Fwd: Today's Houston Chronicle: In Houston and beyond, Harvey’s spills leave a toxic legacy
Scott Eustis
From: Bakeyah Nelson <bne...@airalliancehouston.org>
Date: Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 12:33 PM
Subject: Today's Houston Chronicle: In Houston and beyond, Harvey’s spills leave a toxic legacy
 | Bakeyah Nelson, PhD Executive Director, Air Alliance Houston p: 713.528.3779 | e: bne...@airalliancehouston.orgw: airalliancehouston.org | a: 3914 Leeland, Houston, TX 77003        |
Samuel Coleman, who was EPA’s acting regional administrator during Harvey, said the priority in the hurricane’s immediate aftermath was “addressing any environmental harms as quickly as possible as opposed to making announcements about what the problem was.” In hindsight, he added, it might not have been a bad idea to inform the public about the worst of “dozens of spills.”
Local officials say the state’s industry-friendly approach, in particular, has weakened efforts by the city of Houston and surrounding Harris County to build cases against and force cleanup by the companies, many of them repeat environmental offenders.
“The public will probably never know the extent of what happened to the environment after Harvey,” said Rock Owens, supervising environmental attorney for Harris County. “But the individual companies of course know.”
The chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Bryan Shaw, declined when asked by lawmakers in January to identify the worst spills and their locations. He told a legislative subcommittee hearing he could not publicly discuss spills until his staff completed a review.
The amount of government testing after Harvey stands in contrast to what happened following two other major Gulf Coast hurricanes. After Hurricane Ike hit Texas in 2008, state regulators collected 85 sediment samples to measure the contamination, according to a state review. More than a dozen violations were identified, it said, and cleanups were carried out.
ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE: Government ill-equipped to monitor damaged plants
In Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters ravaged New Orleans in 2005, the EPA and Louisiana officials examined about 1,800 soil samples over 10 months, EPA records showed.
“Now the response is completely different,” said Scott Frickel, an environmental sociologist formerly at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Frickel, now at Brown University, called the Harvey response “unconscionable” given Houston’s massive industrial footprint. Some 500 chemical plants, 10 refineries and more than 6,670 miles of intertwined oil, gas and chemical pipelines line the nation’s largest energy corridor.
Reporters covered some environmental crises as they occurred, such as AP’s exclusive on the flooding of toxic waste sites and the Chronicle’s Arkema warnings before fires broke out. But the sheer quantity of spills was impossible to document in real time.
Academic researchers now are trying to fill in the gaps in environmental monitoring, helped by grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. One project, a Harvey-related public health registry for Houston, was funded just this month but is not yet under way.