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NY Times, Sept. 1 2017
A Sea of Health and Environmental Hazards in Houston’s Floodwaters
By HIROKO TABUCHI and SHEILA KAPLAN
Officials in Houston are just beginning to grapple with the health and
environmental risks that lurk in the waters dumped by Hurricane Harvey,
a stew of toxic chemicals, sewage, debris and waste that still floods
much of the city.
Flooded sewers are stoking fears of cholera, typhoid and other
infectious diseases. Runoff from the city’s sprawling petroleum and
chemicals complex contains any number of hazardous compounds. Lead,
arsenic and other toxic and carcinogenic elements may be leaching from
some two dozen Superfund sites in the Houston area.
Porfirio Villarreal, a spokesman for the Houston Health Department, said
the hazards of the water enveloping the city were self-evident.
“There’s no need to test it,” he said. “It’s contaminated. There’s
millions of contaminants.”
He said health officials were urging people to stay out of the water if
they could, although it is already too late for tens of thousands.
“We’re telling people to avoid the floodwater as much as possible. Don’t
let your children play in it. And if you do touch it, wash it off,” Mr.
Villarreal said. “Remember, this is going to go on for weeks.”
Flooding always brings the danger of contamination and disease, though
epidemics from floods in the United States have been rare. This
inundation, which put nearly 30 percent of the nation’s fourth-largest
city underwater, will pose enormous problems, both immediately and when
the waters finally recede.
Dr. David Persse, Houston’s director of Emergency Medical Services, said
officials were monitoring the drinking water system and the sewer
system, both of which he said were intact so far. But hundreds of
thousands of people across the 38 Texas counties affected by Hurricane
Harvey use private wells, according to an estimate by Louisiana State
University researchers, and those people must fend for themselves.
“Well water is at risk for being contaminated,” Dr. Persse said, “and
the well owner is really the one who is responsible. In the City of
Houston, we have folks that use well water but we strongly recommend
against it — and this will sound awful — we don’t take responsibility
for it.”
Harris County, home to Houston, hosts more than two dozen current and
former toxic waste sites designated under the federal Superfund program.
The sites contain what the Environmental Protection Agency calls legacy
contamination: lead, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls, benzene and
other toxic and carcinogenic compounds from industrial activities many
years ago.
Kathy Blueford-Daniels grew up just a block away from one of those
sites, a wood-treating facility that used cancer-causing creosote and
other toxins. As a young girl, she would try to avoid the plant and the
pungent, oil-like goo that lined the ditches around it.
Now 60, Ms. Blueford-Daniels still lives on the same block, in Houston’s
Fifth Ward. So when Harvey’s rains started to pour into her
neighborhood, she immediately began to wonder what the rising waters
would carry off the old industrial property.
“I wasn’t so fearful of the storm. But I’m scared of that site,” she
said. “I thought: This is going to be a travesty. The contamination
could be going anywhere.”
An E.P.A. spokesman, David Gray, said in a statement that the agency
would inspect two flooded Superfund sites in Corpus Christi, but he did
not specify which ones or say whether additional sites elsewhere in
Texas would be checked.
Houston also lies at the center of the nation’s oil and chemical
industry, its bustling shipping channel home to almost 500 industrial
sites. Damaged refineries and other oil facilities have already released
more than two million pounds of hazardous substances into the air this
week, including nitrogen oxide as well as benzene and other volatile
organic compounds, according to a tally by the Environmental Defense
Fund of company filings to Texas state environmental regulators.
“We’re very concerned about the long-term implications of some of the
emissions,” said Elena Craft, a senior health scientist and toxicologist
at the Environmental Defense Fund in Texas.
“As well as the flooding and the impact on pipelines, there’s
underground and aboveground storage tanks,” she said. “It’s a suite of
threats.”
Houston’s sewer systems have also long struggled with overflows, drawing
scrutiny from federal regulators who worry about raw sewage seeping into
groundwater. Like dozens of cities across the country, Houston has been
negotiating a consent decree with the E.P.A. that would require the city
to upgrade its pipes and overhaul its maintenance regime.
“Houston’s had problems with their sewer system in the past. They
already had cracks and leaks that were allowing storm water to get into
the sewers,” said Erin Bonney Casey, research director at Bluefield
Research, a water-sector consultancy based in Boston.
“When it rains, the sewer pipes get infiltrated with storm water. The
pipes exceed their capacity and you get discharge of a mix of sewer
water and storm water,” she said. “As you can imagine, this raises major
concerns around disease and contamination of local water supplies.”
Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor who helped identify the Flint
water contamination crisis, said Houston’s abundance of private water
wells added to the city’s woes. People who evacuate return home and use
them, to their great risk.
“Poop from animals and humans that normally does not get into the water
supply is present” in the wells, he said, and “if they are present in
water that you drink it would cause massive epidemics in a matter of days.”
He added: “Everything else, as horrible as it is, is really a more
chronic secondary concern. It’s pretty rare that those things are
present in flood water, short term, in levels that can kill you.”
Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy director of the E.P.A., said one
hope was that there was just so much water that it might dilute
pollutants and fecal matter in the water.
But he also worried about people who had three or four feet of water in
their houses and would not realize that all the pesticides and hazardous
products they keep under the sink would now have contaminated their houses.
“After Katrina, when the floodwaters receded, we had to go around to
assist communities to pick up debris and leftover chemicals, like
propane tanks, pesticide containers that were compromised and household
hazardous waste,” said Mr. Meiburg, now director of graduate programs in
sustainability at Wake Forest University.
“The water is going to be polluted,” he said. “You know that from the
get-go.”
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