Companies held responsible for cleaning up the San Jacinto Superfund
site have disclosed involvement in three supposedly independent groups
that popped up to protest an Environmental Protection Agency plan to
permanently remove hazardous paper mill wastes from the capped pits east
of Houston, according to a letter their attorneys provided to a Harris
County judge.
Representatives of groups called Keep it Capped,
Galveston Maritime Business Association and the San Jacinto Citizens
Against Pollution have attended meetings, organized events and launched a
website to support keeping the waste pit sites capped, even though the
river front site frequently floods and leaked cancer-causing dioxin
after Hurricane Harvey.
But the revelation of what attorneys called "significant
participation" in those protest groups by at least one of the
corporations required to fund EPA-ordered Superfund clean-up activities
came to light only after Jackie Young, a long-time community leader and
executive director of the Texas Health and Environmental Alliance,
formally complained that she had been harassed by the groups.
"This is outrageous," Young said. "Such well-funded
efforts distracted the Superfund process and could have drowned out the
voices of our residents that received no funding from the responsible
parties in this mess."
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