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.

by Harry Hurt III

May 1981

(Page 3 of 6)

Appropriately enough, the first warning of possible health hazards occurred only when a problem developed that threatened to devastate the operating efficiency of the plants. About a year after they opened, the synthetic rubber plants in Port Neches and elsewhere began to produce an unintended by-product nicknamed “popcorn polymers.” This substance, a compound of styrene and butadiene, got its name because it was white and hard and resembled kernels of popcorn. As time passed, the production of popcorn polymers increased. They began to clog pipelines, storage tanks, and distilling columns and even buckled con- densers and bent pipes. Soon it became necessary to shut down the plant every so often to clean out the popcorn polymers.

In 1947-48 a team of scientists from Johns Hopkins University conducted a government-sponsored study of the popcorn polymer problem at several rubber plants, aimed at finding a way to stop the growth of popcorn polymers. Among the plants studied was the Goodrich plant in Port Neches. In the course of its research, the Hopkins team found that the popcorn polymers were created by the formation of butadiene peroxide, which in turn was formed by an unintended reaction between butadiene and the peroxides used in the rubber-making process. In fact, the study showed that the Goodrich plant in Port Neches had the second-highest butadiene peroxide level of all plants in the nation, with 1560 ppm in samples, compared to an average of 150 to 700 ppm in other plants. As the researchers pointed out, the peroxides that formed the popcorn polymers were highly explosive and represented a real danger to the workers in the plant.

Following the Hopkins study, the workers at the Port Neches plant were told about the explosive potential of butadiene peroxide, and the plants began pumping sodium nitrite into the rubber mix to prevent the formation of popcorn polymers. The remedy worked, and the problem soon became a thing of the past. There was no move to run further tests on butadiene peroxide to see if it had any other harmful properties besides explosiveness. And the men who had been exposed to butadiene peroxide simply continued working at their jobs, just as they always had.

In 1955 the government decided to sell its giant Port Neches rubber plant. In order to avoid handing such a plum to just one company, the government sold one half to a partnership of B. F. Goodrich and Gulf (Gulf sold its interest to Goodrich in 1966) and the other to a partnership of Texaco and U.S. Rubber called Texas-U.S. Chemical. Since these companies were already operating the plant, the change in ownership did not bring with it any change in safety procedures. The Port Neches plants, which by that time were neighbors to several other petrochemical plants, continued to operate as they had in the past.

Carlos Dwight Stokes was born in Andalusia, Alabama, on March 2, 1949, about a year after the completion of the Johns Hopkins study of popcorn polymers. When Carlos was two months old, his father, an insurance salesman, moved the family first to Orange and then to Beaumont, where they lived in a house about a quarter-mile from a large Mobil Oil refinery. After spending about a year in that part of town, the family moved to North Beaumont, several miles from the refineries, and it was there that Carlos entered elementary school. A few years later, Carlos’s father took a job at the Goodrich plant in Port Neches. For a while he commuted to work from Beaumont. Then, in the fall of 1959, the family moved to Port Neches permanently.

The first place they lived was an apartment on Avenue E, just two blocks from the giant Goodrich and Texas-U.S. Chemical plants. After three months they moved to a red-shingled house at 422 Lotton Drive. Although it wasn’t right next to the plants as the apartment had been, the Stokeses’ new home was not far from them. Jefferson Chemical was a mile and a half away; Goodrich and Texas-U.S. Chemical were a mile away; Neches Butane was only half a mile. Here, in a working-class subdivision full of families whose breadwinners worked in the plants, Carlos Dwight Stokes spent the next eleven years of his life.

Like most of the other kids in his neighborhood, Carlos attended the local public schools. From fourth grade to sixth grade he went to Ridgewood Elementary, which was located about a mile and a quarter from the petrochemical plants. Then he went to Port Neches Junior High School, just a half-mile from the plants, and finally to Port Neches-Groves High School, only a few blocks from the plants. None of these schools were air-conditioned at the time Carlos attended them, so their windows were often open to the malodorous winds blowing over from the plants.

After graduating from Port Neches-Groves in the spring of 1968, Carlos enrolled in the College of Technical Arts at Lamar Tech in Beaumont (now Lamar University). The classrooms of Lamar were even closer to the local plants than the buildings of Port Neches-Groves High School had been. Three major plants— Mobil Chemical, PPG Industries, and the Olin Corporation—were adjacent to the campus. Since the early forties, pollution from the petrochemical plants had been a constant presence at the school. First the trees would not grow. Then came instances of coughing and wheezing among the students. In 1964, four years before Carlos Stokes enrolled, the Olin plant accidentally released a cloud of sulfuric acid that actually gave people sunburn and ate up women’s nylon hose. Two years later a heavy concentration of sulfur trioxide wafted across the campus. When combined with moist air, sulfur trioxide forms an acid rain that, as its name implies, descends on buildings, trees, and people. Dr. E. A. Eads, a Lamar University chemist, noticed that the mortar between the bricks of the campus buildings was being eroded and concluded that the cause of the erosion was the pollutants in the air. In 1972, chemical discharges from the plants knocked out the electrical system in Cardinal Stadium and began eating the paint off the bleachers; the university assessed the damage at $225,000. Although there were no such dramatic pollution episodes during Carlos Stokes’s days at Lamar, he attended machinist training classes amid a continual barrage of odor and particulate pollution that appeared to emanate from the neighboring petrochemical plants.

After completing two years of study at Lamar, Carlos left school, married Mary Evelyn Lawson, a young woman he had met working summers at a TG&Y store, and got a job in Beaumont as a machinist with the American-Darling Valve Company. Then he was drafted. He trained at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and Fort Knox, Kentucky, and was sent to Kitzingen, West Germany, as a tank crewman.

It was about this time—late 1970 and early 1971—that Carlos started getting sick. While serving in Kentucky and West Germany, he repeatedly had strep throat, coughs, and high fevers. “Sometimes he would just cough himself down to nothing,” his widow remembers. “When he couldn’t stand it, he would go to a doctor. But Carlos was such a big-built person, over two hundred pounds, he would work even though he was sick.” Though Carlos and his family took his illnesses with the seriousness they seemed to merit at the time, no one, least of all Carlos himself, suspected that his life might be in danger.

When his Army tour expired, Carlos came back to the Golden Triangle and settled into a place on the Twin City Highway in Port Neches—within two miles of at least half a dozen petrochemical plants. Since the plants offered the best-paying jobs in the area, Carlos hoped to work in one himself. But when he went for an interview at Goodrich, he was told he was overweight and could not be hired. He then started a low-calorie diet and went back to work as a machinist at the American-Darling Valve Company in Beaumont, planning to slim down enough to get a job at Goodrich. A short time later his wife became pregnant with their first child.

In the fall of 1972 Carlos Stokes got sick again. It started with a runny nose, backaches, and a cough laced with blood. He went to a doctor in the nearby town of Nederland, who diagnosed his condition as sinusitis and treated him with anti- biotics. The treatment seemed to work, and Carlos felt fine for about two months. Then the runny nose and the bloody cough returned, this time accompanied by a fever of 102 degrees. Carlos went to a doctor in Port Neches, who treated him with more antibiotics. Again, the drugs seemed to work—but only for a few weeks. One day in November 1972, he came home early from work with a nose-bleed. It stopped when he applied a cold compress, but Carlos, who had lost about thirty pounds on his diet, still felt weak. About two weeks after the nosebleed episode he had a fever of 104 degrees accompanied by chills and faintness. The next day he was admitted to Mid-Jefferson County Hospital, where an x-ray revealed a touch of pneumonia in his right lung. A blood test showed that Carlos was anemic.

Unable to make a complete diagnosis of Carlos’s low blood count, the doctors at Mid-Jefferson County Hospital transferred him to Methodist Hospital in Houston for further tests and observation. Two days later the Methodist doctors diagnosed Carlos’s condition as acute myelogenous leukemia. As his physician noted, Carlos was only 23 years old, did not smoke or drink alcohol, and worked in a machine shop where he was “not exposed to any industrial fumes or chemicals.” His family had no history of serious illness.

The doctors put Carlos on a course of chemotherapy, which appeared to be just what he needed. After a two-week stay at Methodist, Carlos started feeling better, and he was released from the hospital with instructions to return for more treatment in two weeks.

The improvement did not last long. Within a week of his release he was back at the hospital complaining of chills, high fever, headaches, pain, and skin infections on his face, arms, and legs. The doctors readmitted him and put him on antibiotics. He stayed in the hospital for fifteen days, responding well to his treatment. By late January he seemed well enough to go home to Port Neches.

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