When EPA administrator
Scott Pruitt toured the San Jacinto Waste Pits site after Hurricane
Harvey ripped through the area, he said the federal agency would make a decision by October 14 about whether to remove, dredge or permanently cap the waste pits.
In
other words, the debate over what to do about the San Jacinto Waste
Pits, the dioxin-filled kolache of a federal Superfund site nestled on
the edge of the San Jacinto River, has been raging ever since the site
was deemed toxic and given a temporary cap back in 2011. But now it's
crunch time.
The waste pits were created starting in the 1960s when International
Paper's predecessor, Champion Paper, hired McGinnis Industrial
Maintenance Corporation to haul off the toxic sludge the paper mill was
producing in Pasadena. McGinnis toted the toxic crud up the San Jacinto
and tucked containers of waste into the pits until they were packed full
and written off of the company's assets in 1968.
Since then,
the containers have remained at the site, but the paper mill byproducts
saturated the ground around the area and over the years dioxin, a known
carcinogen, has oozed out of the site, a situation that many residents
say has caused all sorts of health problems, including cancer. After
decades of being forgotten, the waste pits were "discovered" by the EPA
in 2005 and the spot was turned into a Superfund site, designated for
cleanup, by 2008.
The companies on the hook for polluting the site had placed a
temporary $9 million cap on the pits, and before the cap was even
completed, company officials were already hoping to talk the EPA into
allowing them to simply make the cap permanent by reinforcing it and
putting more rock on top of it.
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