Texas officials ignore dioxin spread in Houston waterways
HIGHLANDS, Texas — Evelyn and Jerome Matula were still polkadancing newlyweds in 1950 when they spotted a half-finished cottage in the woods along the San Jacinto River east of Houston. It seemed idyllic, with panoramic views and a sandy path to the river, where their three children and later their grandchildren fished. Now, the retired refinery worker and former educator fear their kin were poisoned by carcinogenic dioxin in the fish and well water.
Decades ago, paper mill waste barged down the Houston Ship Channel was buried across the river. From their bluff today, the Matulas can see orange buoys marking a federal Superfund hazardous waste site established in 2008.
An agreement announced last month has cleared the way for the San Jacinto Waste Pits to finally be cleaned up. But dioxin damage already has spread far beyond the waste pits, the Houston Chronicle and The Associated Press found.
More than 30 hotspots — small sites where dioxin has settled — have been located in sediments along the river, the Houston Ship Channel and into Galveston Bay, according to University of Houston research conducted from 2001 to 2011 and pieced together by the news organizations.
The affected areas are alongside parks and residential neighborhoods with thousands of homes. But the residents’ wells or yards have not been tested by state health officials.
Details about the hotspots have not been made public by Texas environmental regulators, who used more than $5 million in federal money to pay for the
research. In 2012, they ended a fact-finding committee that oversaw the project and had proposed new standards for dioxin and PCBs that could have been costly to corporate polluters.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality refused to release the full results of the studies that identified the sources of dioxin and PCBs, even to academic researchers, Harris County officials and lawyers who later sued companies over environmental damage. The research funding ended in 2011, leaving unanswered questions about whether toxic damage spread even farther during hurricanes Ike and Harvey.
The university data linked hotspots primarily to three sources: the leaking waste pits, the original site of the paper mill in Pasadena and a major chemical complex in nearby Deer Park that is part of another Superfund site, records show. None has been cleaned up.
Under the Clean Water Act and state law, Texas authorities were required to address dioxin and PCBs in the
river and ship channel, waterways officially designated as “impaired.” Setting such standards could have forced the responsible companies to clean up and upgrade contaminated stormwater and wastewater treatment.
All three TCEQ commissioners, appointed by the governor, declined an interview request.
Carl Masterson, a former Houston-Galveston Area Council staffer who for years served as a facilitator for the committee, said state regulators failed to do their duty. Once “the meetings were done, the project was over and the findings were in, the TCEQ should have approved” the committee’s recommendations, he said.
In a statement, the agency said it’s still working on “a document summarizing the source characterization of dioxin loads in the Houston Ship Channel/ Upper Galveston Bay system.”
The state’s approach to dioxin follows the same pattern the Chronicle and AP previously identified in an investigation into air and water pollution releases
from Hurricane Harvey. The news organizations found that state and federal regulators did little in response to massive releases of toxic pollution reported during and after Harvey’s torrential rains.
Similarly, Texas regulators have not followed up on the dioxin research with additional testing to see if wells, parks or property also are contaminated by the pollutants that formed the toxic hotspots.
In the Matulas’ case, their grandson Sean, a 33-year-old emergency manager, paid to have samples from the cottage’s two wells tested after learning he suffers from long-hidden heart and kidney defects that may shorten his life.
His mother had moved to the cottage when she was pregnant with him. Recent test results showed that the family well used at the time he was born tested at twice the level of dioxin considered healthy for human consumption.
“I have been told,” Sean Matula said of conversations with his doctor, “that I am lucky to be walking.”