Fallout from ITC fire is far from over
Work to dispose of millions of gallons of tainted water ongoing
For about three weeks, a barge loaded with hazardous wastewater from the Deer Park chemical fire sat in limbo in the Houston Ship Channel. No one was quite sure whether the shipyard where it had been sent could process it. Ultimately, it was returned to the storage terminal from which it originated.
Four months after the International Terminals Co. explosion, fire and chemical leak put the Houston region in the national spotlight, the work to dispose of the millions of gallons of waste and contaminated water generated in the incident is taking place quietly in the background and is far from finished.
ITC must comply with a 31-page management plan that details how the waste is sampled and identified, stored and finally disposed of. It dictates how it’s transported and where it can go. But details about the status of the work and where exactly the waste is going are hard to come
by.
“Hazardous waste laws are so demanding. If you are trying to dispose of hazardous waste, you have to send it to a facility that has all sorts of protections to avoid contamination,” said Rena Steinzor, a professor at the University of Maryland Law School. “That is why companies should be more careful of disposing their waste, and the real question is why they are not?”
On March 17, a tank holding the toxic chemical naphtha caught fire at the ITC plant in Deer Park, about 20 miles southeast of downtown Houston. One day later, it had spread to eight storage tanks. By the time the blaze was extinguished, 11 of the 15 tanks, with a capacity to hold up to 80,000 barrels each, had burned for 64 hours, sending a miles-long dark plume of smoke over the Houston area. No injuries were reported.
Some of the barrels contained gasoline blend stocks; others had xylene and pygas, which have concentrations of the cancercausing chemical benzene.
In total, more than 21 million gallons of water mixed with product and firefighting foam were collected from the tank farm and the Ship Channel area, which became exposed when a containment wall breached.
Along with the chemicals spilled from the tanks, waste was generated from skimming and vacuuming, decontamination of water vessels, washing wildlife, the mixtures recovered from the diked areas (Tucker Bayou and the Ship Channel), stormwater potentially mixed with released materials, and the protective garments used by workers.
All of it must be considered hazardous until it’s tested and determined otherwise.
“One of the problems is that xylenes continue to vaporize from the water unless removed,” said Jack Matson, professor emeritus of environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University. “A boom across the impacted area will not prevent continued volatilization, and some of the chemicals are dissolved and enter the Ship Channel.”
All the waste must be tracked and documented from cradle to grave.
Earlier disasters led to rules
The detailed plan that ITC must follow is the result of federal regulations and laws that originated in the 1970s and ’80s after some of the worst environmental disasters in the country.
To understand why the laws are so strict, it’s important to remember environmental disasters such as those that beset Love Canal in western New York and Woburn, Mass., said Steinzor, also a member scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform, which specializes in health, safety and environment regulations.
Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, was a working-class neighborhood with hundreds of houses that sat atop thousands of tons of toxic industrial waste that had been buried underground in the 1940s and ’50s by a local company, according to Time’s list of the top 10 environmental disasters.
Over the years, the waste began to bubble up into people’s backyards and basements. Then-EPA administrator Eckardt Beck described trees and gardens turning black and dying. There were birth defects and high rates of miscarriages.
In 1979, he called it one of the “most appalling environmental tragedies in American history” and said it couldn’t be regarded as an isolated event. It could happen again, anywhere in the country, unless something was done to prevent it, Beck said.
In Woburn, three local industries were accused of contaminating two municipal supply wells, leading to “clusters” of leukemia within the community.
Cases such as these, coupled with strong environmental reporting and best-selling accounts of scandals like Love Canal, Woburn and PG&E in Hinkley, Calif. (the groundwater contamination case that was the subject of the 2000 film “Erin Brockovich”), have spurred and strengthened federal legislation governing hazardous waste, Steinzor said.
“These stories gave the public the impression, which was correct, that companies were disposing of waste in very careless ways, so Congress decided to step in,” she said.
The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, signed into law in 1976 and designed to deal with newly generated waste, has since been amended, starting in 1984 with the passage of the federal Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments.
And the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA, enacted by Congress in 1980 to deal with existing waste sites, was reauthorized in 1986.
Essentially, the government can say, “I don’t need to fingerprint the waste, trace the waste right to you. If you contributed to the site, if you were the owner and operated out of this site, sent waste there, drove the waste, you are liable,” Steinzor said.
Federal regulations dictate what happens after an incident such as the one at ITC, one of three chemical fires in the Houston region in as many weeks, including one that left a worker dead. It exemplifies how even after the fire is put out, so much of the work is just beginning.
And 20-plus million gallons is a huge quantity, Matson said. “It’s going to cost them a lot of money to dispose of it … but then again, it was a horrific incident,” he said.
Disposal raises issues
And disposal efforts themselves can get confusing, in part due to a lack of transparency.
On May 21, ITC notified the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, as required, that a barge loaded with hazardous wastewater from the March incident had been sent the prior day to the Southwest Shipyard Channelview Gas Front-Barge Cleaning facility for disposal.
Four days later, in response to a Houston Chronicle inquiry, the state agency said they were aware of the situation and were looking into it. On June 7, TCEQ said it had determined that Southwest Shipyard didn’t have the proper permits to treat and dispose of wastewater related to the ITC fire.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it had determined Southwest Shipyard was an accepted facility under CERCLA, also known as Superfund, for off-site disposal of hazardous waste. “However, after TCEQ later clarified this facility’s state-issued National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit did not permit receipt and treatment of the specified waste, no wastewater from the ITC response was processed at Southwest Shipyards,” EPA spokeswoman Jennah Durant said in a written statement.
She didn’t respond to a followup question about what kind of waste it was and what role the federal agency was playing in overseeing the process.
TCEQ has said it continues to review the situation, referring further questions to the Texas Attorney General’s Office.
An ITC spokesman said the company worked with state and federal officials to develop an approved plan for treating collected incident water and had obtained approval regarding Southwest.
“After approval, an issue arose between Southwest and TCEQ. By agreement Southwest did not discharge any of our incident wastewater and it was all returned or stored. ITC continues to treat some of the wastewater and will use other third-party facilities as approved by EPA and TCEQ to ensure the safety and health of the community,” the spokesman said.
On April 17, Southwest Shipyard posted on its website that it had been approved to decontaminate and clean large equipment vessels involved in the fire.
The facility, the statement read, “has the permitting in place and the technology on hand to decontaminate and clean all of (sic) large equipment vessels and has been told that they are going to receive some portion of the approximately 17 million gallons of contaminated water that was collected during the clean-up event to date.”
“Southwest Shipyard has been selected before by response officials to do exactly the same type of clean-up, remediation and water treatment on other spill responses in the Houston Ship Channel,” the statement continued.
Government oversight
After the Chronicle’s inquiry, the company stripped its online post of most details, saying only that it had been approved to clean large equipment vessels involved in the Deer Park fire.
Multiple requests for comment to Southwest Shipyard have gone unanswered. On July 10, an employee contacted by phone by a Chronicle reporter responded, “We have no comment, thank you,” and hung up.
“The whole purpose of these regulations is to make sure (the waste) is properly treated and disposed to not cause further damage to the environment,” said Matson, the Penn State professor.
And it’s the job of the government to provide oversight and make sure the company is doing the right thing, he said.
In general, he added, current laws and regulations are rigorous, but it depends on the regulatory agency and its oversight.
“If they follow the regulations as written, it’s likely it will be disposed of properly,” Matson said.