For decades in Houston, where resident Bryan “Lucas” Parras grew up near the city’s shipping channel, neighborhoods have faced the cumulativeToxic emissions can have serious consequences. This area is home to many industrial facilities, chemical plants, and oil refineries. Pollution has become such an ingrained part of life, Parras said, that residents on the city’s East End automatically adjust to the health threatsLimiting time outside, filtering their water, and making sure they have their inhalers in case they experience asthma attacks.
“A lot of the pollution in Houston has just become normalized because there’s so much and because so little has been done,” said Parras, 45, and a co-founder of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services. The group, t.e.j.a.s. has been advocating for impacted communities by providing tools that allow residents to protect themselves as well as the environment for years.
Some of Houston’s pollution is hidden in its soil. As the weather gets more severe, it is likely that we will fail to account for toxic chemicals that have settled in Houston and other cities across the United States. extremeDue to climate change. A recent studyResearchers from Brown University, Rice University, and New York University discovered that urban areas with higher flood risk are more likely to be impacted by soil contamination from decades of industrial activity.
It’s a new type of climate injustice, the researchers warn: floods spreading toxic industrial contaminants in racially marginalized neighborhoods.
“We’re very concerned about the remobilization of toxics which may have wide ranging negative health outcomes,” said the study’s lead author, Thomas Marlow, a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Interacting Urban Networks at New York University Abu Dhabi.
The study builds on 2018 research that the study’s co-authors, sociologists James R. Elliott and Scott Frickel, outlined in their 2018 book Sites Unseen – Uncovering Hidden Hazards In American Cities. They found that the failure to map so-called “relic” industrial sites leaves communities in the dark about potential contamination hot spots created by long-closed businesses outlived by their hazardous byproducts.
They looked at historical industrial directories for four American cities — New Orleans, Minneapolis, Portland and Philadelphia — and discovered that more than 90% of sites where hazardous industry has operated over the past half-century have become “lost, hidden from view” and ignored by government agencies.
The latest studyThe study, published in Environmental Research Letters last month, looked at these cities as well as two others, Houston and Providence. They compared the data from manufacturing plants with future flood risk estimates.
The researchers discovered that over 6,000 former industrial sites are at risk of flooding in these six cities. This is because legacy pollution is likely to be present in the soil. They also discovered flood-prone areas of relic industrial sites, which could expose thousands to hundreds upon thousands of residents to toxic chemicals.
Floods Risk Spreading Hazardous Pollutants
Houston is located in Texas’ Harris County. It has almost 2,000 flood-prone areas where chemical manufacturing and petroleum refining were once conducted. Researchers from New York University, Rice University, Brown University and Brown University examined this area along with five others in the country and found that floods could spread contaminants buried beneath the soil.
A large proportion of the people living in the affected areas are low-income, people of color, and those who live in lower-quality housing.
The study can’t assess the extent soil contamination in these areas. However, soil studies by scientists across the country over many decades have shown that there is extensive soil contamination in these areas. urbanThe core of citiesThese include New Orleans, Indianapolis Detroit, with toxic metals like lead being the most common.
“I don’t think it was a good idea to have industry next to residences, especially given that the industries weren’t very well regulated at first,” said Howard Mielke, an urban geochemistry and health expert at Tulane University School of Medicine who has spent four decades investigating the dangers of lead in soil across the country.
He pointed out that nearly every major city had either a lead smelter, or some form lead industry. The consequences are still being felt today in cities.
“There are a lot of other substances that have accumulated in these soils — lead is a very strong indicator of multiple [types] of pollution,” Mielke said. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has examinedWe assessed the potential dangers of major contaminated sites in the country and found that approximately 60% of these were present Superfund sitesAre at risk of being affected by climate change-driven flooding or wildfires
“Everyone’s beginning to agree that this is a huge issue,” Elliott said. Elliott and his co-authors have shared data from six cities to aid urban planners and other city officials in creating strategic plans to address the risk.
In Houston, the study’s data shows the relic sites are located not just along the ship channel, but also one to two miles inland. There were ancillary industries that operated in the area, and working-class residents settled there. Today, it is largely Latino.
Elliott has also studied industrial development in the region over the past decade. He discovered that companies are increasing the construction of infrastructure, such above-ground storage tanks in floodplains. “So the contemporary issues and concerns are growing alongside the relics that are largely hidden,” Elliott said.
Marlow, Frickel, and Elliott hope that their findings will spark a wider discussion about how cities can remediate urban lands. Instead of thinking about site-by-site cleanups officials should think about neighborhood-level or regional cleanups. watershedThese are the highest-level approaches to recognize the widespread effects industrial pollution has on the environment.
They suggested that government agencies should include historically marginalized communities into the strategic planning process.
In Houston’s shipping channel corridor, with industrial warehouses abutting homes, schools and even childcare centers, Parras said there’s no escaping the environmental hazards. He wants to see a public health reckoning: one that acknowledges, documents and prevents environmental threats from current emissions and the legacy pollution that’s accumulated in the water and soil.
Parras said that once polluting water or soil settles, it becomes indistinctible to the naked eye. This makes it difficult to link the exposure to the harm. “That’s what makes it easy for politicians to dismiss because there’s no evidence — because we haven’t looked for that evidence,” he said.
Parras says that in order to address the legacy of industrial pollutants, it is not enough to remediate the soil. He also recommends that chemicals be resisted until they are thoroughly tested and proven safe. That’s known as the precautionary principle.
“You can’t operate under a precautionary principle without acknowledging the legacy of harm that exists,” said Parras. “[The legacy]People are still suffering. That’s the real problem.”
