Officials unconcerned after water used to fight fire flows through toxic waste site

HARLINGEN - A state environmental agency on Tuesday downplayed any contamination danger after water used to extinguish a fire at a former H.E.B. warehouse flowed through a toxic waste site.

City firefighters worked Sunday and Monday to control the blaze at the empty warehouse between North Commerce Street and the Union Pacific Railroad tracks.

Firefighters managed to prevent the fire from igniting small wooden homes near the tracks. But water used to put out the fire streamed through the site of the former Niagara Chemical Co.

The company sold, mixed and stored farm chemicals there from 1946 to 1968, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

The site is listed on the state Superfund registry, which identifies facilities where hazardous substances have been determined to pose an imminent and substantial danger to public health and safety or the environment.

It's also listed as an "archive" site under the federal Superfund program, meaning the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has no further interest in it based on available information.

The TCEQ Web site identifies lead, arsenic and pesticides as contaminants found at the site at one time, but agency spokesman Terry Clawson said it "has all been cleaned up."

Remedial action at the site - within a quarter of a mile of downtown Harlingen - was completed April 20, 1998. The site is nearing the end of a 10-year groundwater monitoring program that began later that same year.

Harlingen Fire Department Capt. John Renneker said on Monday he was not aware the property just south of the former H.E.B. warehouse had been a farm chemical plant.

City Manager Craig Lonon also was not aware of the Superfund site, but said, "If TCEQ is not worried about it, why should we be worried about it? ...

"We are pleased that TCEQ is aware of that and is not concerned."

Union Pacific Railroad spokesman James Barnes said if the source of the water used by firefighters was not contaminated, and the site had been cleaned up and monitored by TCEQ, there is no reason to be concerned about the possible spread of contaminants.

However, the former industrial site will never be used for residential development, he said

"It's an industrial site," Barnes said. "We are not aware of any impact that the water from the firefighting would have had. ...

"The soil has been cleaned up."

Ramiro Gonzales, director of the Harlingen Health Department, said the city is developing a storm water runoff monitoring program to track the flow of surface water drainage.