The Environmental Protection Agency is ignoring hazardous post-hurricane spills at one of Houston’s most polluted toxic waste sites — even after the agency’s chief surveilled it himself.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, multiple reports have detailed stormwater flowing out of U.S. Oil Recovery, a highly polluted, now-retired petroleum waste processing facility in Houston, the Associated Press reported. Although EPA chief Scott Pruitt visited U.S. Oil Recovery on Friday, the EPA hasn’t amended its statement from last week that said the site “require[d] additional assessment efforts.” It’s also been designated as part of the Superfund program, which cleans up the most contaminated sites in the country, since 2012.
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On Aug. 29, after Harvey’s floodwater began to recede, a Harris County pollution team sent photos of three large concrete tanks at the site filled with floodwaters to the EPA. The group responsible for cleaning up the site, a coalition of companies whom the EPA has identified as responsible for the pollution at the site, then contacted the Coast Guard — three times — to inform them of three separate leaks of potentially contaminated stormwater, according to call logs obtained by the AP.
Then, on August 31, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration snapped photos of oil slicks and murky water around U.S. Oil Recovery and circulated them to the press, an NOAA spokesperson told VICE News.
While the photos don’t prove that contamination leaked from the former petroleum waste processing plant, they do show that the dark, polluted water leaked into the nearby Vince Bayou river, where it likely flowed into the already polluted Houston Shipping Channel.
“Any contamination in those tanks would likely have entered Vince Bayou and potentially the Houston Ship Channel,” Thomas Voltaggio, a former EPA official who worked on Superfund cleanups and emergency response for more than 20 years, told the AP, after looking over the images.
In 2014, even the EPA acknowledged that “flooding and inundation from more intense” storms could pose a danger and lead to more chemical contamination from Superfund sites. But now, the 3-year-old report where that statement appeared is no longer publicly available online, E&E News reported Tuesday. A link that had led there now directs to a page that says it’s being updated “to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.”
The report was removed as part of the agency’s “website updates,” announced on April 28, according to EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox. “The AP is written by a partisan hack,” Wilcox added when asked about the AP’s reporting.
Sarah Sax contributed to this report.
