Fifth Ward Residents Make Last Ditch Effort to Include Neighbors in Union Pacific Creosote Testing
Sandra Edwards trudged down Suez Street under Tuesday’s beating sun, knocking on doors less than half a block east of the Union Pacific rail yard in Fifth Ward.
For decades, the yard was home to an open-air wood treatment operation, where rail ties were dunked in a toxic creosote mixture. The substance leached into the earth, contaminating some of the neighborhood’s groundwater.
In 2019, Texas’ Department of State Health Services found the area had multiple clusters of cancer diagnoses, which neighbors attributed to the creosote operation.
Since then, Edwards has grown accustomed to showing up at her neighbors’ homes. She has knocked on doors to help with Texas A&M research, knocked to gather information for the city of Houston, knocked to get people to community meetings.
This time, the cancer survivor was on a more urgent mission. Union Pacific planned to wrap up soil sampling in the area on Friday, so she and several neighbors agreed to look for residents who had still not given permission for their land to be tested. Out of 342 properties in the initial focus area, owners of just over half the properties — 187 — have signed off on testing so far.
The task of getting more signatures frustrated Edwards.
“You see how big that one is?” she asked, gesturing at an empty, overgrown lot on Erastus Street across from the Union Pacific property line. “It would be nice to test it. It’s untouched, you’re going to get some results.”
But she doubts the site will get sampled, she said, because they can’t find the owner.
Wrangling property owners for soil testing
A few doors down, Edwards had a different issue: twin garage doors opened into newly constructed townhomes, a pristine “for sale” sign set up by Land & Luxe Realty. She said most of the developers who have recently bought property around the rail yard’s perimeter do not want to let Union Pacific test their land.
Edwards said these townhomes had sprung up in the last year. They were built after Houston Mayor John Whitmire raised concerns over continued real estate development near the yard and halted new city permitting within a section of the adjacent land.
She then pointed to another multi-unit property nearby, this one a rental: “He’s got two residents that were saying they want their property tested, (but) he doesn’t want to do it.”
Joetta Stevenson, president of the Fifth Ward Super Neighborhood, had a bit more luck.
Stevenson came across one homeowner who spoke Spanish, and handed her a translated flyer on the process. The woman's daughter, interpreting for her, said, “She’s going to call them now. She’s going to call them right now.”
These final door-knocking efforts followed months of promotion by Union Pacific and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency staff.
EPA spokesman Joe Robledo told the Houston Chronicle that if a homeowner came forward at the last minute before the Nov. 15 deadline, “we would try our best to get their properties sampled this week.”
The EPA staff leading the process can be reached directly by interested residents. Their contacts are listed on a landing page explaining the research process.
Union Pacific faces mistrust
Union Pacific has for years known about a plume of creosote in the groundwater under a suite of homes, which it tests and reports to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The company long held that once residents were switched to city water, there was no pathway for the contamination to affect them, though many neighbors did not believe that claim.
The latest creosote investigation is driven by Union Pacific but overseen by the EPA. It is designed to prove whether the creosote contamination from the wood preserving operation – which Southern Pacific ran from 1911 to 1984 before its merger with Union Pacific – is a current danger to nearby residents.
Since kicking off the new research in 2023 with tests to show if chemical vapors can travel up through neighborhood soil, Union Pacific and the EPA have faced scrutiny during their updates to the community. Most meetings have been packed with residents, with new voices each time expressing skepticism over the process.
“We do not trust y’all,” longtime rail yard neighbor Joe Ballard said at the latest open forum last Thursday, urging Union Pacific and EPA to move forward and clean the area up. “Y’all know the stuff is there.”
But while some stages of the testing process can be done without community buy-in, property owners who opt out of soil sampling are also opting out of targeted cleanup.
Robynn Tysver, a spokeswoman for Union Pacific, said the company worked for 15 months to maximize the number of residents included in the research.
“We canvassed the neighborhoods six times, knocking on doors and talking to residents face-to-face, and we sent seven mailers to each property owner with information about the soil tests. We also launched a social media campaign earlier this year to broaden our reach,” Tysver said.
Properties left out of soil sampling investigation
The EPA representatives familiar with contaminant investigations said it was common for property owners to resist soil testing on their land. So far, only 55% of have agreed.
“EPA decisions regarding risk and cleanup will be determined on a property-by-property basis, so properties that were sampled will have results and will be eligible for follow up,” said Robledo, the agency spokesman.
As community members like Edwards and Stevenson made last-ditch efforts to afford more of their neighbors that chance, critics of the process worry the boundaries of the research were too narrow.
Attorneys Jason and Casey Gibson represent almost 4,000 plaintiffs in ongoing litigation against Union Pacific. They are concerned that the 342-property sample size stretches only a block or two around the rail yard perimeter.
“There's a ton of people that live out there that were not included,” Jason Gibson said, noting that if they stretched those boundaries the company would have a better sense of how many people were affected.
“Some of these properties have had multiple generations of family members who have died from various types of cancer,” he said.
Robledo said EPA staff were approached by several community members newly interested in soil testing after the agency’s last community meeting, but none owned property within the targeted sampling zones.
The EPA said in a past presentation for community members that the 342 parcels were chosen because they were close to the creosote operation and most likely at risk of contamination.
“EPA highly encourages you to consider agreeing to sign that access agreement because it is the only way your property will get tested,” said agency project manager Casey Luckett Snyder at the presentation last year.
“At the end, there will be a big report that has a summary of all the results. But to get specific results for your home and your yard, you must sign the access agreement so that Union Pacific and EPA can test your property,” she added.