Cancer rate alarm

State officials found higher than expected rates of cancer in Houston Gardens, Frenchtown and parts of downtown in an analysis that expands on findings from 2019 that identified a cancer cluster in an area nearby a long-contaminated rail yard.

The Department of State Health Services identified higher rates of cancer in an additional six census tracts in Houston, according to the March report, which supplements a report last year that identified a cancer cluster in Houston’s Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens neighborhoods.

The expanded analysis covers about 30 square miles of northeast Houston. It began in response to Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens residents who blamed a long-contaminated rail yard site owned by Union Pacific for unusually high rates of sickness in the neighborhood.

Operations at the Englewood Rail yard included treating wooden ties with the hazardous product creosote, a preservative considered a probable cancer-causing substance, or carcinogen, by the Environmental Protection Agency. It was used for more than 80 years at the rail yard on Liberty Road.

Creosote treatments ceased in the 1980s, but the chemicals sank deep into the ground and created a toxic plume that has moved beneath more than 100 properties and contaminated groundwater, according to state environmental records.

The state’s analysis only identifies the types of cancers that have occurred at astatistically higher rate in the area between 2000 and 2016. The analysis does not attempt to determine the causes.

Higher than expected rates of lung, liver, esophagus and larynx cancers were found in 12 of the 21 census tracts included in the analysis. State officials did not find elevated rates of cancer in census tracts further east from downtown in Denver Harbor, Houston’s Second Ward and Pleasantville.

The Texas Health and Environment Alliance (THEA), a Houston environmental advocacy nonprofit, called the expanded analysis incomplete and called for more testing. THEA said the state should expand the analysis to include children and consider data from before the year 2000.

Houston Gardens, one neighborhood where elevated rates of cancer were found, is adjacent to another rail yard owned by Union Pacific. The yard, on Kirkpatric Boulevard, and connected by rail to the yard just a mile southeast on Liberty Road in the Fifth Ward where creosote treatment operations caused the contamination plume underground.

In a statement, Union Pacific spokesperson Raquel Espinoza said the Environmental Protection Agency and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality regulate hundreds of other chemically contaminated sites in the area.

“Any fair assessment of the causation of any health issues in this area must take this reality into account,” Espinoza said. “The (state’s) assessment does not address the issue of causation.”

In February, Texas Department of State Health Services Commissioner John Hellerstedt wrote in a letter to Harris County Attorney Vince Ryan that the state would conduct afeasibility study to determine if an epidemiological study should be conducted. An epidemiological study would attempt to identify causes of the cancers in the area.

Steven Lester, a toxicologist and science director at the Center for Health and Environmental Justice, an environmental advocacy group in Virginia, said he believes the cancer cluster analysis provides sufficient evidence for the state to test whether people are being exposed to the creosote and what caused the cancers.

“These chemicals are volatile and they’re moving in the direction of the residential area to the north of the property,” Lester said last month during an online panel discussion hosted by THEA.

“Questions remain about whether people are being exposed to these chemicals. Tests need to be done to determine whether these chemicals are present in homes nearby.” erin.douglas@chron.com twitter.com/erinmdouglas23