Officials work on air quality crisis plan
The Intercontinental Terminals Co. storage tanks were on fire, sending a black plume of smoke across Harris County. Some families wondered if they needed to shelter in place. Others questioned whether thiswas safe. Commissioner Adrian Garcia wanted more data.
Part of a nearby state air monitor was offline for some seven hours during the crisis for a quality check. The county, meanwhile, had what Garcia called an “almost nonexistent” ability to measure air pollution from the fire on its own.
“We just at that time didn’t have the right information — the necessary information — to be able to effectively direct and challenge political decisions and
guide the community,” Garcia said.
It was a situation Garcia and others hope not to have repeated. The county and the city of Houston, with help from a recent $1.1 million grant, have been buyingmore equipment andworking on plans — their own and regionwide — for tracking air quality and decidingwhen action should be taken.
The latest grant-funded project, coordinated by the Environmental Defense Fund, highlights the ongoing local effort since last year’s ITC disaster to assume more responsibility for air monitoring.
“The state environmental agency … in our perspective has not shown up in these critical times,” said Elena Craft, the EDF’s senior director for climate and health, adding, “The city and the county really (are) in local hands in many respects.”
ITC chemical tanks burned for three days in March 2019 in unincorporated Harris County, prompting shelter-in-place orders in the city of Deer Parkwhile other local officials maintained the fire posed no serious health risks. Benzene, a carcinogen, leaked into the air after firefighters put out the fire, which kept flaring up.
Varied precautions exposed the lack of a regional system for measuring and communicating the risk. “I got an alert saying to shelter in place; I need to know why,” one caller at the time told a Deer Park dispatcher, who didn’t have an answer.
The patchwork response sowed mistrust and confusion. Different school districts closed on different days; the lifted shelter-in-place order in Deer Park was later reinstated.
“It wasn’t streamlined — the communication, the data sharing … transparency around themeasurements,” Craft said. “It just seemed like chaos from the monitoring perspective.”
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality now operates monitors at 30 stations in Greater Houston and collects data from 46 others. But these are meant to watch for specific pollutants and trends — not dictate
emergency responses, said Cory Chism, the monitoring division’s director.
When emergencies do occur, the agency said in a statement, its workers are also among those that respond, dedicating the staff and resources they have.
Figuring out how better to watch for pollutants in the air and share that information with residentswas identified as a principal priority by a crisis management firm that Harris County
contracted with after the fire, PENTA Consortium LLC.
The July 2019 report recommended the county develop a community monitoring strategy within a year. This would require addressing a pollution control department that was understaffed, under-equipped and without a clear role in collecting data “that can be critical during an emergency,” the report states.
So the county began catching up, spending what the EDF tal
lied to be more than $11 million. The pollution control department received nearly $6 million, buying 12 new air monitors to develop its community air monitoring program and hiring 26 additional pollution control staff, among other initiatives.
“Harris County really wasn’t adequately staffed or even equipped to conduct any community air monitoring that was really critical for this event,” said Andrew Brady, deputy director of operations and policy, among the new hires.
The city of Houston has been purchasing more equipment, too, going back even to Hurricane Harvey. They are installing particulate-matter monitors on city- owned vehicles, putting benzene monitors on two electric vehicles and upgrading a mobile unit.
“With regard to the most recent events, with ITC and these other large industrial incidents,” said Corey Williams, research and policy director for Air Alliance Houston, “they’ve moved… as quickly as government can.”
With the most recent grant, which is from the Houston Endowment, the city and county are planning for better coordination. They are making an inventory of equipment and gearing up for a monitoring campaign to get a sense for typical air quality, including nights and weekends.
Their goal overall is to add to the information the state provides, said Loren Hopkins, the Houston Health Department’s chief environmental science officer. (The state is also installing three more monitors.)
“Fixed-sitemonitors definitely have their role because they’re continuous and high-quality information,” Hopkins said. “Complimenting it with data between the monitors — measurements between the monitors — is what we’re seeking to do.”
Hopkins described mobile monitoring as key. Both the city and TCEQ have mobile air-monitoring vehicles, but TCEQ houses its three in Austin, slowing the time it takes to respond after a stormor during a fire in theHouston area. (The city is receiving a second vehicle through a grant. The county also ordered one.)
Chism, at TCEQ, welcomed the opportunity to partner with the city and county on their increased monitoring efforts. The more shared data they have, the better they can assist the public, he said. After all, the TCEQ monitors were too expensive to have one in everyone’s backyard.
Local officials are also tackling how to interpret the data. The county recently allocated $200,000 of $1 million from the American ChemistryCouncil and others to develop a strategy for when measurements of certain pollutantswould require actions.
“It wasn’t acceptable to us either,” said Anne Kolton, spokeswoman for the American Chemistry Council, a trade association, of the industry fires last year.
Mustapha Beydoun, vice president and chief operating officer for the Houston Advanced Research Center, which is receiving that funding, said it plans to gather experts to devise emergency response standards. Their goal is to get everyone on the same page about when to call for evacuations or sheltering in place.
“At the end of the day, that’s what really drove the public crazy,” Beydoun said. “Do I go outside or do I not go outside? Is it safe or not? Because everybody was telling you something different.”