Battered, Flooded and Submerged: Many Superfund Sites are Dangerously Threatened by Climate Change
The Obama administration directed the EPA to focus on climate-related threats. Now, the Trump administration refuses to even use the word.
BY DAVID HASEMYER, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS, AND LISE OLSEN, TEXAS OBSERVER
BARRETT, Texas—Fred Barrett thought he’d wait out Hurricane Harvey at his home in this town outside Houston, founded by his great-grandfather in 1889. He prepared for heavy rain, wind and flooding.
But when the murky brown San Jacinto River jumped its banks, flooding Barrett’s neighbors and an ominous cluster of four hazardous waste Superfund sites nearby, Barrett worried the catastrophic 2017 storm could fill his community with deadly toxins.
The most notorious of the sites, the San Jacinto Waste Pits, was smashed by 16 feet of water that undermined a concrete cap covering the site’s toxic contents, washing dioxin downriver. A dive team from the Environmental Protection Agency later found the potent human carcinogen in river sediment at 2,300 times the agency’s standard for cleanup.
Several miles upriver, Barrett, a historically Black town, shares a wooded area with the French Limited Superfund site. That toxic dump was built so close to the Barrett family homestead that, as a young man, Fred Barrett could hear the rumble of tractor-trailers hauling chemical waste, including carcinogens, down the Gulf Pump Road to a foul pond.
Like the San Jacinto Waste Pits, the French Limited site was also inundated by Hurricane Harvey, leading Barrett, 67, and his neighbors to worry that its contaminants had spread. The EPA did not report any leakage, but he and other residents wondered what the floodwaters could have carried offsite.
“What happened back there?” Barrett said in a recent interview. “It was Harvey that made it seem more crucial. We wanted to know: What contaminants are still there—and where is it going once it got out of its banks? Who’s watching the chicken coop?”
Those questions highlight the perils posed by the nation’s industrial wastelands as they are increasingly battered by extreme weather worsened by climate change.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned in a report last year that French Limited was among 945 Superfund sites across the United States vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise, increased precipitation or wildfires, all of which are intensifying as the planet warms.
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