President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency and Texas state officials rejected an offer from NASA scientists in 2017 to use their state-of-the-art flying laboratory to evaluate air quality in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, new reporting by the Los Angeles Times reveals.
“This is disturbing,” said Lina Hidalgo, judge for Texas’s Harris County.
Harvey brought historic rainfall, catastrophic flooding, and triggered potentially dangerous environmental and public health impacts: Houston’s many refineries and petrochemical released pollutants into the air and waters, and area residents began to complain of worrisome smells and toxic sights near the facilities, as well as symptoms including headaches. The EPA asserted that the air quality posed no threat.
NASA, it turned out, was in a good position to gather data on air quality in the area with its DC-8. The jet, whose ability to ability to gather data dwarfs that of the EPA’s air pollution plane or the hand-held devices used by Texas state officials, was already set up for testing because of a scheduled six-hour test flight to Lamont, Oklahoma on Sept. 14.
The response to NASA’s offer? Thanks but no thanks.
Susanne Rust and Louis Sahagun reported for the Times:
The NASA scientists offered assurances that their fact-finding would not get in the way, but noted that the data would eventually be seen by the public. Texas and the EPA were unmoved.
The state-level response came from director of toxicology Michael Honeycutt, who now heads EPA’s Science Advisory Board and is known for expressing views well out of the reach of mainstream science, such as the idea that lowering ozone would be bad for public health.
Associated Press reporter Frank Bajak noted that the new investigation adds weight to his own news agency’s previous reporting showing that “Texas environmental regulators had little interest in exposing most post-Harvey industrial contamination.”
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
Click Here: Cheap Chiefs Rugby Jersey 2019