TX Superfund Site, Which Dumped 1.2 Million lbs Of Mercury, Will Be Submerged By Rising Ocean
Just after dawn on a hot, clear summer morning, Myron "Buster" Spree and his friends eased their flat-bottom fishing boat away from the public pier in Point Comfort and steered into the blue-green waters of Lavaca Bay. Along the shoreline, they could see the sprawling ruins of the now-shuttered Alcoa aluminum plant. As a much younger man, Spree worked for the company in the 1970s, when a union president asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Alcoa for dumping about 300 pounds of mercury a day and exposing workers to toxic vapors in the process of aluminum refining. From 1966 to 1979, the company spewed an estimated 1.2 million pounds of mercury into these waters.
Spree gazed across the shimmering waves and shrinking sandbars and lamented how many birds and sea creatures, once abundant here, seem to have vanished. Lavaca Bay used to be one of the most productive shrimping areas in coastal Texas, but no more. The dolphins have mostly disappeared, and so have the tiny crabs, clams, and other microorganisms in the mud flats. Their scarcity is an ominous warning sign about the failing health of the larger Lavaca and Matagorda Bay ecosystem. Spree has fished this area for seven decades, but now, as the sun rose, the boat veered around Health Warning and No Fishing signs. Because of mercury contamination, this is one of only two places in Texas where state health officials have banned possession of fish and crabs as hazardous to human health.
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The EPA inspected Superfund sites that flooded after Hurricane Harvey and issued a supplemental report for the Alcoa site in 2019. But it has not determined whether Harvey and other storms have pushed hot spots of contaminated sediment deeper into the bay system, as has happened around another notorious Superfund site, the San Jacinto Waste pits near Houston. Nationwide, there's a lack of resources for follow-up research at sites struck by storms or subject to climate change. In Lavaca Bay, even the longtime fishing ban is unenforced by state game wardens, who admit they never ticket anyone for violating it. And Texas state health agencies have little funding for testing the effects of toxic waste on fish or people around Superfund sites, whether hurricanes strike or not.
State health officials acknowledged years ago that they were never able to adequately study the health impacts of mercury contamination on local residents or fishermen, partly because no one wanted to admit they'd been catching and eating fish from the ban area. In 1998, a separate state study found a cluster of birth defects in the nearby town of Port Lavaca, population 11,000. But it did not explore whether mothers had consumed tainted fish, though mercury exposure can harm fetuses. No state health study has ever been conducted in Point Comfort, where residents frequently report reddish dust drifting from the now-abandoned Alcoa plant site whenever the winds blow hard enough. The latest study by the Texas Department of Health Services in 2013 found contamination had spread—fish and crab for miles around Lavaca and Matagorda bays contained elevated levels of mercury.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25092020/superfund-epa-lavaca-bay-climate-change