Houston’s polluted Superfund sites threaten to contaminate floodwaters.
The Brio Refining toxic Superfund site, where ethylbenzene, chlorinated hydrocarbons and other chemical compounds were once pooled in pits before the Environmental Protection Agency removed them, sits “just up the road, and it drains into our watershed,” he said.
Harris County, home to Houston, has at least a dozen federal Superfund sites, more than any county in Texas.
On Monday, a spokesman for the Texas commission, Brian McGovern, wrote in an email that its workers “took steps to secure state sites in the projected path of Hurricane Harvey” by removing drums with chemical wastes and shutting down systems.
But Highfield and a colleague at Texas A&M, Samuel Brody, want to know what’s in the water now, as residents with children sometimes plunge into it as they wade to safety from flooded homes.
We can’t say for sure it will happen, but it’s certainly a possibility.” Residents who use well water are especially vulnerable, Loeb said: “There’s no testing of their water to know whether it’s been contaminated.” In addition to the toxic pits at the Brio in Houston’s Friendswood community, Harris County’s polluted Superfund sites include the low-lying San Jacinto River Waste Pits that “is subject to flooding from storm surges generated by both tropical storms (i.e. hurricanes) and extra tropical storms” that push water inward from Galveston Bay, according to an Army Corps of Engineers report released last year.
“When you get water in your home, it’s not just water, it’s sediment and debris.
Once you get water in the home and it has to be cleaned out, people are exposed.” Both Brody and Highfield said Monday that they were fortunate: Water had not entered their houses.
I plotted a path earlier thinking I could get kind of a back road path where I thought the water would be lower at the creek.” But it was no use.
His car was no match for what is by far the worst flooding ever in a city that has flooded since the month it was first founded.