The San Jacinto River Waste Pits Unleashed Toxins Into the River and, Residents Say, Their Bodies
After a series of storms in March 2012, John Bonta is sorting through the wreckage on his Highlands ranch, 20 miles east of Houston. He's just gotten home from work when his wife, Pam, asks him to help her pick up a portion of the fence that had fallen during the night. He doesn't wait for her, thinking he can get it done more quickly on his own. As he strains to fit a heavy beam back in place, the post suddenly snaps. John jolts forward and there's a second snap -- his back. He goes down. In the distance, Pam is calling his name as she runs out to him.
Image by Andrew Nilsen
Pam half-carries, half-drags John into the house, where he lies down in a daze, insisting he doesn't need an ambulance. The family already has substantial medical expenses, and he doesn't want to make something out of nothing.
The days pass, and the pain worsens. Early one morning as Pam sleeps, John collapses on his way to use the bathroom. There's no arguing the second time. They check him into the ER, where doctors run a series of tests confirming he has fractured his spine. They also tell him he has multiple myeloma -- a rare blood cancer that starts in the bones and affects about .02 percent of Americans, according to the National Cancer Institute. He already has it in more than 80 percent of his body.
At the same time, Pam's daughter from an earlier marriage, Jackie Young, has a host of health problems of her own that require Pam's full-time care. At 21 Jackie has an average of seven seizures a week and skin lesions from head to toe. Inexplicably losing the use of her hands, she wears braces to help with the shaking. Pam feeds her, bathes her, drives her to school and helps her study by turning the pages in her books. Then Jackie is diagnosed with endometriosis.
As an undergrad, Jackie studies environmental geology at University of Houston -- Clear Lake, where she decides to compare her family's well water to city water for a class case study. She consistently finds pH levels of 9.5 -- higher than pure water's pH of 7 -- and, in one case, even flakes of iron visible to the naked eye. When a professor urges her to get tested for hard metals, she finds she has unacceptably high levels of 21 out of 23 of them. The chickens on their ranch hit on all 23. Meanwhile, the family dog dies of a liver tumor.
The Bontas shut down their well, the most obvious connection between their health and that of their animals. Pam starts to haul city water to drink and for Jackie to bathe in. She and John keep showering with well water because one bath takes six five-gallon jugs of water and she doesn't have the energy to carry more.
Almost overnight, the animals seemed to get better, Pam remembers. Jackie began IV chelation treatment, an expensive alternative toxicology therapy proven to be effective in heavy-metal poisoning. Her hand braces came off. John received a bone marrow transplant that stabilized his myeloma-.
With her family in recovery, Pam turned her attention to the ranch. Even with insurance, it was obvious they could no longer afford a $3,000 monthly mortgage payment on top of medical expenses. When she called the bank begging them to foreclose, she learned they'd already paid $350,000 on her "dream home."
Although John's cancer finally forced them out of town, the Bontas had had their suspicions about living in Highlands since 2010, when the EPA started hosting informational meetings about newly uncovered pollutants in their backyard. Environmental regulators had found a dump site in the San Jacinto River between Highlands and Channelview chock-full of paper-mill sludge. Over time, the San Jacinto River waste pits submerged underwater, releasing known carcinogens throughout the river system. The dump appeared to be abandoned, but the EPA said a Pasadena paper company and its waste disposal contractor were responsible for creating it nearly half a century ago.
In 2011, word spread when Harris County Attorney Vince Ryan sued three major corporations for polluting the San Jacinto River: International Paper, Waste Management of Texas and McGinnes Industrial Maintenance Corporation. Despite the EPA's community forums and ads in local news-papers, residents say the county's lawsuit was the first time most people in the river-bottom communities of Highlands and Channelview had heard about the toxic waste in their waterways.
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