Carolyn Stone, founder of the Channelview Health and Improvement Coalition, looks out at barges on the San Jacinto River. Earlier this year, the Channelview Fire Department began working with Air Alliance Houston to install upgraded air monitors in the neighborhood capable of tracking specific barge emissions. Photo by Paola Hoffman, Houston Newsroom.
by Paola Hoffman
On a Tuesday morning in April, Carolyn Stone stood at the base of a grassy hill at her local park, counting barges in the San Jacinto river.
Since Stone moved to Channelview in 1981, she said she’s watched the number of barges in the river grow.
“It didn’t used to be that way,” Stone said. “This is just a tiny tip of what’s in our river, surrounding our homes and our community.”
As the barge industry expands, Channelview residents like Stone say the authorities haven’t responded properly to their concerns about air pollution.
Now, the Channelview Fire Department and a Houston nonprofit are collaborating to install air monitors that could address barge emissions.
The barges, transporting tanks of oil and petrochemicals, float less than 500 feet from the nearest residential streets.
Stone said you don’t need to live down the block to smell their emissions. At times, the smells travel much farther.
On an afternoon in March around 4 p.m., Stone came inside from her backyard with a headache. Shortly after, a smell reached her house.
“I walked in the living room and it about knocked me down,” Stone said.
Stone said the smell was somewhat onion-like. She said her husband described it like fuel. And they weren’t the only ones who noticed.
Stone said her phone began to buzz with neighbors calling. And the callers, other Channelview residents, weren’t only reaching out to her.
They were calling the Channelview Fire Department, Pollution Control, the National Response Center, and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), to report high levels of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, in the air.
The spike in pollution was significant enough that Stone said callers were reporting physical symptoms.
But she said that most of the smells in her neighborhood are treated as commonplace.
“We’re a community that’s acclimated to odors,” Stone said. “A lot of people who come to Channelview [are] like, do you smell that? We’re not smelling it, because it’s not strong enough – it’s our everyday air.”
In terms of pollution, however, it’s been hard for residents to be certain of what their “everyday air” consists of.
Understanding Their Air Quality
According to an investigation by Public Health Watch, barges aren’t required to obtain air permits.
Salina Arredondo reported the story. She said she spoke to different regulatory agencies dozens of times in her attempt to track existing policies.
“Neither the TCEQ or the EPA have really any policies directed strictly towards barge emissions,” Arredondo said.
Though the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality publishes a triennial emissions inventory, Public Health Watch’s investigation found gaps in the data of the 2023 report.
The investigation states that the numbers were pulled from industrial sites on land, which self-report the emissions released during the loading and unloading of barges.
But Arredondo said that once the barges are on the water, that reporting stops.
“Because they operate on this very unique setting of on the water, but catering to land and crossing lots of jurisdictions, sometimes dozens of times in a day, there’s no easy remedy and there’s no direct monitoring happening for how barge operations go,” she said.
Jimmy Sumbera, the administrator of the Channelview Fire Department, said that while multiple agencies are involved in barge operations, key parts are left underregulated.
“Army Corps of Engineers, they approve the pylons for them to tie off to,” he said. “But nobody regulates the actual barges. The Port Authority, they lease the submerged land, but nobody cares about what’s in the barges.”
He said this is where frustrations and worries arise in the community.
“When you talk to congressional offices, which I have, when you talk to different agencies, when you talk to the county, […] when you go north of the Houston Ship Channel into the San Jacinto River, nobody regulates that,” Sumbera said.
“It’s a no man’s zone, and so that’s concerning.”
Anthony D’Souza, the Community Air Monitoring Program Manager at Air Alliance Houston, said that Channelview residents are specifically concerned about the emission of VOCs.
He said VOC emissions can have short and long term effects.
The short term effects include nausea, headaches, and dizziness, which callers were reporting to Stone in March. But with more time, D’Souza said the impacts intensify.
“That’s when you get the more serious health effects like cancers and asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease,” D’Souza said. “When chemicals have time to build up in your body, that’s when you see more serious effects.”
Air Alliance Houston is a nonprofit that has been working to set up air monitors in the Greater Houston and Harris County areas.
The organization first installed monitors for particulate matter in Channelview in mid 2024. Now, they’re installing more advanced monitors that are capable of detecting VOCs.
Stone said the upgrades could help address a pattern that the old monitors had discovered.
“The decision was made that we were in dire need of more sophisticated monitors to document what’s occurring in our neighborhood because we had our Purple Air monitors and they were picking up patterns, as Air Alliance Houston puts it, unique to Channelview,” Stone said.
“Whereas emissions and stuff in most areas go down at night, ours spiked at night.”
She said the source is seemingly barges.
Storage tanks on barges sometimes need to be vented to prevent pressure building up. Sumbera said that this often happens at night.
“Three o’clock in the morning, dark outside, wind moving at about 10 to 15 miles per hour in the southeast coming across the barges,” Sumbera said. “There’s hundreds of them.”
“If somebody wanted to clean a barge up, somebody wanted to open the hatch and release the chemicals and not do it the proper way, when are they gonna do it?”
Sumbera said he doesn’t believe the whole industry is engaging in this behavior.
“I’m in no way beating up on industry,” he said. “Matter of fact, I think a majority of industry is responsible.”
“But I do think there are bad players out there. And the bad players probably emit a majority of the odors and the pollution that we’re smelling.”
When there is a high emission event, Channelview residents call for support from government agencies, like they did in March.
Two main issues arise in those moments. The first, Sumbera said, is that of logistics.
“From a fire department’s perspective, from Houston, from Pollution Control, from TCEQ, any of these agencies, go identify that one barge out of all of those that are releasing that at 3 a.m. in the morning,” Sumbera said.
“You can’t see a cloud. You can’t identify anything.”
And if no agency can track down the source, Sumbera said, then no polluter can get fined.
He said the second issue is that non-local agencies can take hours to arrive.
“Well, I promise you by that point, everything’s gone. Everything’s dissipated,” Sumbera said.
And Stone said that sometimes, aside from the Channelview Fire Department, the agencies the communities call don’t arrive at all.
A Combined Response
Stone, founder of the Channelview Health and Improvement Coalition, or C.H.I.C., said the group was formed following an after hours non-response by Pollution Control, EPA, and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in August 2019.
“It was the first time, at least I had ever been told positively, we are not coming. Deal with it yourself, we aren’t coming,” Stone said.
During the VOC emission spike in March, Stone said there was similarly no response from these agencies.
“The only entities we are aware of that have taken any action are the Channelview Fire Dept and Air Alliance Houston,” she wrote in an email to the community on the behalf of C.H.I.C.
This is where Stone said the new air monitors come into the picture.
The monitors are being provided to Air Alliance Houston by the Fire Department, then hosted at the houses of Channelview residents.
Air Alliance Houston’s relationship with the Channelview Fire Department is new, D’Souza said, but has already demonstrated the capacity for results.
One of the new monitors is what picked up the spike in VOCs on that afternoon in March and spikes in days following. D’Souza said the data told a clear story.
“We could exactly see the specific time that it spiked and the specific direction in which the wind was coming. And it was almost directly over the stretch of the river where a lot of chemical barges are parked,” he said.
“And so that kind of just speaks to the value of community air monitoring in that it’s able to pinpoint the source of the pollution, show you just how bad it is.”
With wind direction data from monitors during VOC spikes, Sumbera said the Fire Department might have more success responding and locating polluting barges during the emission events.
The network of monitors will be faster than waiting for the residents to call, and faster, he said, than waiting for Pollution Control.
“So the district chief, the fire chief out on the road with the crews, he can pull [the data] up on his computer, say, hey, I got wind this direction, and here are three monitors, and these two monitors don’t have any VOCs and this one over here spiked,” Sumbera said.
“And then everything from that wind direction, we start tracking. I think that is how you start identifying and localizing.”
Still, he said he thinks it will take some time to fully put it all together.
The Fire Department has requested training from Air Alliance Houston to learn how to most effectively use the monitors. Stone said she plans to sit in.
She said that with the new monitors and the training sessions, her eyes are on three goals.
“First, the community will be able to have real time information for them to make the appropriate health decisions for them as to what they need to do,” she said.
Her second goal is about immediate response, giving the Fire Department and other entities the ability to take action.
Stone’s third goal looks towards larger change.
“The ultimate goal is to have our representatives of all levels aware of the information and to change the laws and the procedures that they’re now doing,” she said.
D’Souza said that community data can be very effective for this.
“It just creates a repository of data, of community collected data, that they can use when they go to their elected officials to ask for stronger regulations, or when they approach the industries to ask for better transparency and better communication. Or if they want to file lawsuits,” D’Souza said.
“Every community has its own different action plan that they want to take. And so that record of data over many months and years informs those actions.”
Stone said the data was necessary, not just to make a plan, but to be believed in the first place.
“It had to be documented,” she said. “It had to be so we could share it and make people aware of it. And so that we could have something to actually dispel the notion that we are making this up, that we’re just complaining.”
“We want to live in a healthy environment. And we deserve to. But we have to have the information to know what steps we need to make and we have to have the information to fight against it.”