Months after the Environmental Protection Agency was expected to share the conclusions of a yearslong effort with Union Pacific Railroad to assess creosote dangers in a Fifth Ward rail yard, U.S. Rep. Christian Menefee is demanding more transparency from federal officials.
In a letter to the agency’s regional office on Thursday, the new congressman said the saga of the site has frustrated residents who are worried about decades of open-air wood treatment next to homes that created a plume of underground chemicals.
“For years, community members raised alarms about elevated rates of cancer and illness in these neighborhoods, but meaningful government action was slow to come,” Menefee said.
He said that the EPA’s binding agreement with Union Pacific in 2023 “requires the investigation and evaluation of contamination at this site” — including an assessment of whether and how it had to be cleaned up. But these final reports have yet to be released, and once-frequent progress meetings with community members have run dry.
In the last public update meeting led by EPA project manager Casey Luckett Snyder in February 2025, agency representatives said the EPA would conduct an evaluation of current risks to residents — excluding past harms — in early-to-mid 2025, and make a determination of whether cleanup was necessary in mid-to-late 2025.
Menefee was sworn into office in February following the deaths of two predecessors, former Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, both of whom had focused significant local and national attention on the cancer clusters identified in Houston’s Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens neighborhoods.