The Cancer Belt
People around Port Neches like to say that the odor from the chemical plants nearby is the smell of money. But it could also be the smell of death.
Theresa says: They should track the children of the area to adulthood. Not only does my class have an inordinate number of cancers, there are many autoimmune disorders. Class of 71 PNG, Lupus sufferer Mother died of cancer, Aunt died of cancer, great aunt cancer. (October 22nd, 2011 at 8:36am)
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Some scientists and the perrochemica; industry in general argue that chemical; have “threshold limit values” (TLVs) of exposure below which the chemicals do not have carcinogenic effects. These values are often expressed in terms of air sample measures, such as pans per million (ppm) or parts per billion (ppb). Other scientists, however, say there is no way of establishing a safe level of exposure to any carcinogen. In either case, there is no doubt that those who live near petrochemical plants are exposed to many of the same chemicals as those who actually work in the plants. A study by the Stanford Research Institute found that six million people living in the general vicinity of petrochemical plants in Texas, California, Louisiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey were exposed to atmospheric benzene in the 0.1 to 1 ppb range. The study also found that the 64,000 people who lived closest to the plants were exposed to atmospheric benzene concentrations as high as 2 ppb. These exposures are considerably below the current federal standard of 10 ppm for benzene. But government health and safety agencies have tried unsuccessfully to lower the standard to 1 ppm, and if those who challenge the concept of TLVs are right, any exposure to benzene should be avoided.
The scientific debate aside, industrial cancer is a touchy subject. Neither the companies that manage the plants nor the people who work in them like to talk about it, much less take action. In fact, a recurring theme in the history of petrochemicals and cancer—and the history of the Port Neches cases—is the reluctance of chemical company employees and their relatives to bite the hand that feeds them. The story of Carlos Dwight Stokes and the “community cancer” cases of Port Neches does not answer all the questions about cancer and petrochemical plants. But it does tell a great deal about what the petrochemical companies, federal agencies, the State of Texas, local governments, and private citizens are doing—and not doing—to investigate and combat the suspected health hazards of the Gulf Coast cancer belt.
The story really begins 49 years before the birth of Carlos Dwight Stokes, on January 10, 1901, when a gusher of an oil well came in at Spindlstop outside Beaumont and the Golden Triangle became the birthplace of the modern oil industry. As the Spindletop Monument rightly notes, the well ushered in “a new era in civilization.” The first phase of that era was symbolized by the automobile. The second phase has been symbolized by the manufacture of petrochemicals, the alchemy of the twentieth century that turns crude oil into everything from plastic heart pumps and rubber tires to polyester clothing. The concentration of oil refineries in the Golden Triangle has been increasing ever since Spindletop, but the first big petrochemical plants—the installations that made not just gasoline but all sorts of plastics and synthetics—came in with World War II. The Golden Triangle, nestled by the waters of the Sabine and Neches rivers and Sabine Lake in the far southeastern corner of the state, offered a man-enhanced inland harbor with access to the Gulf of Mexico as well as proximity to the major oil fields of Texas and Louisiana. The big oil companies and the U.S. government recognized the area’s vast potential as an industrial center.
In the early forties the government, badly needing rubber for the war effort, decided to build the world’s largest synthetic rubber plant in Port Neches, a riverside hamlet in the middle of the Golden Triangle. Though owned by the government, the plant was operated by private companies—first Goodrich, then Firestone as well, then U.S. Rubber, Gulf, and Texaco. Within the chain link fence tnai enclosed the plant was a series of steel tanks and columns and chemical reactors and process rooms whose features seemed drawn from a science fiction novel. The raw material that went into the plant was two chemicals: styrene, a liquid, and butadiene, a gas. The stuff that came out of it was a solid—little flakes of rubber crushed and packed into 75-pound bales. In between, the styrene and butadiene were mixed with a soap solution in five-thousand-gallon glass-lined catalytic reactor vessels. After a fourteen-hour run through the reactors, what came out was a milky liquid that was rubber in latex form, as well as quantities of unused styrene and butadiene. The chemicals were sent back to a recovery unit, and the latex went on to a process building, where it was fed into blend tanks and mixed with antioxidants. From the blend tanks the latex flowed into a coagulation unit to be combined with water, acid, and salt solutions. At this point the rubber became chunky like a sponge. It was then sent to dryer rooms, where it was dried out with applications of heat. Finally, a hydraulic machine compressed the chunks of rubber into bales, which were then loaded onto railroad cars and shipped away to be made into tires and thousands of other styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) products that would spur America on to victory.
For all its wondrousness, this synthetic-rubber-making process involved some rather ominous chemical compounds. One of them was benzene, a basic component of styrene, which in turn was a basic component of SBR. As early as 1897 a German scientist recognized benzene as a skin irritant to both humans and animals. From the twenties through the forties European researchers published several studies linking exposure to benzene to the development of leukemia. But in the United States there was not much scientific literature on the ill effects of benzene, and American industry was using it widely. In gasoline refining, which took place at several plants in the Port Neches vicinity, benzene was a major by-product.
The synthetic-rubber-making recipe at Goodrich also required a purple, powdery chemical called phenylbetanaphthylamine (PBNA). PBNA was used to retard oxidation and was mixed with the latex just before coagulation. Part of a chemical family known as aromatic amines, PBNA was itself derived from a chemical called betanaphthylamine, or BNA. BNA had also been studied by the Germans back in the 1890s; they found a link between BNA exposure and bladder cancer. In the twenties English researchers attempted to detoxify BNA but discovered that people exposed to it still showed a high rate of bladder cancer. Just before World War II a Du Pont chemist reconfirmed that BNA has carcinogenic effects. Then, as the war intensified demand for synthetic rubber, Goodrich chemists mixed BNA with phenyl to create PBNA. According to one former Goodrich employee now suing the company, Goodrich told its employees that PBNA was not toxic even though the company had not done any studies on the chemical and did not really know whether it was toxic or not.
Both government and industry scientists attribute the failure to test PBNA to the rushed atmosphere of World War II and to the fact that it was not standard procedure to test chemicals at the time. As Dr. Walter Harris of Uniroyal puts it, “In those days, people didn’t know chemicals had long-term effects. It just wasn’t part of their thinking, especially not with the war effort going on.”
The synihetic-rubber-making process also produced a by-product that some of the men at the plant referred to as “gunk.” Gunk was a black, gummy substance that was always clogging up the dryers. It was a serious maintenance problem because cleaning it out required shutting down the production line. Then the gunk had to be taken outside and burned. No one knew exactly what the stuff was, and hence the unscientific name.
According to several current and former petrochemical plant employees, in the early days plant safety precautions in Port Neches and all along the Texas Gulf Coast were stringent where accident prevention was concerned but haphazard about exposure to chemicals. During plant shutdowns men worked on valves and pipes without gloves. At some plants they even washed their hands in solvents containing benzene, since, like gasoline, it effectively removed grease and grime. At night the plant workers went home with the sharp smell of styrene and the sweet odor of butadiene all over them. Their wives would make them peel off their clothes at the door, but many say the stench of the rubber plant never really left their husbands’ hair and skin.
In fact, the smell of the plants was the first thing newcomers to Port Neches noticed: Port Neches and the rest of the Golden Triangle exuded stenches that were described as smelling like anything from burning cabbage to burning skunk. One Port Neches woman whose family migrated to the area recalls that because the odor hit her when she crossed the bridge at the state line, she and her sisters began to call their new home “stinky Texas.” In Port Neches the odors emanated in part from the dryers in the rubber plant, which were vented right into the atmosphere. Vapors also came off the chemical tanks in the half-open pigment building, where solutions were prepared for the reactors.
Besides the stench, life in the Golden Triangle carried odder hazards. There were days when many of the residents of Port Neches and the surrounding towns woke up to find that the paint on their houses had turned black from the sulfur compounds emitted by some of the nearby plants. But such episodes hardly outweighed the primary attractions of the petrochemical plants: jobs and money. Houses could always be repainted. And after a while people began not to notice the smell. What was more, no one suspected—or wanted to suspect—that living near petrochemical plants might be not just unpleasant but dangerous as well.
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