For weeks, the Arkema settlement administrators have been in Crosby hosting town hall meetings to encourage any property owners that were affected by the Hurricane Harvey event, to contact them and sign up to have their property considered for cleanup. On November 18, that window closed and now the administrators will focus on the next steps.
“The judge delegated the authority to us for the signup time for property cleanup,” said Edgar Gentle, III, settlement administrator in the Arkema case.
Now, Gentle says they will turn to the three bidders who have stepped forward to do the cleanup.
“They will actually know the properties involved and can come back to us with a good bid,” he said, aiming to stretch the money as far as possible to cover more damages.
“That will be done by the end of the first quarter (2025) and the testing will be done by the middle of the year. Once that’s done, we’ll begin mediating,” Gentle said.
He said they will aim at beginning the worst properties first and go down the list till they run out of money.
“We hope to be finished by 2026,” he said, almost a decade after Harvey hit Houston in 2017.
Gentle said if residents have a large tract of land, maybe five acres or more, they won’t remediate the entire five acres.
“We’ll test where the worst spots are and clean those,” he said.
The first set of bids will involve the testing of the properties and then once that’s determined, the cleanup companies will know how to bid on the actual properties that need the cleanup the most.
“We’ll start with the soil cleanup and then the inside of houses as necessary,” he said.
In a house, it was not as contaminated as much because it was self-contained.
“The soil is the biggest risk to the community,” he said.
Gentle said they were trying to get neighbors of those who came in to get their properties cleaned up.
“If you come in and your neighbor does not, the wind could blow it back onto your property,” he said.
The Class area is a 7-mile radius; residents were asked to come in for the settlement. That settlement area included Harris, Liberty, and Chambers counties.
More than a 100 people turned out for the party they threw, encouraging all claimants to get to know each other if they didn’t already and bring their friends or neighbors for a presentation.
Ashley Liuzza, one of the class counsels in the litigation.
“We brought the lawsuit, we got it to settlement and ultimately got a program that we’re really proud of,” she said.
The suit was filed in Judge Keith Ellison’s court, United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas in 2017.
“We fought for many years, and we won class certification, went to the Fifth Circuit, had to redo it, it was a long road,” she said.
“It was what I expected for the community, and it will help lower the presence of dioxins,” Liuzza said.
Some of the money will be used to pay a university such as Baylor or University of Texas to do a medical study and see if there’s any increase in health risks.
“Information is power. It may not be this facility ever again, but knowing exactly what happened and how to prevent it will be helpful,” she said.
She also said the testing protocol will be valuable knowing whether or not your property was contaminated or not.
“Our goal is to lower the risk of dioxins in the community. There are other sources of dioxin in the community. We want to lower the exposure as much as possible,” she said.
Arkema Crosby is no longer operational. When the lawsuit was filed, Arkema did take steps to harden the facility to try and prevent this from happening again, she explained.
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