(The following story by Laura Elder appeared on The Daily News website on April 29.)
GALVESTON, Texas — The port will pay $150,000 for the removal and related cleanup of a railroad tank filled with thousands of gallons of liquid, including the degraded form of the pesticide DDT, found buried earlier this year, officials said Monday.
The port has no record of who might have buried the car — about 40 feet long and 10 feet in diameter — so there’s no one to whom to forward the bill.
The car, which port workers found Jan. 15 in the parking lot of Cruise Terminal No. 2 near Pier 27, has no identifying marks.
On March 27, crews used a crane to unearth the railcar, which was rinsed, placed on a flatbed truck and taken to a disposal center.
Today, about 50 cubic yards of contaminated soil and 18,000 gallons of liquid pumped from the tank will be transported to a disposal facility in Alvin.
The port had planned to pump the contents out of the tank, fill it with slurry and pave over it. Officials estimated that would have cost about $25,000. But the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said the port first would have to test the soil beneath the tank, which required digging it up.
The city’s fire marshal also required that the tank be removed.
The federal government banned DDT in the 1970s. It was blamed for devastating wildlife, particularly birds, and probably causes cancer in humans. Tests also detected low concentrations of diesel fuel and Endosulfan, a neurotoxin, in the tank. Ingestion of Endosulfan has been linked to seizures.
Port officials speculate that a company removed the carriage from the railroad tank car and used the tank for storage. Pesticides may have been used to fight insects at Grain Elevator B, which the port and various private companies managed from 1930 to the late 1990s.
The port demolished the grain elevator in 2003 to make way for cruise-ship operations.