12-17-2013
When the waste pits were rediscovered in 2005 they presented a tremendous threat to public health and the environment, and something had to be done quickly to temporarily stop the release of highly carcinogenic waste until the EPA could determine a long-term remedy. The temporary cap has proven highly problematic in its five short years of existence. The cap has undergone several repairs; there are currently over 40 known deficiencies in the cap, and this past December a 22 foot-by-25 foot hole was discovered in the cap and the highest concentrations of dioxin (&43,000 ppt) to date were found just outside this hole. If you aren't familiar with this type of dioxin, it was the active ingredient in Agent Orange, the chemical warfare agent used extensively in the Vietnam War that has caused horrible harm to the people there and our veterans who were exposed to it. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Young-San-Jacinto-waste-pits-Full-remediation-9125910.php .................................................................................................................................................9-20-2017 Federal money for Superfund is already about half what it was in the 1990s. Though the federal government often goes to court to force those responsible for the pollution to pay, that sometimes fails, leaving taxpayers on the hook. The majority of cleanup money has been spent in just seven highly industrialized states, topped by New Jersey. The inspector general review was conducted from February 2016 to July 2017, covering the last months of the Obama administration and the early months of Trump's. The report said EPA's Region 10, which includes Idaho, Oregon and Washington, had stopped or slowed work at 49 Superfund sites because of a shortage of staff. https://phys.org/news/2017-09-internal-watchdog-epa-mismanaging-toxic.html#jCp
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5-3-18 Details about the hotspots have not been made public by Texas environmental regulators, who used more than $5 million in federal money to pay for the research. In 2012, they ended a fact-finding committee that oversaw the project and had proposed new standards for dioxin and PCBs that could have been costly to corporate polluters. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality refused to release the full results of the studies that identified the sources of dioxin and PCBs, even to academic researchers, Harris County officials and lawyers who later sued companies over environmental damage. The research funding ended in 2011, leaving unanswered questions about whether toxic damage spread even farther during hurricanes Ike and Harvey….
Under the Clean Water Act and state law, Texas authorities were required to address dioxin and PCBs in the river and ship channel, waterways officially designated as “impaired.” Setting such standards could have forced the responsible companies to clean up and upgrade contaminated stormwater and wastewater treatment.
All three TCEQ commissioners, appointed by the governor, declined an interview request….The state’s approach to dioxin follows the same pattern the Houston Chronicle and AP previously identified in an investigation into air and water pollution releases from Hurricane Harvey. The news organizations found that state and federal regulators did little in response to massive releases of toxic pollution reported during and after Harvey’s torrential rains….
The Environmental Protection Agency already had been funding initiatives to clean up the nation’s impaired rivers and identify sources of toxic substances in sediments and water that poisoned fish. The actions came in response to revelations in the 1980s that one of the most dangerous dioxin forms had been unleashed into the environment from paper bleaching and chemical manufacturing. Even in microscopic doses those dioxin types have been linked to birth defects as well as cancer and reproductive problems….Those crystalline fragments are examples of dioxin sediment, said Larry Koenig, who for 10 years was the TCEQ staff member assigned to the dioxin study. He and other experts have estimated that about half the waste originally buried in pits already had escaped into the environment before the site was rediscovered. Koenig retired in 2010, in part, he said, because of frustration over inaction on any proposed water quality standard.
A dozen hotspots identified by teams of University of Houston researchers were scattered around those pits. Some of the worst hotspots became part of the San Jacinto Waste Pits Superfund site a decade ago. But others are miles downstream, near riverside neighborhoods in Baytown and LaPorte….
But EPA records show that during the time the dioxin cleanup committee was making its recommendations, neither company had agreed to pay to address polluted Patrick Bayou. EPA subsequently named Shell Chemical, Occidental Chemical and Lubrizol, all chemical companies with operations in Deer Park, as “potentially responsible parties”, according to EPA records. The companies still have not agreed to fund the cleanup of Patrick Bayou, 16 years after the area was designated as a Superfund site. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2018/05/03/283198/texas-officials-ignore-dioxin-spread-in-houston-waterways/
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(a coalition of more than 300 scientists, educators and doctors in North America who literally laugh off worries/warnings on dioxin, many toxins, nuclear energy and so forth—here’s a sample of their “information”:)
6-1-2016 Just what is the latest scientific evidence regarding the human health effects of dioxin?
Recent studies of Vietnam veterans reveal that their dioxin tissue levels are no different (11.7 parts-per-trillion, “ppt”) than those both of non-Vietnam veterans (10.9 ppt) (soldiers who had never been to Vietnam), and of a civilian control group (12.4 ppt), suggesting that “heavy exposure to Agent Orange or dioxin for most U.S. troops in Vietnam was unlikely.” (The slight differences are within experimental error and are not significant.) Even more revealing is an extensive on-going 20-year
mortality and health-effects evaluation of 995 Air Force Ranch Hands, the personnel who handled and sprayed Agent Orange and some of whom have relatively high concentrations of dioxin (>300 ppt) 15 years after exposure.
In this group of veterans, there was no chloracne observed, no increase in nine immune system tests, and no increase in melanoma and systemic cancer (lung, colon, testicles, bladder, kidney, prostate, Hodgkin’s disease, soft tissue sarcoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma). The authors of this 1990 study conclude that “there is insufficient scientific evidence to implicate a causal relationship between herbicide exposure and adverse health in the Ranch Hand Group.” An October 1991 update recently provided by Dr. William Wolfe, the senior physician in charge of this study, reaffirms these conclusions.
Studies of more than 800 occupationally exposure workers in nine industrial plant accidents, including those in the massive Nitro, WV, Monsanto accident in 1949, and chemical mishaps in 2,4,5-trichlorophenol plants in England, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, The Netherlands, and the U.S. fail to indicate serious long term health effects in these men, some of whom have dioxin concentrations exceeding 1000 ppt 30 years after their initial exposure. Some 465 cases of chloracne were observed in these workers.
A study of 2,200 Dow Chemical workers who were potentially exposed to dioxin revealed that they had a slightly lower mortality than a control group, and have no total cancer increase. https://www.acsh.org/news/2016/06/01/doomsday-chemical-update-whatever-happened-to-dioxin
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9-3-2017
https://apnews.com/27796dd13b9549b0ac76aded58a15122
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9-27-2018 GALVESTON, Texas (FOX 26) - It has been more than a year since FOX 26 News revealed what some now call "the most thoroughly toxic strip of land on the Texas Gulf Coast." Blocked from public view by a levee, just feet from the Intracoastal Waterway and Galveston Bay, a string of giant sludge pits, most more than a half century old, each filled to the brim with waste no living thing should ever touch.
"Right now as I am doing this interview, my kidneys are one point away from failure," said Jennifer Guy, a Hitchcock resident and critic of the pits. "I am sterile and I am legally blind." For all of her 39 years, Guy has lived within a few miles of the McGinnis pits and she's convinced the toxins stored there have destroyed her health. "They needed to dispose of all the waste from the Houston Ship Channel and there was no other place to put it," described Guy. "That was their argument. There was no other place to put it."
Waste from the ship channel, much of it from paper mills, was first treated, then barged across West Bay to Halls Bayou and offloaded at a very private toxic dump. For decades, McGinnis Industrial Waste Maintenance, a subsidiary of Houston-based Waste Management, claimed the sludge was no threat to humans or the environment. But 2009 laboratory test results, uncovered from state records by FOX 26, tell a much different story. The results reveal dangerous, potentially deadly levels of cancer causing Dioxin in the compartments closest to the Intracoastal Waterway — toxicity levels greater than those at the notorious San Jacinto River Waste Pits....
Declining our invitation to discuss the issue on camera, the Gulf Coast Waste Disposal Authority instead issued a statement that said the sludge disposal was legal, the dump permanently closed and the waste safely contained. "We take the health and safety of our community seriously and we work tirelessly to ensure our standards and practices meet or exceed strict environmental health and safety requirements," said the authority in its statement.
For its part, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality says it has inspected the site and is confident the tons of waste stored there pose no threat to human health or Galveston Bay. They are official assurances that Jennifer Guy flatly rejects. "I don't think anybody should fish or eat a fish out of Galveston Bay," said Guy.
A review of documents obtained from TCEQ confirms that the operators of McGinnis Pits have legally released millions of gallons of treated effluent from the dump into the Galveston Bay system. State regulators have consistently claimed the release is safe. http://www.fox26houston.com/health/toxic-trouble-as-dioxin-dump-near-galveston-bay-bankrolled-by-government-agency
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