Good news for Union Pacific site
The threat of a lawsuit over contamination starts to pay off for the city, county and community.
Finally, Sandra Edwards got some good news. The longtime community organizer and Fifth Ward resident who lives across the street from the Union Pacific rail yard was buoyed when she heard that federal environmental regulators would, at long last, be taking a more involved role, overseeing the investigation and cleanup of the site contaminated after decades of use by a wood treatment facility in the 20th century.
“That’s a small step but guess what? It’s a step and it’s not going backward; it’s going forward,” Edwards told the editorial board.
The move was a long time coming. When community members gathered in April of last year inside a Fifth Ward church a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks that cut through the neighborhood, there was anger, skepticism and also a glimmer of hope about a new idea to try and force officials to get serious about cleanup.
It involved threatening to sue over the Union Pacific site, where for decades, creosote, a likely carcinogen, was used before the rail company eventually acquired the land in 1997. The company has stressed its own efforts to contain and clean up the site but residents have still complained that on hot days, they can see a black, tar-like substance oozing to the surface and other experts have called the efforts insufficient.
The idea to send Union Pacific a notice of “intent to sue” under federal environmental law was the brainchild of nonprofit Bayou City Initiative and environmental lawyer Jim Blackburn.
It wouldn’t pay for the generations of health complications, even deaths, that both scientists and residents believe can likely be traced back to the site but it could trigger the oversight of the federal government.
“It can be done much faster and much better than what’s being discussed,” Blackburn said at the time.
Since then, the city and county joined the potential lawsuit.
Union Pacific agreed to come to the negotiating table and the state paused its pending permit for the site. In the fall, more city testing found dioxins, a different toxic chemical, in soil samples gathered from Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens.
Then, earlier this week, Union Pacific announced it would start the additional testing in and around the site that so many had pushed for. Now we can begin to understand the real scale of the problem.
“For far too long, the concerns of families in Fifth Ward have been dismissed, and residents have suffered the consequences of being forced to endure decades of uncertainty and higher-thannormal incidents of cancer in the community,” said Mayor Sylvester Turner in the statement from the city and county Wednesday.
“This is about the best progress we’ve got,” said Edwards, but it’s only part of the larger picture.
“The damage is already done,” in too many cases, she said. “I have a neighbor across the street whose son died four months ago. There’s people steady getting cancer on my street.”
She wants to see sick residents get help getting to and from appointments and financial support for treatment.
“Some of them have to pick: do they pick medicine or do they pick food and bills?”
For now, she wants to see the EPA continue to operate as transparently as possible.
The agency said it will oversee the additional testing both at the site and in the community, including nearby homes, set the timeline for moving forward and even implement penalties if Union Pacific doesn’t meet its deadlines.
It’s a victory but the work is only just beginning. And we cannot forget the years-long fight that preceded the lawsuit: the protest and community organizing from residents who watched family members fall ill, the health studies that finally documented the presence of cancer clusters in the area and the consistent pressure from the skeptics who continue to ask: is it enough?
No. But it’s a start. At last.