A 16-Acre Poison Pit, Six Miles From Downtown

They Used the Ground Like a Trash Can

From the 1950s through the 1960s, a company called Brine Service Company ran what can only be described as an industrial dumping operation in Nueces County, Texas. Vacuum trucks rolled in carrying oil field and refinery waste, including tank bottoms and API separator sludge, and pumped it all into open pits dug into the ground. The companies that paid Brine Service to do this, including the corporate ancestors of Energy Transfer, El Paso LLC, and El Paso Merchant Energy, knew exactly what was in those trucks.

The two pits, called the North Pit and the South Pit, were intermittently connected so that when one filled up, the overflow poured into the other. By approximately 1973, both pits had been completely backfilled, meaning the poison was sealed underground with no surfacing features. To anyone walking or driving past, there was simply nothing there.

The site covers approximately 16 acres and sits surrounded by industrial and petrochemical facilities west of downtown Corpus Christi. A drainage ditch called the East Ditch runs along the eastern edge of the site, and its surface water flows directly into a northwest-trending ditch that empties into Tule Lake.

The Contamination Was Invisible Until Someone Started Digging

The buried poison stayed hidden for nearly three decades. It was not discovered through any environmental monitoring, corporate disclosure, or proactive government inspection. It was discovered in 1997 because Koch Pipeline Company was digging to install pipelines and physically hit it. Workers saw visible hydrocarbon staining in the soil and hydrocarbons seeping into groundwater at the excavation site.

Koch notified state regulators, and subsequent sampling in 2000 confirmed the presence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), benzene, and metals. The EPA added the site to its National Priorities List in 2002, formally designating it a Superfund site, meaning the contamination was serious enough to require federal emergency cleanup authority.

The companies that arranged for all that waste to be dumped there in the first place did not come forward. The federal government had to find them.

The Corporate Shell Game: Who Are These Companies, Really?

Every Name Has Changed. The Liability Hasn’t.

Energy Transfer LLC, one of the largest pipeline operators in the United States, does not just appear in this lawsuit on its own merits. It appears because it is the corporate successor to Suntide Refining Company, which arranged the toxic waste disposal in the 1950s and 1960s. Suntide became Sun Oil Company of Pennsylvania in 1975, became Sun Refining and Marketing Company in 1981, became Sun Company Inc. (R&M) in 1991, became Sunoco Inc. (R&M) in 1998, and finally became Energy Transfer (R&M), LLC.

El Paso LLC follows a nearly identical trail. Its corporate ancestor, Coastal States Gas Producing Company, arranged for the toxic waste disposal, then changed its name to Valero Energy Company in 1979, then transformed through multiple mergers across three more decades before landing on the name El Paso LLC in 2012. El Paso Merchant Energy-Petroleum Company is a parallel successor to yet another Coastal States entity, Coastal States Petrochemical Company, which passed through five separate name changes and mergers between 1979 and 2001.

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, headquartered in Akron, Ohio, is named because it absorbed Wingfoot Commercial Tire Systems LLC, a joint venture it had with another company from 2000 to 2003. Wingfoot operated a tire shop directly on the North Pit area from 2000 to 2014 and, according to the federal complaint, dumped lead wheel weights into the already-contaminated ground the entire time. Goodyear merged Wingfoot fully into itself in 2017, making the liability entirely its own.

Corporate Rebrandings Do Not Erase Corporate Crimes

The pattern across all four defendants is identical: dump waste through a subsidiary or predecessor company, rename or merge repeatedly, and hope no one can trace the liability back through the corporate genealogy. Federal law under CERCLA is specifically designed to prevent exactly this maneuver. Successor corporations inherit the environmental liabilities of their predecessors.

The federal government spent years conducting a Remedial Investigation and Feasibility Study, finalized in 2018, to identify what was in the ground and who put it there. The lawsuit, filed in 2023 and amended in January 2024, is the United States formally demanding that these corporations pay back the money taxpayers spent cleaning up their mess.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Can’t Fix

The Ground Was Poisoned Before Most Residents Were Born

The waste disposal at this site began in the 1950s. That means every person who has lived, worked, played, or simply passed through the area west of downtown Corpus Christi in the last seven decades has done so above a buried reservoir of hazardous industrial chemicals. The people who made the decisions to dump there are long gone. The chemicals they left behind are not.

The substances confirmed in the soil and groundwater read like a who’s-who of industrial toxicology. Benzene is a known human carcinogen for which the EPA acknowledges there is no safe level of exposure. Lead causes permanent neurological damage, particularly in children, with effects on cognition, behavior, and development that no treatment can reverse. Arsenic is a confirmed carcinogen linked to bladder, lung, and skin cancers. Mercury attacks the nervous system. Chromium in its hexavalent form, the kind found in industrial waste, causes lung cancer. Every single one of these substances was confirmed at this site.

The 2018 Remedial Investigation found benzene and arsenic present in the South Pit area “at concentrations that pose a risk to human health.” It found lead, mercury, selenium, and zinc in the soil of the North Pit area. It found light non-aqueous phase liquid (LNAPL), which is a category that includes petroleum-based substances, floating on the surface water of the East Ditch as recently as 2017. That ditch connects to Tule Lake.

A Tire Shop Built on a Bed of Poison for 14 Years

The detail that should make every person in Corpus Christi furious is this: Goodyear operated a tire shop directly on the North Pit from 2000 to 2014. This means workers showed up to that location every day for fourteen years, handling vehicles, breathing air, touching surfaces, while sitting on top of contaminated soil that contained lead, mercury, and volatile organic compounds. The federal complaint specifically alleges that Goodyear did not just passively operate there; it actively added more lead to the site by disposing of lead wheel weights into the environment during its operations.

The contamination did not stay in the pit areas. The East Ditch runs along the site’s eastern boundary, and the LNAPL observed floating on its surface in 2017 carried associated chemicals of concern with it. The drainage from that ditch flows north and into Tule Lake. The federal government did not install a sediment cap in a section of that ditch until December 2017, and had to extend it again in February 2020 because the contamination kept spreading. The cap is still being maintained today.

The community that surrounds this site is described in the federal complaint as “predominantly industrial and petrochemical refining area.” Communities near petrochemical corridors in Texas are disproportionately low-income and disproportionately communities of color. The people who had the least ability to pick up and move away from a contaminated industrial zone were the ones who bore the full burden of living next to a site that corporations treated as a disposal ground for fifty years.

The corporate answer to all of this was silence. Not disclosure, not remediation, not compensation. The contamination was discovered because a pipeline company accidentally dug into it in 1997. Without that accident, the poison might have stayed buried and unnamed for another generation. The corporations that put it there had every opportunity to come forward at any point in the fifty-odd years between when the dumping happened and when it was discovered. None of them did.

Legal Receipts: The Government’s Most Damning Charges, Verbatim

They Said It Under Oath. Read Every Word.

Societal Impact Mapping: The Full Damage Report

Environmental Degradation

The contamination at the Brine Service Company Superfund site spread through multiple environmental pathways simultaneously. Hazardous substances migrated from the original disposal pits into both the soil and the groundwater beneath the 16-acre site. By 2017, LNAPL, a petroleum-phase liquid that carries dissolved toxic compounds, was observed floating on the surface water of the East Ditch, which borders the site on its eastern edge.

That surface water ditch is not isolated. It empties into a northwest-trending ditch that extends to Tule Lake, a natural water body. The federal government’s response to observed LNAPL in December 2017 was to install a sediment cap in a limited portion of the ditch. That cap had to be extended in February 2020 because contamination continued spreading. The EPA continues to oversee the cap’s maintenance today, meaning the contamination is still actively migrating and still requires ongoing physical intervention to contain.

Multiple underground pipelines transporting a variety of products run through the site in multiple directions, creating additional risk vectors for chemical migration and cross-contamination. The site’s North Pit area, adjacent to the East Ditch, contains metals including lead, mercury, selenium, and zinc in the soil, compounds that persist in the environment for decades and bioaccumulate in wildlife and plant life.

Public Health

The specific chemical profile of this site represents a compounded public health catastrophe. Benzene causes leukemia and other blood cancers, with no exposure threshold below which risk disappears. Arsenic causes bladder, lung, kidney, and skin cancers. Lead permanently impairs neurological development in children, lowering IQ, increasing impulsivity, and contributing to behavioral disorders. Mercury targets the central nervous system and kidneys. Chromium in industrial waste form causes lung cancer. Every single one of these substances is confirmed present at the Brine Service Company Superfund site.

The 2018 Remedial Investigation specifically identified benzene and arsenic in the South Pit area “at concentrations that pose a risk to human health.” This was not a hypothetical or precautionary finding. This was a federal scientific determination that the levels of known human carcinogens in the ground at this location present a measurable, documented risk to human health. The investigation also identified light non-aqueous phase liquid in the groundwater and residual waste material in the South Pit as requiring active remediation.

Goodyear’s tire shop operation on the North Pit from 2000 to 2014 adds a direct occupational health dimension to this story. Workers at that tire shop spent years in physical contact with a site that already contained lead and volatile organic compounds in the soil, and Goodyear was simultaneously adding more lead to it through disposed wheel weights. Those workers had no documented reason to believe the ground beneath them was a Superfund site, because Goodyear has not been shown to have disclosed that fact to them.

Economic Inequality

The Brine Service Company Superfund site sits in what the federal complaint describes as “a predominantly industrial and petrochemical refining area” west of downtown Corpus Christi. Industrial and petrochemical corridors in Texas are systematically located in lower-income communities and communities of color, a pattern documented by environmental justice researchers for decades. The families who live closest to sites like this one are those with the least economic power to relocate, the least political power to demand accountability, and the fewest resources to seek medical care for the health consequences of chronic chemical exposure.

The $568,694 (enough to cover rent for roughly 47 families for a full year) that American taxpayers paid for EPA response actions through July 2023 represents money that should have come from the corporations that created the contamination. Instead, that cost was transferred to the public while Energy Transfer, El Paso LLC, El Paso Merchant Energy, and Goodyear continued operating as profitable corporations. The federal lawsuit exists precisely because these companies have not voluntarily reimbursed a single dollar of that public expenditure.

Future cleanup costs at the site remain undetermined and ongoing. The federal government is seeking not only reimbursement for the $568,694 already spent, but also a declaratory judgment making all four defendants jointly and severally liable for every future dollar of cleanup costs. Those future costs could far exceed what has already been spent, and every day they go unpaid is another day the public absorbs the financial consequences of private industrial contamination.

What Now? Who’s Watching, and What You Can Do

The Corporations Currently Named in the Federal Lawsuit

• Energy Transfer (R&M), LLC — Corporate successor to Sunoco, Sun Oil, and Suntide Refining Company
• El Paso, LLC — Corporate successor to Coastal States Gas Producing Company and Valero Energy Company
• El Paso Merchant Energy-Petroleum Company — Corporate successor to Coastal States Petrochemical Company
• The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company — Headquartered 200 Innovation Way, Akron, Ohio 44316

Regulatory Watchlist: These Agencies Have Authority Here

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 6 — Dallas, TX — Overseeing cleanup and enforcement at the site
• U.S. Department of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division — Filed and is prosecuting the federal lawsuit
• Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) — State-level environmental regulator with jurisdiction over this site
• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — Energy Transfer is a publicly traded entity; environmental liabilities must be disclosed to investors
• Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — Relevant to the occupational exposure of workers at Goodyear’s tire shop on the contaminated North Pit

What Residents and Organizers Can Do Right Now

The federal lawsuit is public record and the EPA Superfund process includes required community participation windows. Corpus Christi residents and environmental justice advocates can contact EPA Region 6 directly to request community briefings on the cleanup status, submit formal public comments during any future remedial action proposals, and connect with Texas-based environmental justice organizations that have existing relationships with TCEQ and EPA. Building local pressure through neighborhood associations, mutual aid networks, and connections to national environmental justice organizations like Earthjustice or the Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s.) translates directly into amplified scrutiny on the corporations still fighting reimbursement. These companies respond to legal costs and reputational pressure; both increase when communities stay organized and loud.