Former employees say the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality gutted the unit soon after the fracking boom swept the state oil industry. The operation never returned to what it was before.
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Today, the team spends more time monitoring ambient air after hurricanes, ice storms or industrial explosions. Instead of comprehensive reports making the findings intelligible, its projects more often produce scores of spreadsheets with thousands of lines of data. In subsequent years the team re-emerged under new management with a new philosophy. The agency combined its emergency response and mobile monitoring programs into a single team. Even so, and despite expensive recent equipment upgrades, the new team would conduct fewer projects, monitor fewer facilities and issue fewer reports than the old team did.
“Monitoring throughout the state has increased through the use of additional mobile monitoring vehicles, handheld equipment, and stationary monitors,” Cann said. “Regional offices conduct a significant number of investigations using regional assets.” Furthermore, agency data doesn’t support the claim that investigations with air monitoring equipment have recently increased. The number of on-site investigations of air quality by regional TCEQ offices has declined in the past decade, according to anof agency data. Investigators have also made less frequent use of their optical gas imaging cameras, one of the primary handheld monitoring devices used to measure and visualize gas leaks and emissions.
Cann said the team’s findings helped the agency take enforcement action against companies to reduce local benzene pollution, but didn’t say which companies. She said communities weren’t notified of the findings because the concentrations presented no immediate threat to human health. The agency’s short-term screening level for benzene, 180 parts per billion, is only meant to trigger further investigation.
“As far as I know, TCEQ has never done anything to acknowledge either a problem with H2S in the Permian or the results of these mobile monitoring reports,” said Jack McDonald, a research assistant at Oilfield Witness and co-author of “The big increase in oil and gas that you saw in the 2000s has increased pressure on the agency to do what industry wants,” said Cyrus Reed, conservation director for the Sierra Club in Texas, who has spent more than 20 years lobbying for environmental interests at the Texas Capitol. “There has been a lot of money made. That means there’s more money in politics, there’s more money in the governor's race, and the governor’s the one who appoints the commissioners.
Regional office staff would conduct routine patrols with handheld monitoring equipment, Stanley said. If their findings suggested problems, they would call in mobile monitoring for further investigation. The team had trained scientists and lab-certified data, which means the data quality was strong enough to hold up as evidence for a citation or in court.
Since 1989, the report said, the mobile monitoring team had visited Corpus Christi and surrounding areas 42 times. After that, it would be back once, for one day, to monitor a pipeline fire in 2020.The crippling of the mobile monitoring team followed events beginning in 2009 in the Barnett Shale of North Texas, where the early fracking boom was encroaching on residential areas.
Shaw, who said in 2014 as TCEQ chair that he was not convinced the earth was warming, would hold the position for nine years, longer than any previous chair in at least 30 years of agency history. Shaw did not respond to queries sent to Total, TXOGA and a personal email address. “You don’t get to pick and choose as a scientist what values you want to report and what you don’t want to report,” said Doty, who holds a master’s degree in environmental science. “It was an inconvenient truth when something was not beneficial to the agency, either it would cause media scrutiny, or more work or would cause elected officials to get excited.”
It happened gradually, according to Doty and other former employees. Over subsequent years, the team was given little work. Team members were transferred to the instrument repair shop, air laboratory or regional offices. Doty was eventually put in charge of optical gas imaging camera training for other staff.
Jeff Lewellin, former head of TCEQ’s emergency response team who spent 25 years at the agency, disagreed that the reorganization enhanced capabilities. After 2016, the mobile monitoring team began to resume regular, if limited, activity. Over the next three years, the team ran four projects in Pearland, outside Houston, investigating complaints of trash smells from two nearby landfills, but was ultimately
After that, the mobile monitoring team began to spend most of its time engaged in disaster response. The team was told it was important to be seen in public after disasters, the former employee said. For example, in the early morning of March 31, two weeks after the fire started, a van measured benzene well above TCEQ’s long-term screening level for three consecutive hours in a neighborhood in Deer Park, according to the data. Benzene exceeded short-term targets for the final 25 minutes, then the van stopped recording.
“Further efforts could be made to make the information more understandable to a non-scientific audience,” the report said.
Energy Environment State Government Texas Commission On Environmental Quality (TCEQ) Texas Legislature
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