HIGHLANDS, Texas — Floodwaters have inundated at least five highly contaminated toxic waste sites near Houston, raising concerns that the pollution there might spread.
The Associated Press visited the sites this past week, some of them still only accessible by boat.
Long a center of the American petrochemical industry, the Houston metro area has more than a dozen such Superfund sites, designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as being among the most intensely contaminated places in the country.
EPA spokeswoman Amy Graham could not immediately provide details on when agency experts would inspect the Houston-area sites. She said Friday that staff had checked on two other Superfund sites in Corpus Christi and found no significant damage.
“We will begin to assess other sites after flood waters recede in those areas,” Graham said.
Near the Highlands Acid Pit, across the swollen San Jacinto River from Houston, Dwight Chandler sipped beer and swept out the thick muck caked inside his devastated home. He worried whether Harvey’s floodwaters had also washed in pollution from the Superfund site just a couple blocks away.
In the 1950s, the pit was filled with toxic sludge and sulfuric acid from oil and gas operations. Though 22,000 cubic yards of hazardous waste and soil were excavated in the 1980s, the site is still considered a potential threat to groundwater, and EPA maintains monitoring wells there.
When he was growing up in Highlands, Chandler, now 62, said he and his friends used to swim in the by-then abandoned pit.
“My daddy talks about having bird dogs down there and to run and the acid would eat the pads off their feet,” he recounted Thursday. “We didn’t know any better.”
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has said cleaning up Superfund sites are a priority, even as he has taken steps to roll back or delay rules aimed at preventing air and water pollution. President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget seeks to cut money for the Superfund program by 30 percent, though congressional Republicans are likely to approve less severe reductions.
Like Trump, Pruitt has expressed skepticism about the predictions of climate scientists that warmer air and warmer seas will produce stronger, more drenching storms.