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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Besides lodging their complaints against the same companies, Bodie Pryor and Mary Stokes Johnson (after Carlos’s death she married his best friend, Tommy Johnson, but the marriage later ended in divorce and she has now remarried once more) had something else in common: their lawyer. His name was William Townsley, and he was a Beaumont plaintiffs attorney and an active environmentalist. Townsley formed a working association with the Houston firm of Kronzer, Abraham, and Watkins (the former law firm of former attorney general John Hill), with an eye to using both the Pryor case and the Stokes case to open up a whole new area of community cancer lawsuits and at the same time force the petrochemical companies to clean up their plants. As Townsley saw it, the only way to get the companies to act responsibly was to make them “pick up the tab for their damages.” If they do, of course, Townsley himself will become a wealthy man.
The investigations and lawsuits involving the Port Neches cancer cases apparently prompted the local petrochemical companies to institute some new safety and health measures. Shortly after the NIOSH team arrived on the scene, the rubber plants began monitoring their workers for benzene exposure. Goodrich also stopped using PBNA and replaced it with another antioxidant. According to Pryor, the decision to stop using PBNA came after a 1976 Wall Street Journal article reported findings of’ high cancer rates among rocket fuel workers exposed to PBNA. Pryor says Goodrich did not tell its workers why PBNA was being discontinued.
About the time the leukemia cases came to light, NIOSH came out with a stronger stand against benzene. The institute recommended that OSHA reduce the benzene standard from 10 ppm to 1 ppm, adding that it could not determine that there was in fact any safe level of exposure to benzene. In 1977 OSHA issued non-binding guidelines calling for a benzene standard of 1 ppm. That same year the Environmental Protection Agency listed benzene as a hazardous air pollutant under section 112 of the Clean Air Act. The National Association of Petroleum Refiners and other industry groups im- mediately attacked the more stringent benzene guidelines as unfair, claiming that the new standard would cost industry up to $500 million to implement. The two sides eventually went to court over the standard, and in the summer of 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the industry, saying that the government was empowered only to guarantee a “safe” workplace, not a “risk-free” one.
Meanwhile, the subject of cancer and petrochemical plants was becoming a hot topic in the scientific community. Along with the NIOSH investigation of the Port Neches rubber plants came announcements of separate studies of cancer risks at other petrochemical plants along the Texas Gulf Coast. The National Cancer Institute undertook a study of cancer among petrochemical workers at three Texas refineries. The University of Texas School of Public Health began studies of both occupationally related cancers and cancer rates in communities surrounding petrochemical plants on the Texas Gulf Coast. And several of the major petrochemical companies began studies of the possible links between cancer and petrochemical plants.
William Townsley started his own informal health investigation of leukemia among Port Neches-Groves High School graduates. He quickly learned of three other leukemia deaths besides that of Carlos Stokes. All three cases involved males who had graduated from Port Neches-Groves High School between 1964 and 1974. In addition, Townsley learned of four cases of Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes, among male Port Neches-Groves graduates. According to available epidemiological data, the expected incidence of leukemia death in a population the size of the male student body attending Port Neches-Groves High School during the sixties and early seventies was less than one.
Believing that, at the very least, his findings called for further inquiries by competent medical authorities, Townsley wrote the Texas Department of Health informing it of the four graduates’ deaths and asking the department to launch its own investigation of the situation. He also contacted the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta but learned that the CDC was unable to act on his information without first being invited to Port Neches by the Department of Health. For reasons that the two bureaucracies now dispute, the CDC and the Department of Health could not find a way to work together. Although its primary job is controlling communicable diseases like the flu and it is limited in staff and resources, the Department of Health decided to handle the situation on its own.
In the spring of 1979 the department began an inquiry into the incidence of leukemia among former Port Neches-Groves High School students. But instead of studying male former students or the entire former student population of the sixties and seventies, the Department of Health confined the study to leukemia deaths (rather than all leukemia incidents) among female former students. Dr. Richard Donelson, the study’s director, says the decision to study females was made with the full knowledge that the incidence of leukemia among males is more than a third higher than the incidence among females. He says the Department of Health investigators felt that by studying females they would be better able to study the problem of community cancer rates, since there was less chance that females would have been exposed to cancer-causing chemicals through summer or part-time jobs in the plants.
The Texas Department of Health released its final report on the Port Neches-Groves High School study in the summer of 1980. After stating that it had not found even one female former student who had died of leukemia, the study concluded that “acknowledging the expressed limitations of the data produced, there is no reason to believe, based on this study that PNGHS students have been at greater risk of developing leukemia than graduates of the average Texas high school.” Donelson told the press that Port Neches students and their families could find “comfort” in the study’s findings. Dr. Jerome Greenberg, a deputy commissioner of the Department of Health, added that there was “no indication for a need for further study in the school.” In short, the Department of Health left the very distinct impression that the whole issue of community cancer in the area was a tempest in a teapot and that the citizens and students of Port Neches had nothing to worry about.
The Department of Health appears to have been over-optimistic. Bodie Pryor recently generated a list of more US han 25 people associated with Port Neches-Groves High School who have been diagnosed in the past ten years as having some form of cancer; the list, admittedly unscientific, includes students, staff, and faculty members who had never worked in the plants. Although the Department of Health plans no follow-up study of the school, Donelson now calls the department’s report “kind of a pilot study.” He acknowledges that “in retrospect” he was “a little overconservative” in his design of the study and that “it would have been feasible to study both males and females.” And while he maintains that he would feel safe in sending his own son to Port Neches-Groves High School if he lived in the community, he admits he would be “hesitant about having him work in the plants.”
In recent months, separate studies by the National Cancer Institute and NIOSH have reported increased rates of cancer among petrochemical workers at the Dow Chemical plant in Freeport, the Union Carbide plant in Texas City, the Texaco plant and the Gulf refinery in Port Arthur, and the Mobil refinery in Beaumont. Among other findings, these studies have shown incidences of brain cancer death as much as five times the expected rate for the general population and of lung cancer death as high as twice the normal rate, as well as higher incidences of stomach, kidney, and blood cancer.
Preliminary results from the NIOSH study of the Port Neches rubber plants begun in 1976 report three times the expected number of leukemia deaths among people employed at the Goodrich plant between 1943 and 1976. Although NIOSH found the expected number of deaths at the Texas-U.S. Chemical plant next door, the study noted that there were no data available on workers employed there before 1950. Because of the small size of the population under study, NIOSH reported that “the excesses of cancer were not statistically significant” but also noted that the basic findings—that there were excess deaths—were “consistent with other researches in the field.” OSHA now classifies “styrene and butadiene and other rubber manufacture” in the category of suspected carcinogens.
But while these government and union-associated studies have been finding increased cancer risk in the plants, company-sponsored studies have been reporting no increased risk. So although certain data, as well as smell and intuition, suggest that petrochemical plants do pose health risks for their workers, the matter is not yet settled among scientists.
Working conditions in plants in Port Neches and elsewhere on the Texas Gulf Coast have changed considerably in the wake of the environmentalist pressures of the seventies. Most chemicals, and especially known or suspected carcinogens, are processed in closed systems that prevent them from coming in contact with the workers or with the atmosphere. There is an evident concern with safety and health monitoring that did not exist in the early days. And the companies, including Goodrich, have cooperated with various government cancer studies by providing personnel data.
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