Group said subsequent testing of stormwater remaining in the affected U.S. Oil Recovery tanks showed it met federal drinking water standards.