The Tank Farming Harvest from Pearland’s New Superfund Site

State agencies have finally caught up with the chemical soup left to seep into the soil for two decades at a 3.5-acre abandoned tank farm in south Pearland, poisoning the wells of nearby residents with high levels of lead and other contaminants. Now the Camtraco Enterprises site, at 18823 Amoco Dr. — along a rail line running west of Highway 35 — is poised to become the latest addition to Texas’s Superfund registry.

Camtraco, which operated the fuel storage, blending, and distillation facility under a series of assumed names (Beaumont Chemicals, Camtraco Chemical Corp., Glycols Inc., Mondobello Chemical Services, Picos Chemical Plant, Okemah Hydrocarbons, and Southeastern Oil Company), halted work at the site in 1992. A sampling of the chemical bouquet discovered both on- and off-site from recent TCEQ efforts: arsenic, barium, chromium, lead, mercury, bis(2-ethylhexyl)adipate, bis(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate, diethyl phthalate, di-n-butyl phthalate, methylene chloride, 1,4 dicholorobenzene, toluene, and tricholoroethene (TCE).

Map showing the Camtraco Enterprises site’s former features: TCEQ