The continued oil and gas export boom in Texas threatens to stir up—literally—ghosts of toxic pollution past. Lavaca Bay, flanked by the industrial towns of Port Lavaca and Port Comfort, harbors an old Alcoa aluminum and chlor-alkali plant that in the 1960s and 1970s contaminated the bay and spawned the state’s largest Superfund site.
A 2019 proposal by Houston-based oil company Max Midstream and the county port authority to dredge and expand the Matagorda Ship Channel, used by oil tankers, could have spread this mercury further into the ecosystem. But last week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers withdrew initial approval for the project after a lawsuit by local and national environmental groups.
“I didn’t believe it,” said Diane Wilson, a retired shrimper and longtime activist who went on a hunger strike in 2021 to protest dredging the bay. Her organization, the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper, led the lawsuit against the Army Corps.
