This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Katrina, the BP spill, now Houston: This consulting firm keeps coming under fire on Mar 22, 2019.
Katrina, the BP spill, now Houston: This consulting firm keeps coming under fire
A crude oil spill during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A coal ash spill in Tennessee in 2008. The BP oil spill in 2010. In all three cases, the companies responsible for these environmental calamities turned to the same Arkansas-based consulting firm, the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, to monitor air and water quality and chemical exposure in workers.
In each case, CTEH was found to have either incorrectly handled data collection or downplayed the risks of exposure to toxic chemicals. But the companies used CTEH’s data to reassure people that the spilled chemicals posed little risk to public health.
This week, a fire at International Terminals Company’s chemical storage facility outside Houston, blanketed the country’s fourth-largest city in a cloud of smoke. Multiple school districts in the area cancelled classes. Once again, CTEH got the call to provide air quality monitoring.
The fire at ITC’s facility reignited late Friday afternoon after a dike wall used to contain chemicals partially collapsed, renewing concerns about air quality. According to initial reports, the company released 9 million pounds of pollutants in just the first day of the fire. On Thursday, the city of Deer Park, home to the facility, issued a shelter-in-place advisory after benzene levels spiked overnight. Long-term benzene exposure can cause anemia, lead to cancer, and damage women’s reproductive health.
Earlier in the week, ITC had said that its air quality testing data showed conditions “below levels” that would raise health concerns, even as residents near the fire complained of nosebleeds, headaches, and irritated throats. The statement prompted Deer Park to lift an earlier shelter-in-place advisory.
Elena Craft, senior director for climate and health at Environmental Defense Fund, said CTEH was a “concerning choice” as a consultant “given their history.” ITC has posted nine air quality monitoring reports produced by CTEH on its website since the Deer Park fire began and Craft, a toxicologist by training, said that at least one contained “clear, obvious errors.”
In that report, issued on March 18, CTEH said it used two types of instruments with different detection limits to measure benzene levels. The company collected just six samples with the instrument that had a lower detection limit — meaning it could pick up lower levels of airborne benzene. But on a map elsewhere in the report, CTEH appeared to indicate that it had tested for lower benzene levels at dozens of sites. It marked more than 60 locations on a map where it claimed it had tested for low levels of benzene and had not detected it.
In a written statement to Grist, Phil Goad, CTEH’s founder, said that in its more than 20 years in business “CTEH has never been cited for inaccurate or misleading data.” The company’s “top priority is, and will continue to be, to safeguard public health,” he said, adding its air quality-monitoring plans in Houston have been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Goad admitted to two errors in the March 18 report, including incorrectly reporting detection limits, and said it would “update the report to correct this typographical error.”
Even if the error was a typo, Craft said CTEH’s report did not inspire confidence. “It was a sloppy job,” she said.
In the last two decades, CTEH has come under fire for its work in high-profile environmental contamination cases across the country. In 2005, a storage tank at a Murphy Oil refinery in Louisiana released more than 25,000 barrels of crude oil into floodwaters. The spill affected roughly 1,700 homes in the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette, and Murphy Oil hired CTEH to conduct soil testing. But instead of following the EPA’s instructions on collecting samples, so the agency could verify CTEH’s readings, the firm mixed samples taken at different times from the same site. It also contaminated samples by bagging soil from different locations together. Murphy Oil then used CTEH’s test results to persuade residents not to sue the company.
In 2008, the Tennessee Valley Authority hired the consulting firm after coal ash from its Kingston Fossil plant in Roane County, Tennessee, spilled into the Emory River. An EPA audit later found that CTEH used inaccurate monitoring methods to survey air quality.
Two years later, BP hired the company to serve as the primary monitor for its offshore workers, collecting health and chemical exposure data in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill. The company would only provide aggregated data and the complete dataset was not made available to federal regulators, which prompted lawmakers to urge BP to stop working with CTEH. The company has a history, the legislators wrote, “of releasing findings defending the corporate interests that employ them.”
CTEH is not the only entity collecting air quality data around the Deer Park fire. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Houston’s own Harris County have all deployed air monitors to survey pollution levels. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, an investigatory body that doesn’t have the authority to fine or regulate companies, is also looking into the cause of the fire.