Riding the rip tide of last week’s big environmental news, the Save Our Springs Alliance is renewing its efforts to secure listings for Barton Springs and Barton Creek as “impaired” waterways under the federal Clean Water Act. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality dismissed the group’s request for the classification last fall, but SOS leaders believe that the Statesman‘s controversial report on toxic chemicals in and around the springs should warrant a re-evaluation. The TCEQ is responsible for making the call, contingent on EPA approval.
Under the Clean Water Act, an “impaired” designation prompts a comprehensive assessment of contaminants in the waters and tighter limits on pollutants permitted to enter the waterways. Most relevant to Barton Springs, an “impaired” designation would establish stricter state and federal rules on storm-water runoff from upstream construction sites throughout the watershed.
While the city disputes the Statesman‘s conclusions, it nevertheless closed Barton Springs Pool and called on outside assistance for more testing. Soil samples from a hillside upstream from the pool, below the Barton Hills Park Place Apartments, contain high levels of benzo(a)pyrene, a carcinogen, which will require remediation. However, state and local scientists have said the water bubbling up from the springs into the pool is safe for swimmers, contrary to the opinions of the Statesman‘s independent sources. (Federal experts from the EPA came to town last week to get a firsthand look at the areas where the samples were taken.) The uproar also prompted the Lower Colorado River Authority to conduct a battery of tests on water samples from Town Lake. The LCRA reported Wednesday it found nothing to cause concern.
Sediment in the deep end of Barton Springs Pool shows “traces” of the cancer-causing benzo(a)pyrene chemical, but not enough to present a health risk to swimmers, the TCEQ announced Tuesday. However, scientists did detect hazardous levels of BaP in sediment upstream from the pool, along both sides of the unnamed tributary running downhill from the Park Place Apartments. The pool’s water showed no detection of PAHs (“polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons”) and meets federal drinking water standards for BaP, said Michael Honeycutt, a chief toxicologist at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. He says he expects to receive sampling results for metals, arsenic, and pesticides by the end of the week. “After that, we’ll talk with the EPA and [Texas Department of Health] and we”ll all come to some sort of conclusion,” he said.
SOS spokesman Colin Clark said the city’s decision to close the pool, in direct response to the daily’s report, suggests all is not well at poolside. “This is not the first time Barton Springs has been closed for swimming, and without decisive action, it will not be the last,” he said. “The long-term trend toward dirtier water must be reversed.”
Even with the dramatic events of the past 10 days, Honeycutt says Barton Springs doesn’t meet the “impaired” criteria, which include a “laundry list of chemicals” that show up in water tests. Based on test results from TCEQ and the Texas Dept. of Health, Honeycutt says he’s “99% sure” the pool is safe for swimmers.
But SOS deputy director Brad Rockwell charges that the agency’s process of determination is flawed because it only focuses on water, while failing to include the high levels of toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and pesticides found in the sediment. The state’s method, Rockwell maintains, doesn’t follow the letter or spirit of the Clean Water Act.
This is where things get complicated, Honeycutt says. The soil and sediment inclusion called for in the CWA has never been promulgated by the EPA because of controversy — largely generated from the industry side of the aisle — over the numerical standards for sediment. Even if the state did impose its own numerical standards, “they would never fly … we wouldn’t have the backing of the EPA. Frankly, it’s very convoluted because it’s hard to agree what those numbers should be.”
But SOS leaders believe the state agency is shirking its responsibilities. The fact that the city closes Barton Springs after a heavy rainfall because of dangerous pollutants in the water, they say, should indicate that the springs are indeed impaired.
As for the city, the only two questions are “‘Is there a human health risk?’ and ‘Is cleanup needed and, if so, how do we do it?'” says City Manager Toby Futrell. On the first question, she reasserts her belief — as she said while she was ordering the pool closed — that the pool is safe, according both to previous TCEQ and TDH opinions and to the samples taken two weeks ago. Those samples found no levels of either PAHs or arsenic that exceeded state standards in any Barton-area location other than the hillside below the Park Place Apartments.
The city had been apprised of the Statesman‘s findings a week before the daily went to press. “We knew they had already locked into a conclusion,” Futrell says. Her decision to close the pool even while proclaiming it safe — which has been dubbed suspicious by SOS and other community observers — was an attempt to avoid even more conflict with the daily, Futrell says. “In this battle of ink between the city and the Statesman, I know I’m going to lose. So I wanted to take that” — closing the pool — “off the table.”
As for the other question, local, state, and federal experts have all agreed for some time that a cleanup will be needed on the hillside, which is why City Hall appropriated money for that purpose in 1999, Futrell notes. That money hasn’t been spent because the source of the contamination — that is, what exactly needs to be cleaned up — has yet to be determined. The city’s most likely suspect is coal tar-based parking lot sealant applied to the Park Place lot; the same material is applied to parking lots all over town, including the Statesman‘s own, and city samples show elevated PAHs in runoff from those lots. The daily, however, has decided the culprit is a buried coal-gas waste dump, though no evidence of such a dump has yet been found.
Futrell and Nancy McClintock, the city’s environmental resource manager who oversees the water-quality testing program, note that “it’s way easier if the Statesman finding turns out to be true,” because then the contamination is localized and more readily remediated. In Futrell’s words, “I don’t want to be right about this.” The city sent notification letters Tuesday to several property owners, including the Park Place Apartments and the Statesman, informing them of the benzo(a)pyrene runoff from their lots. Statesman publisher Mike Laosa, quoted in the daily’s Wednesday edition, said the paper will explore cleanup options: “We will make sure we will do whatever is required to continue to have a safe place for our employees and to be a responsible corporate citizen.”
This article appears in January 31 • 2003.
