Houstons toxic Superfund sites are underwater and leaking

[KelleyKramer]

This is really bad news.

And I'm curious, what the hell are multiple Superfund sites doing in a hurricane/flood zone to begin with?!!



Houston’s toxic Superfund sites are underwater and leaking

Meanwhile, the EPA's budget for emergencies has gone down.

https://thinkprogress.org/houston-toxic-superfund-sites-209bb800b38d/


...
Houston is the heart of the Gulf Coast oil industry. The so-called “chemical coast” is home to numerous petrochemical refineries and processing plants. As such, it is also home to more than a dozen Superfund sites — areas of serious toxic pollution designated by the EPA to need remediation. After Harvey, though, many of those sites have gone underwater.

The risk to people and the environment is both immediate and long-term. Kids are reportedly swimming in waters that might be passing through Superfund sites or state-designated toxic sites. But even after the flood waters subside, it’s impossible to know how far the toxins may have spread. “If the water picks up contaminated sediment from sites, that may get deposited in areas where people frequent — residential properties, parks, ballfields — that were never contaminated before. We can’t say for sure it will happen, but it’s certainly a possibility,” Nancy Loeb, director of the Environmental Advocacy Center at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, told the Washington Post. The water could also leach into groundwater sources from nearby wells.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is planning to overhaul the Superfund program. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt — who has decided to personally lead the program — says his approach will reduce costs and speed clean-up, but a task force report from July offered such vague recommendations as “Establishing an ‘Administrator’s Top Ten’ list which will get his weekly attention” and “Finishing sites where construction is completed or nearly completed in order to transition the site from ‘Remedial Action’ to ‘Ready for Reuse’ to Deletion, as appropriate.”

And — along with many other EPA programs — the Superfund program is facing significant budgetary cuts if the Trump administration has its way. The EPA’s proposed budget cut total Superfund cleanup funding by $330 million dollars, a more than 30 percent reduction. The program had already been cut from FY16 to FY17, so the proposed new budget is less than two-thirds what it was two years ago.


-more at the link


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[Ilsa]

1. The texas coast is a mess, dotted with Superfund sites

here and there, all the way down to at least Port Lavaca, which was hit with some of the strongest hurricane winds. You can't eat what you catch near there.

[KelleyKramer]

2. Thanks for the info, can't eat because of the storm? ...

Or can't eat from around there at anytime?

[Ilsa]

3. There is a sign on Port Lavaca Bay warning

people who fish there not to eat their catch due to chemical contamination.

Here's a wiki list, but it doesn't tell you which are coastal, unless you know where those counties are.

[3_Limes]

4. 'Lotta people bust on NJ about this, but the truth is that

The Gulf Coast is much, much worse than NJ ever was. When Northern NJ had the "Chemical Coast" title there was far less overall understanding of the dangers of mishandling these toxins, or of just how persistently toxic some of them were, so there were some real disasters that are still being being felt. But the scale of the industry that grew up around Spindletop was so vastly bigger than what had been in place in NJ, and TX has been so unusually reluctant to regulate the industry, that the scale of the danger on the Gulf Coast makes the old NJ brown fields seem almost pristine by comparison.

I sure hope this storm changes some bad habits around the region.