A few months ago, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a plan to clean up a contaminated Houston-area Superfund site.
The companies footing the $115 million bill have opposed the plan, and it’s now come to light that one of them also quietly helped local citizen groups organize against it. The details of that relationship are still murky.
In the 1960s, the earlier iterations of two companies dumped toxic paper mill waste along the San Jacinto River, near the East Freeway. The EPA has ordered the companies to remove thousands of pounds of cancer-causing dioxins from the site, but the companies have argued that’s too dangerous.