Grantee Research Project Results
2021 Progress Report: Toxic Tides: Risks and Resilience to Coastal Flooding of Contaminated Sites
EPA Grant Number: R840039Title: Toxic Tides: Risks and Resilience to Coastal Flooding of Contaminated Sites
Investigators: Cushing, Lara , Morello-Frosch, Rachel , Strauss, Benjamin
Institution: University of California - Los Angeles
Current Institution: University of California - Los Angeles , University of California - Berkeley , Climate Central
EPA Project Officer: Aja, Hayley
Project Period: August 1, 2020 through July 31, 2023 (Extended to January 31, 2025)
Project Period Covered by this Report: August 1, 2020 through July 31,2021
Project Amount: $799,999
RFA: Contaminated Sites, Natural Disasters, Changing Environmental Conditions and Vulnerable Communities: Research to Build Resilience (2019) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Sustainable and Healthy Communities , Safer Chemicals
Objective:
Flooding events from tropical storms and sea level rise leading to accidental releases of toxic substances are becoming more frequent due to climate change, posing potential health risks to residents living near sites that store or use toxic materials. Across the country, low-income households and people of color experience greater harmful pollutant exposures and are more likely to live near hazardous waste and industrial facilities. These groups often face additional challenges such as poor housing conditions, food insecurity, or pre-existing health conditions that may worsen the health effects of pollutant exposures. As a result, contaminant releases due to flooding of hazardous sites are likely to disproportionately impact socially disadvantaged populations and present environmental justice concerns.
This research project integrates data on: 1) excess contaminant releases to air, land and water during Hurricane Harvey, an extreme flood event in the Texas Gulf Coast; 2) projections of coastal flooding that take into account rising sea levels across the United States; 3) the location of sites that contain, use, process, store, or emit hazardous materials, including oil refineries, cleanup and hazardous waste sites, and animal operations facilities nationwide; and 4) neighborhood level sociodemographic data to estimate potential vulnerability to environmental health risks associated with flooding of contaminated sites. The overarching goal of this project is to advance scientific understanding of sea level rise and coastal flooding threats to environmental justice communities, and provide broadly accessible data, visualization tools, and outreach materials that support regulatory and planning efforts to increase climate resilience in impacted communities.
Objective 1. Evaluate the extent, type and location of excess contaminant releases and spills due to flooding of hazardous sites in the Texas Gulf Coast from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and estimate potential exposures to vulnerable populations
Objective 2. Estimate the environmental health risks posed by coastal flooding of hazardous sites due to sea level rise to vulnerable populations across the United States
Objective 3. Broadly disseminate research findings through a customizable, bilingual online mapping tool, and in-person roundtable discussions in at-risk coastal communities on the East, West and Gulf Coasts
Progress Summary:
Our efforts to date have focused on acquiring and cleaning existing data from multiple sources in order to finalize the datasets that will form the basis of our analyses under objectives 1 and 2. For Objective 1, we obtained and cleaned over 15 years of data on excess air emissions incidences and hazardous material spills to water and land from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and National Response Center’s Incident Reporting Information System for all 41 Texas counties designated as affected by Hurricane Harvey by FEMA. For Objective 2, we assembled data from four different sources on the location of hazardous sites including power plants, sewage treatment plants, Superfund and other clean up sites, refineries, concentrated animal feeding operations, oil wells, ports, and transport facilities, and other facilities that emit hazardous substances as reported to the Toxic Release Inventory. All datasets for Objectives 1 and 2 underwent extensive cleaning, including re-geocoding address information and joining point locations to tax parcel data to obtain better estimates of the location of contaminant releases and location and extent of facilities. Project partner Climate Central then completed flood risk projections for each of the hazardous facility locations for Objective 2. This allows us to estimate the likelihood of a site being exposed to at least one coastal flood event in a given year (2050 or 2100) under different future greenhouse gas emissions and sea level rise scenarios. Given the size and complexity of the data involved for Objective 2, we focused our efforts first in California where we had access to additional data sources with which to validate our approach before we scale up our analysis nationwide.
In March 2021, we convened virtually with our community advisory committee of environmental justice leaders (the Toxic Tides Advisory Committee or TTAC [“T-Tac”]). We reviewed project goals and objectives, methods, and preliminary results. This led to several important improvements in the secondary data quality and methodology including, for example, revisions to our inclusion criteria to ensure that important sites about which TTAC members had on-the-ground knowledge would be included in our analysis. We also discussed audiences and strategies for disseminating our findings, leading to the development of a prototype online mapping platform which was iteratively improved in conversation with the TTAC. The website focuses on Objective 2. Users can visualize the number of expected annual flood-risk events at individual facility locations and the concentration of at-risk facilities in census block groups across years (2000, 2050, 2100). Users can click on any given facility to pull up facility-specific information including name, the number of expected annual flood-risk events, the surrounding population size, and a link to more information. Additionally, users can toggle between different demographic variables (e.g., % living in poverty, % unemployment, % people of color, etc.) in census block groups with at least one at-risk facility by the year 2100. Based on feedback from our advisory committee, we also created a section on our website to highlight three case study examples of impacted communities, again focusing initially on California as we develop our approach for communicating this information before adding additional coastal U.S. communities.
Future Activities:
Next steps will include statistical modelling to understand how contaminant releases and flood risk are distributed with respect to indicators of population vulnerability and social disadvantage in order to explore the environmental equity implications of tropical storms and sea level rise. We plan two additional publications from this work, one focused on Hurricane Harvey, and a second extending the methodology we developed for estimating flood risk at contaminated sites in California to the rest of the country. We will continue to refine our website and interactive online platform and then integrate it into Climate Central’s Surging Seas interface, a highly interactive established mapping tool for the visualization of sea level rise projections. After getting feedback on this interface from the TTAC, we will finalize it and translate it into Spanish. We are also coordinating with the TTAC to host a series of educational webinars to share our preliminary study findings in California with local communities and policy makers during the winter of 2021. Additional events will then be scheduled for the Gulf and East Coasts.
Journal Articles on this Report : 1 Displayed | Download in RIS Format
Other project views: | All 3 publications | 3 publications in selected types | All 3 journal articles |
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Berberian A, Gonzalez D, Ching L. Racial Disparities in Climate Change-Related Health Effects in the United States. CURRENT ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH REPORTS 2022;9(3):451-464. |
R840039 (2021) |
Exit Exit |
Supplemental Keywords:
climate change, sea level rise, flood, GIS, cumulative effects, environmental justiceProgress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.