HOUSTON – The Environmental Protection Agency held another meeting in Houston’s Fifth Ward, providing an update on the agency’s testing of toxic chemicals in the area.

The area was designated as a cancer cluster in 2019 when significantly higher than normal diagnoses of the deadly disease were found among residents of the Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens neighborhoods.

At Thursday’s meeting, the EPA informed residents about vapor, soil and stormwater intrusion in the area.

Vapor ingress is when subsurface contamination from soil and groundwater evaporates and accumulates inside buildings.

Some of the results have already been published while the others are pending. You can see those here.

For the soil contamination study, EPA says the background study or public area contamination study is complete.

EPA testing found that six of the 20 locations tested came back with low exceedances of EPA residential screening levels for contaminants. All six sites exceeded screening levels for benzo(a)pyrene, a common chemical in urban, industrialized areas and vehicle exhaust. You can view the results of the background study here.

EPA is still awaiting results for 1,300 residential samples. These should begin rolling out in January 2025.

The agency said they will begin testing whether creosote-related contaminants are present in the drainage areas and sampling will take place from November 18 to November 27.

You can see all of the presentation material from Thursday night’s session here.

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