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Photo courtesy Harris County Attorney's office

Luis Ortiz, the polluter who was sentenced to five days' jail time for failing to clean up his auto-salvage business, went behind bars today after a last-ditch effort to stay free.

Ella Tyler of the county attorney's office tells Hair Balls district judge Tony Lindsay ordered Ortiz to begin his sentence even though much of the clean-up has been done.

"It's been a long, long time getting it," she says.

Ortiz and the county have been fighting for three years, and the property owner had ignored several court orders demanding he fix the problem. He had one last chance to argue at a hearing this morning, but Lindsay wasn't impressed.

Photo by Daniel Kramer

Dennis Davis

In 2007, our Todd Spivak did a feature on  the "Toxic Town" of Somerville, 90 miles southnorthwest of Houston and home to a Burlington Northern Sante Fe Railway plant.

Residents there have much higher cancer rates than normal, a fact some traced to the arsenic, dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons used by the plant, which at one time was the nation's largest producer of railroad ties.

One of the residents, and one of the key parts of the Spivak's story, was Dennis Davis, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2006.

He sued BNSF, and a 10-week trial wrapped up yesterday. The jury found for the railroad.

The jury took about two hours to reach its verdict, the Bryan-College Station Eagle reported.

If you worry about pollution -- especially in light on the EPA's latest study of the cancer risk posed by air pollution -- you might see that instead of threatening our lives, air pollution actually helps all of us, especially those of us who are most vulnerable, the kids.

For purposes of illustration, we present a case handled yesterday by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which approved an agreed order that assessed the Dow Chemical Co. a penalty of $166,465 for violating state pollution laws.

That's a lot of money any way you slice it.

The case against Dow dealt with six separate pollution incidents at the company's Freeport complex, of which the most excessive began on June 26, 2005, and didn't end until Aug. 13, 2005.

In sheer volume, it was a doozy -- 148,905 pounds of volatile organic compounds, 105,438 pounds of carbon monoxide, 13,868 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and 1,682 pounds of benzene were released during a 1,160-hour time period.

And then there were five other incidents in the ensuing years, the documents show. The average citizen might ask, why? Why can't a world-class company and its array of brilliant engineers and technicians operate a chemical manufacturing plant a better way? And, perhaps more importantly, the average citizen even may ask, "Is this shit gonna kill me?"

This is where you have to get your mind right.

Got a couple of hours to spare Wednesday morning? The Buffalo Bayou Partnership is looking for some "heat-resistant" volunteers to help put in 9,000 wetland plants at the still under-construction nature park, Buffalo Bend Nature Park. (Okay, with that many plants it might take a little more than a couple of hours.)

The ten-acre park, which has been in the works for several years, is still in its first phase of construction and not ready for visitors yet, but eventually there'll be a series of ponds, a look-out mound/amphitheater, hike and bike trails, a boardwalk and observation deck. There'll also be an small island that's inaccessible to visitors and varmints alike. (It will serve as a predator-free rest stop for the thousands of migrating birds that fly through the area every year.)

The Jaguarundi

courtesy of blueskull611

Ever heard of the jaguarundi? Neither have we.

Perhaps that's because this unique type of cat that lives along the Texas border with Mexico is endangered. Perhaps it's because nobody really cares. We're guessing it's a bit of both, but that doesn't mean every animal shouldn't have some human in their corner pulling for them.

WildEarth Guardian, a non-profit environmental organization, recently waged war in the form of a lawsuit in Houston federal court against Ken Salazar, Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, demanding that he put a conservation and survival plan together for the animal. After all, the organization argues, the cat has been listed as endangered since 1976, plenty of time to create such a plan as required under the Endangered Species Act.

Two types of the endangered species call south Texas their home, the Gulf Coast jaguarundi and the Sinaloan jaguarundi. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they are larger than a domestic cat and have small ears, long, narrow bodies with short legs and flattened heads and tails. They generally look more like an otter or a weasel than a cat. They make their homes, according to the lawsuit, in the "dense thorny mesquite, cacti and cat claw thickets of southern Texas."

If you think you've got a lot to do getting ready for the season's first hurricane, imagine if you had a museum full of millions of dollars in art you had to protect. Gulf Coast area museums don't have to imagine -- they do. Among the most prepared is the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, but it's the Aurora Picture Show where visitors will have the most fun.

The Aurora Picture Show can afford to be a little more lax than AMSET -- it's hard to drown DVDs. "It would take a massive storm," laughs Associate Director Rachel Tepper. "Everything [in the DVD library] is up off of the floor and they're in cases. So it would take the destruction of the building before it would affect the DVDs."

Hurricane Ike, which pretty much shut Houston down for a couple of weeks, didn't affect the Aurora Picture Show's programming schedule last year. "We continued with the screening we had planned," says Tepper. "The city was still a wreck and the turnout was extremely modest, but we went ahead. We actually served Hurricanes, the drink, during the show. A lot of people still weren't driving after the storm, so it was just people from the area. Everyone came over; we had air-conditioning and Hurricanes. It actually was a fun, little community event."

What are the group's preparations for this year's storm season? "Our plan," Tepper jokes, "is 'We'll serve Hurricanes.'"

If you live in Needville or  "the unincorporated portion of Beasley," the Fort Bend County Health & Human Services Department is warning you to stay away from skunks.

We've never quite lived in a place where people had to be warned to stay away from skunks, but then again we've never even been to the incorporated part of Beasley, much less the unincorporated part.

But two rabid skunks have been discovered in the greater Beasley-Needville Metropolitan Area, and health officials are warning residents to protect themselves and their animals.

Pet owners should make sure their animals' vaccinations are updated. "It is also important to keep your animals restrained and not allow them to roam freely as this will further protect them from confrontation with wildlife," said Vernon Abschneider, the county's animal control director.
 

Photo by Scott Barnes

Spencer Langford paddles his canoe west from Eleanor Tinsley Park along his usual route through Buffalo Bayou. He tries to get on the water every day. A nature buff, he notes the different species of birds, fish, turtles and snakes. But as he nears Studemont, by the dog park, he stops at something else: an impassable dam of garbage that has developed around a cluster of logs.
 
"This used to be gorgeous," Langford says. "But now it's, um ... shit water."
 
The trash collects in storm drains throughout Houston, then flushes out into the Bayou whenever it rains, according to Scott Barnes, the conservation director at the non-profit Buffalo Bayou Partnership, which maintains the area through private donations and funds from the city and county.
 
The trash had been floating around since the last big rainfall about two weeks ago. Barnes and his crew had to work through a logjam around the bridge columns downtown before they could reach the Studemont "dam."

The World Health Organization has declared swine flu to be a pandemic, the first in over 40 years.

It's doing it mostly on the basis of a sharp growth in cases in Australia, Japan and Chile, but just about every story on the subject -- at least in America -- mentions Houston.

We were, of course, the first American city to have a swine-flu death; we also had Travis Elementary close after a bunch of kids came down with stuff, some of which included swine flu.

But all that seems to have calmed down lately -- just as experts said it would, before a possible resurgence.

So is the city going to change its swine-flu plans now that it's a pandemic? Cancel Astro games? Tell HISD they need to shut down summer school? Order citizens driving within three blocks of Travis Elementary to wear masks?

Not really, Health Department spokeswoman Kathy Barton tells Hair Balls.

Travis Elementary's swine-flu heyday came just as the topic was losing its national cachet, but the school made the most of it -- closing completely after days of frantic parents keeping their kids home, leaving the school a ghost town.

At first HISD said a weekend scrub-down would be enough to set things right, but eventually officials threw in the towel and closed the school completely for the few remaining days of the year.

It's now re-opened, for summer school, but it's not exactly back at 100 percent.

The school is "still on bottled water, sack lunches and portable bathrooms, for now," HISD spokesman Norm Uhl says.

Portable bathrooms in the heat of a Houston summer? Sounds great!