How women led the activism that created the Superfund program | Houston Public Media (2024)

Houston Matters

A new PBS documentary called “Poisoned Ground” tells their story. And a local activist shares how the actions of women across the country more than 40 years ago paved the way for her fight to clean up contaminated sites in Greater Houston.

The Environmental Protection Agency has decided not to take over the cleanup of the contaminated San Jacinto River Waste Pits Superfund site.

Instead, the EPA will allow the responsible parties, McGinnis Industrial Maintenance Corporation and International Paper Company, to continue to manage the site, which consists of two pits for a now-defunct paper mill that dumped chemical waste there decades ago.

One of the pits has been cleaned up. The second has continued to stagnate in the planning and design stages.

More on the EPA's Decision

Macie Kelly/Houston Public Media

Earlier this year, the EPA issued a “Notice of Takeover” to the responsible parties before issuing this decision late last week.

Jackie Medcalf of the Texas Health and Environment Alliance, who founded her organization after she and her family suffered numerous health problems while living near the waste pits, said in a statement the companies’ actions so far amount to “nothing more than a plan to create a plan.” And she told Houston Public Media that residents living in the area are disappointed and discouraged.

“They’re tired of the EPA giving the companies opportunity after opportunity to come up with a plan that meets the EPA’s criteria,” Medcalf said.

The waste pits are just one of 21 Superfund sites around Greater Houston. Those are polluted sites the EPA has named to its National Priorities List. Once a site has been named to that list, it becomes subject to federal oversight and special funding can be allocated to its cleanup, hence the term “Superfund.”

But it wasn't always that way, that is until an environmental disaster known as Love Canal near Niagara Falls, N.Y., helped create the Superfund program. That story is told in a new documentary from the PBS series American Experience, called Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal, and it airs tonight at 9 on Houston Public Media, TV 8.

The documentary details how homes and schools were built atop and adjacent to chemical dumping grounds and how, in the late 1970s, residents — led mostly by women — fought to be moved out of the site.

That disaster and their activism helped lead to the 1980 federal law that created the Superfund program.

AP Photo/File

Activist Lois Gibbs is featured prominently in the documentary. She lived in the contaminated neighborhood and became the face of the fight for its cleanup along with many other women who lived there.

Another one of them was Debbie Curry (who was Debbie Cerrillo at the time). She said she and her children all suffered a laundry list of health problems during and after living in that neighborhood. And she explained why she kept fighting to get other families out even after hers was living elsewhere.

“I had to fight for my children like a dog would for her puppies. She would do anything to keep them safe,” Curry said. "And that's what I was doing."

More than 40 years later, those same kinds of fights continue, including here in Houston where Medcalf is perhaps the Lois Gibbs of Houston. In fact, Gibbs has been a mentor to Medcalf for several years now as Medcalf works for the cleanup of contaminated sites in our region.

Courtesy: Jackie Medcalf

In an interview with Houston Matters producer Michael Hagerty, Medcalf explains how a project in a college science class helped her discover the many heavy metals contaminating the drinking water on her family’s property near the San Jacinto Waste Pits and about the many health problems she, her parents, and her family’s animals suffered while living there.

She also talks about the challenges of these kinds of environmental fights and about the role women like Gibbs and Curry — and now she herself — often play in this activism.

“It’s almost always women,” Medcalf said, adding that around 90 percent of the people she works with advocating for the cleanup of Superfund sites are women.

“But more so than that, it’s almost always the moms,” she said. “The moms start recognizing something, whether it’s in their yard or with their children.”

Courtesy: Jackie Medcalf

Similarly, Medcalf’s mother was the one who noticed a lot of the health problems in her family and with their animals. She’s also the one who pushed Medcalf to start her organization. And now, Medcalf is a mother herself, something that helps her see the issue with even greater perspective.

“I think it’s really great and powerful that women across the country — and really around the world — are oftentimes the ones that are behind these movements.”

Medcalf says Gibbs and Curry paved the way for her to do the work to which she’s devoted the last 13 years of her life.

“Nobody has more tenacity than an angry mama bear,” she said.

Courtesy: Jackie Medcalf