Marty Schladen

El Paso Times

AUSTIN — In June, as floodwaters on the San Jacinto River receded, a geoscientist with the Texas Railroad Commission warned colleagues that an oil spill had escaped into Lake Houston. The commission could expect a rash of calls from people returning home, he said in an internal email.

Despite the warning, the commission appears not to have positively identified the company that owned the leaking tank battery — much less penalized it.

Worse, perhaps, the commission apparently did nothing to assess what might have occurred downstream, where upscale houses nestled against the water’s edge northeast of Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

“If there is oil right outside their door, that’s an environmental and human-health hazard,” said Meredith Miller, senior program coordinator at the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University in San Marcos.

The emails show that this year’s storms continued a pattern of flood-related spills of oil and fracking fluid into Texas waterways. They also seem to indicate that the Railroad Commission – the agency tasked with responding - continues to struggle to adequately document and respond to them.

The documents were provided in response to questions submitted by state Sen. José Rodríguez, D-El Paso. Rodríguez has been questioning regulators’ response to spills photographed during floods by the Texas Civil Air Patrol after the El Paso Times detailed inadequacies in the state’s documentation of them earlier this year.

Photos reviewed by the Times indicate that over the past two years floodwaters have swamped fracking sites, pump jacks and tank batteries, causing spills into at least the Trinity, Red, Sabine, Brazos and San Jacinto rivers.

The Railroad Commission last month provided Rodríguez with a large number of documents to show that when it receives photographic evidence of spills during floods, it takes steps to deal with them. But some of those documents continue to raise questions about whether Texas regulators have any idea how much oil or other dangerous chemicals are flooding into the environment during severe storms.

For example, on June 10, Railroad Commission geoscientist Olin Macnamara sent an email to colleagues Audrey Kuklenz and Peter Fisher.

One attached photo shows that despite a ring of containment booms, oil was streaming from a rusty tank battery into the San Jacinto River. Others show oil plumes stretching beyond the site and collecting against the shore just feet from the doors of waterfront homes.

The photos were among thousands shot by the Civil Air Patrol as emergency officials scrambled to deal with floods that had broken out all around Houston and the surrounding region. Macnamara acknowledged to his colleagues that he was late seeing the spill photos, which were shot 11 days earlier.

“The photos of the oil slick from the (tank battery) with the 3 (above-ground storage tanks), boomed off, I have not yet ID’d,” Macnamara wrote. “I have more of these to review, all from 5/30; many days ago. Attached is what I got so far, all in that West Fork immediate area of the Noxxe leases.”

Then Macnamara made an ominous admission.

“Also — All this mess has gone downstream into Lake Houston and maybe beyond; it will also get spread out over whatever it lands upon when the water recedes,” he wrote. “We may need to prepare for a lot of calls, now that public (access to) these areas is available & folks are going back home.”

Photos shot in the same sortie as the one showing the leaking tank battery appear to bear that statement out.

Although any spill is a violation of Railroad Commission rules, a spokeswoman didn’t answer directly when asked whether any fines were levied in the case of the May 30 San Jacinto River spill.

“Protection of public safety and our natural resources is the Railroad Commission’s highest priority,” the spokeswoman, Ramona Nye, said in an email. “And the Railroad Commission’s oil and gas rules have been effective in carrying out this mission.”

She also didn’t respond directly when asked whether her agency knew how much oil had escaped into the river or what it had done to look for pollution downstream.

“The Railroad Commission responds to any report of potential oil releases with urgency to ensure protection of public safety and the environment,” Nye said. “The Commission dispatches inspectors to all reported spills; and during severe weather events our inspectors travel to a site as quickly as it is safe for them to access potentially affected areas. The Railroad Commission oversees containment and cleanup to ensure it is done in compliance with RRC rules.

“Operators are required by commission rules to report spills to the commission and contain and remediate releases. To be clear, in addition to reported spills, our inspectors routinely are on the lookout for spills and any other potential Railroad Commission rule violations while conducting unannounced inspections — close to 135,000 a year.”

Miller, who coordinates a network of volunteers who monitor Texas waterways, was unimpressed with the documentation the Railroad Commission provided to Rodríguez.

“My first comment is that their recordkeeping is not particularly informative, is totally antiquated and is riddled with errors and missing information,” she said in an email. “This is 2016, for Pete's sake. My citizen scientists keep much better records.”

Exposure to petroleum distillates can affect the nervous system, liver and kidneys. Yet in the case of the San Jacinto River spill, none of the documents from the Railroad Commission show that it did anything to alert residents to a potential health hazard.

“What follow-up are they going to do?” Miller asked. “Any testing of the water after the spill to ensure safe levels? Not likely. Are there any drinking water or municipal wells nearby?”

Other documents the commission sent Rodríguez indicate that it’s not the only spill the commission didn’t seem to have a handle on.

A July 2, 2015, inspection report describes the site of a spill more than a week earlier on the Trinity River in Houston County. It details oil found in tree branches 50 feet away from a tank battery owned by Warrior Petroleum Corp. But there is no information about whether this was cleaned up, how much oil escaped the site or whether Warrior was fined.

Nye did not directly answer when asked why that information was missing.

A Feb. 5 re-inspection of the site of a spill in Cook County during June 2015 flooding on the Red River seems to indicate that the commission did not know how much oil had contaminated the surrounding area for months.

An inspection report the Railroad Commission sent Rodríguez said it was a “back check” of a “dispersed spill caused by flood waters tipping a production tank on its side. As much of the area within a (one-half to one) mile radius was inspected. There appears to be large sections of farmland that were affected by the spill but said produced fluid was burned.”

Rodríguez said the documents the commission sent his office are further proof that it needs more resources — and to change the way it does business.

“These documents are emblematic of broader problems with the way the Railroad Commission responds to spills,” he said in an email. “Sunset reviews since 2010 clearly show that this is an agency that relies too much on self-reporting and has far too few inspectors to do its job. It's little surprise the agency is slow to react to severe flooding; as it is, at least two thirds of oil wells go uninspected every two years. Operators can violate the law with near impunity.”

He was referring to Sunset Advisory Commission reports — including one in April that was sharply critical of the way the Railroad Commission documents spills and its lack of enforcement.

"Last (legislative) session, the Legislature cut off local communities' ability to regulate oil and gas fracking operations,” Rodríguez said. “If we're going to say that oil and gas operations are solely the province of the state, we must ensure that the people can have confidence in the state's ability to protect the environment. The Railroad Commission fails in that role. Right now, we don't even have confidence that the Commission can accurately report how many violations occur each year, or how large those violations are.”

Marty Schladen can be reached at 512-479-6606;mschladen@gannett.com; @martyschladen on Twitter.