Is Ship Channel mud landing in community dikes toxic? Residents ask. – Houston Chronicle

Juan Flores has watched man-made hills — piles of dredged sediment from the Houston Ship Channel — grow to tower over the Galena Park baseball field where both he and his son grew up playing.
“We used to call this the high road, because when I was a kid it was higher than the hills,” said Flores, now 45. Today, the “high road” is dwarfed by towering sludge-filled grassy mounds that block a once-clear view of downtown Houston. 
Flores and others have long been concerned about the possible toxicity of the mud still regularly piped into the sites. Worry turned to alarm when the Army Corps of Engineers outlined plans to use the locations to deposit dredge spoils from an anticipated $1 billion expansion of the petrochemical industry-heavy ship channel, known as Project 11. 
Residents of communities like Galena Park, Pleasantville and Pasadena who live near the deposit sites have asked the Army Corps and the Port of Houston to test the sitting dirt already piled in their communities for contaminants before adding more. Officials said it is not in their protocols.
HEALTH RISKS: As Houston Ship Channel expands, a historic community prepares to fight yet another health hazard
Flores spent his lifetime in a ship channel community increasingly saturated with industrial pollutants. The deposit sites flanking Galena Park’s Main Street look almost like normal hills; as a child, he would play on their quicksand-like surface.
Flores has a myeloma precursor. His daughter, who is 7, already survived cancer. It is not clear if the deposits are contributing to their health problems, but Flores wants to know for sure. 
“I told (officials) a year ago, if you test this thing and everything is not too bad, no harm to the community, I won’t say anything any more,” Flores said. “That’s one less thing for us to worry about.”
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Residents are concerned a field at Flagship Drive and Lanewell Street, shown Monday, June 20, 2023,  will become the dumping site for potentially contaminated dredge spoils from the Ship Channel expansion project in Galena Park. Residents said this site, which includes this walking trail, has been an inactive dumping field for many years.
Residents are concerned the field beyond Galena Park Sports Complex, shown Monday, June 20, 2023, will become the dumping site for potentially contaminated dredge spoils from the Ship Channel expansion project in Galena Park. Residents said this is and has always been an active dumping field. Residents also said the red layer of dirt were dumped in the past couple years.
Residents are concerned the field beyond Galena Park Sports Complex, shown Monday, June 20, 2023, will become the dumping site for potentially contaminated dredge spoils from the Ship Channel expansion project in Galena Park. Residents said this site has been an inactive dumping field for many years.
Residents are concerned the field beyond Galena Park Sports Complex, shown Monday, June 20, 2023, will become the dumping site for potentially contaminated dredge spoils from the Ship Channel expansion project in Galena Park. Residents said this is and has always been an active dumping field.
Residents are concerned the field beyond Galena Park Sports Complex, shown Monday, June 20, 2023, will become the dumping site for potentially contaminated dredge spoils from the Ship Channel expansion project in Galena Park. Residents said this is and has always been an active dumping field.
Several of the earth dikes the Army Corps plans to use for Project 11 flank residential backyards. While the storage sites towering over Galena Park’s still-active baseball field are in use for spoils from ship channel maintenance, similar locations in Pleasantville will be reopened for the expansion.
EXPANSION: A $1 billion expansion of the Houston Ship Channel kicks off after 12 years of planning
One site, known as Glendale, has had no sludge added since 1957. That year, one of its neighborhood-facing levees collapsed, sending wet ship channel sediment barreling between Pleasantville’s homes. 
Oil-filled silt and water flooded “a 40-block area of the addition” on Dec. 6, 1957,  damaging at least 100 homes, according to Chronicle articles from the time. Residents said the muck was still waist-deep a day after the “rainless flood,” and city health officials advised typhoid shots for victims.
Cleophus Sharp, 71, still remembers the sludge. He likened it to “The Blob,” a 1958 horror film in which oil-colored slime devours everything in its path.
Sharp was only 4 at the time, the eager son of Pleasantville’s civic league president.
“My father got phone calls from people — they were elderly people and they didn’t have any way to get out,” Sharpe said. So the leader hopped in his two-tone 56 Mercury with Sharpe in the back seat to pick up stranded neighbors, until the muck rose above the seam of the car door.
Sharp said after the corrosive sludge, “that car never ran again.”
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Newspaper clippings show stories from when an earthen levee holding back silt and oily water dredged from the Houston Ship Channel broke Friday, May 6, 1957, and flooded a 40-block area in the nearby Pleasantville addition.
Newspaper clippings show stories from when an earthen levee holding back silt and oily water dredged from the Houston Ship Channel broke Friday, May 6, 1957, and flooded a 40-block area in the nearby Pleasantville addition.
A newspaper story urges residents to get typhoid shots after an earthen levee holding back silt and oily water dredged from the Houston Ship Channel broke Friday, May 6, 1957, and flooded a 40-block area in the nearby Pleasantville addition.
Residents do not know what was in the muddy cascade that sunk into rows and rows of homes, in spite of strong civic organizing: the subdivision was one of the first historically Black neighborhoods in the country protected by deed restrictions meant to resist industrial encroachment.
DEED RESTRICTIONS: Loophole keeps Pleasantville homeowners from getting post-Harvey repairs
“Some of the elders, when they would share stories about the breach, they talked about how this sludge covered a third of the then-existing community,” said Bridgette Murray, 69. She founded the community group ACTS, a member of the Healthy Port Communities Coalition. 
Murray, a retired nurse, thinks the Army Corps and the Port should close the site permanently instead of using it for Project 11.
“We have no confidence that it is fortified and we won’t incur another breach,” she said.
The Healthy Port Communities Coalition has pushed Army Corps and Port officials for years to test soil inside the sludge deposit locations.
“They will not do a simple test to reassure the community,”said Amy Dinn, an environmental attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid and a coalition member. “We have been so crystal clear about what we’ve been asking for. So much so that we’ve gone out and done our own testing.” 
The coalition cannot legally take soil from inside the sites, so they hired a third party lab to process samples from adjoining earth near two locations — the one that breached in 1957, and one of the two squeezing out the baseball field — which they are testing for contaminants such as metals, dioxins, and a slew of chemicals associated with the oil and gas industry whose facilities line the ship channel’s shores. 
Col. Rhett Blackmon of the Army Corps confirmed at a news conference last Thursday that the federal agency has never tested the toxicity of the soil within the sites. He said they are not required to.
“Our testing protocols, we test the material, whether it’s operation and maintenance material or new work material, before initiating the dredging,” at the extraction point in the channel itself, Blackmon said.
Residents are concerned the field beyond Galena Park Sports Complex, shown Monday, June 20, 2023, will become the dumping site for potentially contaminated dredge spoils from the Ship Channel expansion project in Galena Park. Residents said this is and has always been an active dumping field.
FEDERAL SUPPORT: The Houston Ship Channel expansion is getting $142M more in funding
The news conference followed a closed-door meeting in which Army Corps, EPA and Port of Houston officials toured the sites with community members. 
Earthea Nance, EPA regional administrator, said the group had not promised to test the sites. They had “agreed to first of all come to an agreement on the testing that’s already been done, and how that should be interpreted.”
In 2019, the Army Corps released a report showing their samples did not surpass allowable levels of contaminants for dredged material. This was used to justify the Project 11 disposal plan. 
During Thursday’s meeting, coalition members raised concerns that the 2017 ship channel measurements cited by the Army Corps met aquatic standards for marine animals, but weren’t analyzed for human health in residential neighborhoods. They did contain arsenic and hydrocarbons at levels that should trigger a closer look based on the EPA’s regional screening levels for residential soils, said Cloelle Danforth, an Environmental Defense Fund scientist and environmental engineer.  
“The long and the short of it is they’d be adding to these sites without really understanding the risk profile,” Danforth said.  
The historic Ship Channel communities face many more obvious polluters than the mountainous piles of dredged matter, complicating residents’ ability to trace their impacts. 
A 2016 TCEQ toxicology report on benzene exposure listed 28 industrial complexes in Galena Park, including refineries, chemical plants and a wastewater treatment facility. Pleasantville and Pasadena are similarly saturated.
EAST END: ProPublica mapped cancer-causing pollution facilities in Houston. Here are 5 of the worst.
But the ship channel sets the tone: its expansion will facilitate the port’s ongoing industrial growth. It is already the seventh-largest in the world, doing more than $170 billion in trade, according to port officials. 
Coalition members would prefer the dredged material be deposited in the ocean, a solution which the Army Corps uses in other contexts. But in Thursday’s meeting, Blackmon said the Army Corps’ use of the sites for Project 11 was already set. 
He added it was still “timely to get feedback from the community” while the Army Corps develops engineering solutions, including a clay sealing layer and water conveyance. 
Aerial of rainless flooding in Pleasantville subdivision. Autos in flood are circled. An earthen levee holding back silt and oily water dredged from the Houston Ship Channel broke on December 6, 1957, and flooded a 40-block area in the nearby Pleasantville addition.
Tracy Stephens, another ACTS member and a retired public works engineer, is not surprised by resistance to testing or changing plans. Such decisions are costly: “if they find something, they’re gonna have to deal with it,” he said. 
He thinks the design of Pleasantville’s once-ruptured sludge site is the same. Today, the pipes designed to catch and drain runoff are hidden by a new bike path, but they still sit in residents’ backyards. 
“Why would you want to take the chance in draining something towards residents when you had an option to drain it straight to the port, where it’s all commercial?” Stephens asked. “This was easier, that’s why.”
rebekah.ward@houstonchronicle.com
Rebekah F. Ward is the Houston Chronicle’s climate & environment reporter.
Before coming to Texas, Rebekah was an investigative journalist at the Albany Times Union, where she started in 2021 as the newsroom’s first Joseph T. Lyons fellow. She has worked for outlets including Reuters, France 24 and the OCCRP, reporting from the U.S., Colombia, Mexico and her native Canada.

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