Marty Schladen

El Paso Times

AUSTIN — The state has removed aerial-surveillance photos taken during severe floods from a public website.

The decision comes after the El Paso Times earlier this month published a story with dozens of such photos showing apparent oil spills in different river systems over the past few years.

A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees emergency response, said the photos were removed from a website run by the University of Texas at Austin because they hadn’t been vetted for privacy. He said the public could continue to request them through the Texas Public Information Act.

An environmental activist said, however, that the state appears to be trying to avoid accountability through the move.

When the State Operations Center swings into action during severe floods, the Texas Civil Air Patrol conducts daily flights documenting where floodwaters are and which infrastructure might be in jeopardy, including sewage treatment plants, fracking sites and oil wells.

At least since 2014, thousands of photos from those flights were published on the University of Texas at Austin’s Mid-American Geospatial Information Center’s website. Photos from earlier floods were taken down as they were replaced by those from more recent storms.

This year, photos of March flooding along the Sabine River — many of which appear to show oil spills — were replaced by photos of April flooding in Houston in which a number of sewage-treatment plants appeared to be inundated.

Those photos vanished from the site after the Times on May 1 published a story with an online gallery of more than 30 photos, including of apparent spills on the Trinity and Red rivers during floods in May and June 2015.

In an email, DPS spokesman Tom Vinger said the photos are intended to provide emergency-management officials “situational awareness” during disasters to protect lives and assess damage.

“In consultation with UT staff, the photos have been removed from the public domain, as they are not vetted for privacy concerns or related issues in real-time when uploaded during an emergency,” Vinger said. “Emergency officials will continue to have access to the photos for disaster-related and the public and media may still request access to the photos through the Public Information Act.”

However, several observers have been skeptical that the Texas Railroad Commission and other state agencies have kept adequate track of the spills or made sure that they were cleaned up properly. Removing photos from the website appears to be another attempt to avoid accountability, Ken Kramer, water resources chairman of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, said Monday.

"The public has a right to know about flooding events that could pose a threat to their health and their environment,” Kramer said in an email. “Removing air surveillance photos of floods of oil and gas facilities from public access is a blow to transparency and accountability. It's ridiculous to say that this was done for privacy concerns.”

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