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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At the same time, there is no evidence that the petrochemical companies have been leading an aggressive campaign to police themselves. Goodrich did come forward in 1974 with reports about rare liver cancers that some of its vinyl chloride workers in Ohio developed, but its approach to styrene, which has some chemical similarities to vinyl chloride, has been to give styrene’s possible links to cancer the benefit of the doubt at every turn. For example, during depositions in the Stokes case. Dr. M. N. Johnson, Goodrich environmental health projects administrator, admitted that he had not consulted either Toxline or Medline, the two basic medical information services, for the available literature on styrene. Johnson also said he had not conducted any independent tests on styrene.
There is not likely to be much government pressure on the industry in the near future. The Reagan Administration has made it clear that it intends to roll back the aggressive environmental efforts of the federal government, and the Texas Air Control Board is not authorized to test chemicals in use in the petrochemical plants. Although the board can refer complaints to the state attorney general’s office for prosecution, it usually favors what it calls voluntary compliance.
So the question of community cancer is not likely to be resolved soon—not least because most people in job-rich Port Neches and other petrochemical industry towns don’t have it at the top of their list of priorities. Dr. Thomas Huff, the Port Neches school superintendent, pledges to cooperate with any legitimate health studies, just as his predecessor cooperated with the Department of Health. But he carefully avoids saying whether or not there is an increased risk of cancer in attending Port Neches-Groves High School; his position is that he does not have the scientific expertise to interpret the results of recent studies. He goes on to say that the local plants are “not a nuisance” and that he personally is “not aware of any harmful effects” from working in them. His general impression of the Stokes case and Townsley’s efforts to spur a medical inquiry was, he says, that “the lawyer was trying to get the Health Department to try his case for him.”
Port Neches’s mayor, Gary Graham, is also reluctant to question the local petrochemical industry. A management employee at one of the plants (he asked that the name of his employer not be mentioned), Graham lost a seven-year-old daughter to leukemia. “I wish to God it had been me rather than her,” he says. “But I can’t fault the people who fed me all my life. My daddy worked for an oil company, and I’ve worked in the industry for thirty-one years.” He says he doubts that the pollution from the plants was to blame for his daughter’s illness. “The sad part in this whole thing,” he says, referring to the four Port Neches-Groves High School graduates who died of leukemia, “is that you’re talking four people, in this is instance, when thousands of people are dying from cigarette smoking in this country every year. Drunk drivers kill fifty at thousand people every year. Where are our priorities? Where is our perspective? We’re gagging a gnat and keeping a whole it log in our eye.”
When the Stokes suit was filed back in ie 1978 many students at Port Neches-Groves High School apparently took the matter as something of a joke, and several ran up and down the halls teasing each other by saying, “Don’t touch me or you’ll get cancer.” Even some of the parents of children who have suffered or died from various forms of cancer are, like Mayor Graham, reluctant to blame their children’s illnesses on the plants. As one mother put it, “Those plants are my bread and butter. If we were to pick up and leave tomorrow, someone else would come in and take our jobs.”
The former Mary Stokes now lives in a new one-story brick home in a Port Arthur subdivision. The Port Neches city limita are only a few blocks away, and the towers of the petrochemical plants are visible on all horizons. Visitors to the house are greeted by a cheerful blonde, blue-eyed little girl, six years old.
The little girl’s name is Angela Denise Stokes, and she is the child with whom Mary Stokes was pregnant when Carlos died of leukemia. Mary is now married to a man named Reeves. She too is blonde and blue-eyed, with a round face and a pleasant disposition. The Reeveses want to move one day to a chicken ranch in East Texas. But for now Mary’s husband, like most of the men in the area, works in one of the local plants. He has also been married before, but his first wife died of breast cancer. “‘Cancer’ is a word we listen to in this family,” Mary Stokes Reeves says softly, as she pours coffee at the kitchen table.
Early this spring Mary learned of still another cancer case close to home. The victim is a young man only 21 years old. He lives in Port Neches, one street over from where Carlos Dwight Stokes used to live, just a short distance from the plants. He is a graduate of Port Neches-Groves High School. Recently he was diagnosed as having a lymphoma. Mary knows the young man well. She used to baby-sit for him when he was growing up. No one knows whether the young man’s illness was caused by living near the local petrochemical plants, but it is clear that Mary believes it was. Mention of his illness brings tears to her eyes.
“I hate to watch it,” she says. “It’s like it’s happening all over again.”
VELSICOL 1, GOVERNMENT 0
The environmental bureaucrats went mano a mano with one company on the Texas Gulf Coast and got outlasted and out-toughed. Between 1972 and 1975 eleven workers at a pesticide plant on the Houston Ship Channel run by a company called Velsicol suffered severe neurological damage in what was probably the most dramatic case of work-related disease in the industrial southeast corner of Texas. The plant made a poison called Phosvel, which kills insects by disrupting the electrical currents that run through their nerves and, it turned out, has a similar effect on animals and people. Besides the 11 men who were severely hurt, 63 other Velsicol employees who had been exposed to Phosvel were found to have experienced physical problems after working at the plant—stiffness, sweating, aches, and, in some cases, impotence.
In Egypt, the prime market for Phosvel (it has never been legal in the United States), the pesticide began paralyzing water buffalo as well as killing insects. In this country Velsicol also manufactured DBCP, a pesticide that caused infertility among workers at the Velsicol plant in Arkansas that produced it, and two other pesticides, heptachlor and chlordane, that caused cancer in laboratory animals.
All these activities had the cumulative effect of getting the environmental bureaucracy and the press (see “Danger: Men Working,” TM, May 1978) hot onto Velsicol’s trail. In 1977 the U.S. Department of Justice succeeded in obtaining from a Chicago grand jury criminal indictments (unheard-of in environmental cases) against six Veisicol executives, who faced prison terms of up to fifty years if convicted. The press then forgot about the case, assuming that Velsicol would pay for past sins and refrain from future ones.
That’s not exactly what happened. In January 1981 the criminal cases against Velsicol finally came to an end, and by anyone’s measure Velsicol won a spectacular victory. The company hired the law firm of Edward Bennett Williams, the legendarily aggressive Washington criminal defense lawyer, and the Williams firm pounced like a tiger on an obscure government lawyer named Bingham Kennedy. As an EPA employee, Kennedy had helped build the case against Velsicol; then he moved to the Justice Department and helped prosecute it. So during the grand jury hearings, Kennedy first testified against Velsicol, wearing his EPA hat, and then questioned witnesses, wearing his Justice Department hat. Velsicol filed a motion for dismissal of the case on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct by Kennedy, and the judge in Chicago accepted the motion and wrote a blistering opinion throwing out the criminal indictments. The government reindicted, then settled for a plea-bargained civil contempt citation against the company and its employees. In the end Velsicol and the indicted executives paid a grand total of $5000 in civil fines.
The Justice Department originally planned to investigate Velsicol’s Texas operations, but then agreed not to as part of the complex deal arrived at in the Chicago criminal case. Several of ihe workers hurt at the Texas plant in the early seventies sued Velsicol; mostlv because of the way workmen’s compensation laws are written in Texas, none of the cases are likely even to get to court. Velsicol’s Texas plant stopped making Phosvel in 1976 and concentrated on making another pesticide called EPN, which is more toxic than Phosvel but, plant managers say, safer to work with because it is a liquid and therefore more easily containable than Phosvel, which is a powder.
In 1979 a chemical leak at the Texas plant caused an explosion and fire, but no one was killed. In February of this year the plant completed two full years without an accident, and the company marked the occasion by putting up a plaque and throwing a lunch for its employees. Veisicol has a new president who says the company’s first priority is “to make its plants and its products environmentally safe and secure.”
The moral of the story is that health and safety protection in Texas industry is particularly difficult because the companies have far more staying power than the watchdogs in and out of government. The companies see things through and play tough; the watchdogs, more often than not, quickly turn their attention elsewhere, and so fritter away their few victories. Velsicol says its Texas plant is now a completely safe place to work, and there’s nothing to do but take their word for it.
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