This map shows Superfund sites on the National Priorities List, including those the EPA says are inaccessible from the ground. The animation shows flights of the EPA's ASPECT aircraft, which can measure chemical pollution from the air, as detected by the flight-tracking site, Flightradar24. This may be an incomplete record of flights by the plane, which has been monitoring Superfund sites and the Arkema chemical plant that caught fire on Thursday and Friday.

Tropical storm Harvey damaged at least 13 dump sites for thousands of tons of industrial waste, but flooding has prevented the EPA from inspecting damages in all but two sites, the agency said Saturday.



This was the agency's first major update on the status of the federally managed "Superfund" sites, and came shortly after the AP reported that seven sites near Houston had been flooded.

It could take months to assess the impact of the storm on these sites, said Ivan Rusyn, director of the Superfund Research Center at Texas A&M University, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

"I understand frustration that people have — they want to see federal employees and state employees giving them information right away," Rusyn told BuzzFeed News. Today's emergency response systems prioritize getting people out of the water, and assessing environmental impacts after that. Part of the goal at the Superfund Research Center is to develop better responses to natural disasters at these sites.

"Environmental hazards are usually chronic hazards," Rusyn said. "And truly understanding what’s going on takes some amount of time."

Texas hosts 66 Superfund sites, chosen for monitoring by the EPA because hazardous chemicals stored there pose a risk to human health. The agency said that 41 were in zones hit by Harvey, and that agency staff had used aerial surveillance to determine that at least 13 have been damaged or flooded in some way.

The agency confirmed the AP’s report that two sites in Corpus Christi were the only Superfund sites it was able to access.



Among the underwater sites near Houston, as reported by the AP, were: the San Jacinto River Waste Pits in Harris County, which received sludge from paper mills for years, leading to pollutants like dioxins contaminating the nearby soil, water, and fish. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has an active advisory on consuming fish and crab caught in that region of the river. The waste is stored in 3.5 acres of partially submerged dumps — the EPA said that a "temporary armored cap" had been installed to prevent the waste from flowing away.

Over the years, Highland Acid Pits, another Harris Country site, collected an unknown amount of industrial waste, including sulfuric acid from oil and gas refining, leaching hazardous chemicals into the soil and groundwater. The EPA has extracted 33,000 tons of sludge from that area, but continues to monitor it. The AP reported that this site had also been flooded.