Residents fight to keep mercury testing in South Houston
After region’s chemical plant fires, neighbors say measures at sewage facility aren’t a waste
Bob McGrew walks out to his backyard near Berry Bayou, points to the duck bathing in the water and starts listing all the wildlife he has spotted in the decade he’s lived there: the bobcat, a bald eagle, all kinds of birds and snakes. And then there’s Miss Duck, who has taken refuge in his garage, occasionally guiding her ducklings to the water after the eggs hatch.
McGrew moved to the southern Houston neighborhood from the Heights after his partner inherited the 1950s home from his parents. “The idea was to see how it went and if it didn’t go, sell and move on,” he said. They chose to stay.
Now, McGrew is among a group of neighbors, environmental advocates and lawyers fighting to continue requiring the city of South Houston to conduct weekly testing for mercury at its wastewater treatment plant. At a time when chemical plants are catching fire and federal officials are trying to clean up Superfund sites in the Houston area, they argue that officials can’t be too cautious when dealing with a toxic chemical such as mercury and local waterways.
The city submitted its application to the state in November 2017 to remove the total mercury effluent limitation and reporting requirements from its permit, a request that was endorsed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
South Houston has been required for more than 12 years to carry out weekly tests for mercury after a lab result that city officials claim was flawed found elevated
levels; the result was later dismissed because of quality-control issues. The city now has enough data testing — 91 samples — at the state’s lower required detection level, officials say, to show that mercury is not present in the plant’s wastewater above the permitted level.
“To continue testing for a pollutant that has been proven to be below the state-required minimum analytical level would be a waste of financial resources and not provide any benefit to the environment,” city officials said.
The existing permit requires weekly testing of effluent total mercury at what is called a minimum analytical level of .000005 mg/L.
“The way I see it,” said Fred Gonzalez, superintendent at the wastewater treatment plant, “is that we’ve shown (for) 15-plus years that there is no mercury in the water. Why keep spending the money on something if we have proven it’s not there?”
Besides, he added, testing is not going away completely. They just want to avoid doing it once a week.
But attorneys and residents point to what they consider a dubious record of compliance. For instance, TCEQ in 2014 cited South Houston for mismanagement of its pretreatment program when it found that industrial wastewater permits issued by the city didn’t include provisions for monitoring mercury, nor did they set limits on the amount released by industrial users.
That same year, a sample exceeded the allowable limit by a factor of almost 17. The state later said the method used was not sensitive enough to determine permit compliance, so no permit violation was found.
The city was also cited in 2017 for not using a sensitive enough method; once it did, it began detecting mercury in amounts lower than the minimum listed on their permit.
Still, the lawyers say, it shows the presence of mercury in the wastewater.
“It’s important to know if mercury is going into the environment, in what amounts, and how frequently,” said Rodrigo Cantú, environmental attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid. “It’s especially important to know when the actor involved doesn’t have a squeakyclean compliance history, even though they would like you to believe that’s the case.”
The Legal Aid group is representing Caring for Pasadena Communities and, with Bayou City Waterkeeper, is contesting the permit amendment and asking TCEQ to reconsider its recommendation. They have an online petition that residents can sign calling for the city to continue weekly testing.
Mercury is a neurotoxin that can accumulate in the tissue of fish and in bottom sediments in deep layers of water. About one-fourth of the sediment samples taken from Galveston Bay and the Houston Ship Channel exceeded state standards for mercury, according to the Galveston Bay Foundation’s 2018 bay report card.
Berry Bayou starts less than a mile from the city’s wastewater treatment plant and meanders for about 1.5 miles north until it merges with Sims Bayou, which flows into the Houston Ship Channel and ultimately Galveston Bay.
Nearly 170,000 residents live within 3 miles of the South Houston plant. About 8,500 homes flooded along Berry Bayou during Hurricane Harvey, which the environmental groups cite as another reason why continual monitoring of the chemical is needed.
McGrew’s house in the Meadowcreek Village neighborhood is less than a mile from the plant. His house backs up to a tributary drainage creek that empties into Berry Bayou. It’s full of trees and tall grass and peppered with wildflowers. While others have fences around their backyards, McGrew and his partner decided to leave it open to fully enjoy nature.
He’s become an expert in the different types of snakes, learning which ones to watch out for and which ones are friendly, so he can help escort them back to the shrubs. He recognizes the different yips of coyotes.
He strongly disagrees with the TCEQ’s designation of Berry Bayou as one of limited aquatic life and as a “non-wildlife sustaining entity,” putting emphasis on the four words.
Nearby, Roseanne Peters also worries about losing the wildlife that attracted her more than 30 years ago to her neighborhood.
“When my daughter was 2, we used to walk to the water’s edge to see the turtles, the fish, the birds,” she says. The bayou, about eight houses down the street, was also her son’s playground. They probably got in the water from time to time, even though they were not supposed to.
And people continue to use it. She knows of at least two people who kayak around there. Others fish. Most of them release the fish back into water, but some consume them, she said.
The community, immediately downstream of South Houston’s wastewater treatment plant discharge point, is 35 percent low-income and 83 percent minority, according to comments submitted by the lawyers.
“The urban nature of these waterways practically guarantees their use by people who do not know the risks associated with contact recreation and consumption of the fish caught in these bayous, and the TCEQ should scrutinize this major permit modification with these factors in mind,” they wrote state officials.
To Bob Hunt, the contractor who helped put together the city’s application, the state conducted an exhaustive review of the records and the city has provided enough data to justify its request.
And Hunt said $12,000 is not a small amount for the city of about 18,000, where the census shows the median household income is $44,600 a year.
“The City of South Houston doesn’t have that much (in) discretionary funds,” he said. “It’s an economically disadvantaged city and they struggle with insurance increases for employees and everything that goes on.”
State officials agreed, responding that the city has corrected the different issues that had been brought up. They concluded that Berry Bayou should be protected if the facility is operated and maintained as required.
The agency emphasized that the draft permit doesn’t authorize the discharge of mercury and that data from the facility show there is little to no presence of it in the discharge.
And while the draft permit doesn’t include effluent limitation for total mercury or specific monitoring and reporting requirements, city officials applying for permit renewals or any other future permit actions will have to provide a toxic pollutant analysis to help identify all priority pollutants in the discharge, including mercury, TCEQ said.
Still, there’s a lack of trust from some in the community.
Both McGrew and Peters talked about recent chemical fires that have brought pollution concerns closer to home, not to mention the Superfund sites in the region.
“I’m concerned about contamination,” McGrew said. “Eventually it can affect the soil and end up with a Superfund site where the federal government comes in and fences everything and takes it over.”
He remembers the Brio Refining Site, a facility about 20 miles south of Houston that was used from the 1950s to 1982. Chemical disposal practices contaminated groundwater and surface and subsurface soils with hazardous chemicals, and it was ultimately declared a Superfund site. The neighborhood is now abandoned, and the houses have been removed.
While the city says none of the handful of industrial users in the area uses mercury, Peters’ concerns are long term.
She wonders what will happen as the city grows, if other industry makes the neighboring City of South Houston their home.
“I’m not an alarmist,” she said, “but I’m a realist.”