By Carlos Guerra
San Antonio Express-News
Copyright 2007 San Antonio Express-News
All Rights Reserved
SAN ANTONIO — For Eiginio Rodríguez, one thing led to another. It wasn’t opposition that got him involved in the PGA Village debate. “I just wanted people to have the right to vote on it.”
But while gathering signatures to force a referendum, he learned that the Edwards Aquifer does not filter the water that recharges it, and the only “treatment” Edwards water gets is a bit of chlorine.
His concern about the aquifer’s safety awakened when he walked into a big-box home-improvement store on the recharge zone while killing time before a meeting at a nearby school.
Seeing all those solvents, pesticides and other toxic materials rekindled memories of a warehouse fire, and “when we went in, the water was over our knees.”
Fighting fires, he says, isn’t only about extinguishing them. It is also about containing and cleaning up hazardous materials.
He checked to see what procedures were in place for fighting fires over recharge areas and containing toxic materials.
“I started getting scared,” he says, because all he found were reports of a Dayton, Ohio, fire that threatened an aquifer. And in Texas, the only water supply-related firefighting procedures are for protecting surface water, such as rivers, lakes and reservoirs.
Even though a Uvalde dry cleaning plant fire spilled trichloroethylene into the Edwards, there are still no real plans or procedures in place for protecting Texas aquifers from fire-related contamination.
Worse, Rodríguez says, is that the few public officials who responded didn’t seem too concerned about it.
“One guy at TCEQ did tell me that those big-box stores had containment basins that hold 50,000 gallons of water,” Rodríguez chuckles. “I politely told the gentleman, ‘But sir, some (fire) hoses pump 1,000 gallons a minute, so we would have 50 minutes to put out that fire,’ and he just said: ‘Uh-oh.”’
At another fire in a large battery shop, Rodríguez recalls, “we flooded it for 14 hours, and you don’t attack fires with one hose.”
In November 2002, Rodríguez finished writing “Fire and Hazardous Material Containment Over the Edwards Aquifer: A Liability Nightmare Waiting to Happen,” an exhaustive 30-page report that he sent to city, area and state officials.
In it, he surveyed the growing potential for fires to contaminate aquifers and offered a substantive list of recommendations.
Public agencies that would become involved in such disasters -- from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to the Texas Department of Insurance to the Texas Commission for Fire Protection -- should jointly develop plans and procedures for handling them. Firefighters and other responders should be trained, equipped and drilled for such disasters and their aftermath.
Hazardous practices should be banned from recharge areas, and toxic substances should be kept out to minimize the dangers.
After Gov. Rick Perry’s office forwarded a second copy of his report to the TCEQ, Deputy Director Randolph Wood wrote Rodríguez, saying big-box stores and highways are already required to have water-containment systems.
And he closed his letter saying: “The TCEQ encourages you to continue your efforts with state, county and local authorities and jurisdictions in emergency response planning.”
Asked how he felt about being charged with organizing emergency response planning, Rodríguez laughed, and with a gee-thanks look, handed me a photo.
It is of a large sign that reads: “Entering the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer Recharge Zone.” And behind it are several enormous storage tanks. Asked what was in them, he chuckled: "¡Gasolina!”
“We can have all these studies, and get all these recommendations,” he said. “But if they aren’t implemented, they’re of no use.”