The Environmental Protection Agency has had a draft health risk assessment for two historically Black Houston neighborhoods since October 2025 and has not shown it to the people who live there. Rep. Christian Menefee, who represents them, counted the wait at 396 days as of Nov. 9.
“Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has sat on a draft health risk assessment for 396 days,” Menefee said, as the Houston Defender reported. The assessment covers Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens, where creosote from the former Houston Wood Preserving Works leaked into soil and groundwater. The plant treated railroad ties from 1911 to 1984.
The residents have reason to want the answer. In 2019, the Texas Department of State Health Services identified elevated cancer rates in the surrounding area, and a cancer cluster there has since been confirmed by state health officials. The EPA signed a binding agreement in 2023 requiring a full investigation of the site.
Joetta Stevenson, who chairs the EPA’s Community Advisory Group for the site, put the demand plainly: “Give us that report so we can look at it, the public can look at it and do commentary about it.”
A timeline that keeps slipping
The EPA had promised its Removal Site Evaluation report by late 2025 or early 2026, according to Menefee’s office. It has not appeared. Union Pacific, which owns the railyard, submitted a revised assessment in April at the EPA’s request, so the draft has now been through at least one more round with the company that has to pay for the cleanup.
Menefee wrote to the agency in July asking for a briefing on the report’s status, how sampling locations and depths were chosen, which contaminants were tested and what the preliminary health conclusions are. The EPA answered on Sept. 23, he says, without the information or a timeline. As of Nov. 9 the agency had not publicly explained the delay. He has asked for a written response by Dec. 1, and for the findings to be released, public comment opened and a completion date set.
This is not the first time Fifth Ward waited for health information. A Texas health study that found a cancer cluster in the neighborhood was not communicated to residents for nearly four months after its conclusion, Houston Chronicle reporting found in 2019. In 2022, residents told ABC13 they had still received no cleanup plan. “We get put at the back of the line, we get shunned, we get put on mute,” Walter Mallett said then.
The EPA will say a draft is not a final finding, and that is true. But a draft that the agency and the polluter can read, and the families who got sick cannot, is not a neutral delay. Every month it stays private is a month the people living on the contaminated ground have to make decisions about their children, their homes and their doctors without the government’s own numbers. The EPA should publish the draft now, label it a draft, and let the neighborhood judge it. Dec. 1 is the date to watch.
Have your say