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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When Carlos went back for a checkup in late February 1973 his doctor noted that “he was feeling quite well except that he noticed that his strength was not yet up to par and this is not surprising since he has been so inactive for such a long time.” He added that Carlos appeared to be “in complete remission from his acute leukemic process.”
But Carlos was back in the hospital the following month. This time he was suffering from stomach pains, nausea, and vomiting. Because of his upset stomach, Carlos had decreased his food intake and was subsisting on liquids and cereals. He had lost ten pounds since his release from the hospital three weeks earlier. According to his wife, his weight was down to about 150 pounds, his hair was falling out, and his legs hurt so badly that he could not even stand for the bedsheets to touch them. The Methodist doctors again diagnosed his condition as acute myelogenous leukemia, with the probable added complication of a lower digestive tract obstruction. Carlos stayed in the hospital for another month, showed marked improvement, and again went home to Port Neches.
On June 22, 1973, Mary gave birth to a healthy eight-pound, nine-ounce son that the couple named Jason Dwight Stokes, and soon Carlos himself began to grow healthier. His blood count steadily improved, and the pains and coughs of a few months before ceased. By October he was so much better that his doctor could report that his most recent examination was “completely negative and he appeared to be in excellent health.” It seemed that Carlos might win his battle with leukemia.
Then, in mid-June 1974, just after Mary had become pregnant with their second child, Carlos took sick again and went back to Methodist. He was put on a number of antibiotic programs, but none of them seemed to work. Because of “extreme hypoxia”—that is, oxygen deficiency—he was admitted to the intensive care unit, but his condition got worse. The cancer infiltrated his spleen, his lymph nodes, and his bone marrow. He developed kidney and stomach infections and came down with pneumonia again. Finally, these multiple sicknesses simply overwhelmed him. On the afternoon of July 20, 1974, 25-year-old Carlos Dwight Stokes died.
The official cause of the death of Carlos Stokes was acute myelogenous leukemia. In the late fifties, researchers in the United States, following up on earlier European findings, had begun turning out studies showing apparent links between exposure to benzene and the onset of leukemia—specifically, acute myelogenous leukemia. In 1963 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare published findings that blood cancer death rates were 54 per cent higher among synthetic rubber workers than among workers in other industries. In 1970 the newly created Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) adopted a “consensus standard” for benzene of 10 ppm with permissible excursions up to 50 ppm. But according to one later government report, occupational health hazards in the rubber industry were still considered “minimal or nonexistent” in the mid-seventies. Besides, in the case of Carlos Stokes, who never worked in a petrochemical plant, there was no history of exposure to industrial chemicals—or so it first appeared.
It took two more years and two more deaths to prompt even a preliminary investigation into the possible link between leukemia and the rubber plants of Port Neches. The deaths occurred in early 1976. This time the people who died had worked in the plants, specifically Goodrich and Texas-U.S. Chemical. What was more, they were members of the Port Neches local of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW), and their deaths attracted the attention of the local union leadership. The union men began talking among themselves and soon discovered that several other members also had leukemia. The OCAW complained to the management at Goodrich and Texas-U.S. The companies, in turn, agreed to call in the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to investigate the leukemia deaths.
The NIOSH representatives visited the Port Neches rubber plants in the summer of 1976 and quickly uncovered eight cases of leukemia among past and present employees. Six of the victims had already died of the disease. These cases persuaded NIOSH to commence a full-scale study of 5600 men who had worked at the rubber plants between the mid-forties and the late seventies.
The investigators soon met a ninth leukemia victim who was doing some investigating of his own. His name was Bodie C. Pryor, and he was not a union worker but a former Goodrich technical manager with a chemical engineering degree from Columbia University. In 1965 Pryor had left Goodrich to take a job at the Gulf refinery in Orange. He became the plant’s first environmental engineering and industrial hygiene manager, a position that had been created in response to pressure from the government and environmental groups. Though he generally told plant employees just what his superiors had told him about the hazards —or lack of hazards—in the plant, Pryor took his new job seriously and began reading up on the chemicals used in petrochemical plants.
“I became more and more aware of what the companies had been hiding all those years,” Pryor recalled later. “The more I read, the more I realized that diseases in the plants were coming from the workplace and the environment and that the management of the plants was handing out a bunch of baloney in saying that the chemicals did not hurt you.”
In 1973 Pryor learned that he had cancer of the kidney. Three years later he discovered that he also had leukemia. He did not reveal the leukemia to anyone outside his immediate family and was especially careful not to discuss it with the other men at the plant. He did not want them to pity him or try to do extra work to help him out. More than that, he did not want to appear to be a complainer.
“It’s a subtle pressure you’re working under at a plant,” he explained years later. “I would probably have been fired, downgraded, or stalemated if I’d filed a lawsuit before retirement. The company denies it, but it’s understood by everyone who works there even though it isn’t written down. Things like that are all hushed up.”
In the meantime, Pryor started thinking about the possible causes of his cancers and remembered the 1948 Johns Hopkins study on popcorn polymers from his early days at the Goodrich rubber plant. He tracked down one of the doctors involved in the study and got a copy of the report, which had noted the presence of butadiene peroxide in the plant. Pryor then consulted some standard toxicology books and found a 1967 edition of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology that listed butadiene peroxide as a chemical known to cause leukemia. This discovery seemed to Pryor to confirm what he already suspected—that the chemicals he had worked around were the cause of his illness.
When Pryor heard that the NIOSH team was going to study the Port Neches rubber plants, he secretly contacted the investigators and offered to cooperate on a confidential basis. His cooperation did not remain confidential for long. In 1978 NIOSH mentioned to Goodrich that besides the eight plant-worker leukemia victims it had found another man with leukemia who was a former “process engineer and technical manager” who had gone on to another job in 1965. It did not take long for the management at Goodrich to realize that that person was Bodie Pryor.
In 1978, at the age of 64, Pryor retired from his job with Gulf. A few months later he filed a seven-figure lawsuit against Goodrich, Gulf, and most of the other major petrochemical companies operating in the Golden Triangle. His suit charged that the plants’ pollution had caused his leukemia.
Pryor says his suit led the management at Goodrich to hold up his pension. Month after month, he says, he inquired as to the whereabouts of his pension checks and got no response. Finally, after nearly two years had passed, he called Goodrich plant manager Donald Boumans and threatened to take his case to the news media. Boumans, Pryor says, begged him to hold off a little longer until he had time to look into the complaint. A few more days passed, and Pryor contacted a Beaumont reporter just as he had threatened. The next day he got an envelope by express mail that contained a check for twenty months’ back pension. Goodrich won’t comment on the matter.
Within a few days of his filing suit, Pryor’s telephone began ringing with calls gp from other Golden Triangle people who had leukemia or other forms of cancer or knew of people who did. Soon Pryor began his own amateur epidemiological investigation, compiling names and addresses and short case histories of cancer victims in the area.
One of those who heard of Pryor and his lawsuit against the petrochemical companies was Mary Evelyn Stokes Johnson, the widow of Carlos Dwight Stokes. Carlos’s death had left his wife with one small child, one unborn child, and not much means of support. She decided to follow Bodie Pryor’s lead. In the fall of 1978 she filed a $3.5 million suit against Goodrich, Neches Butane, Texas-U.S. Chemical, and 26 other companies with petrochemical plants in the Golden Triangle, alleging that the pollution emitted by the plants had caused Carlos Stokes’s leukemia and his death. Goodrich will not comment on anything relating to the Stokes and Pryor suits, which are still pending.
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