Bad Air Days

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Let's start with the notion of "regulation." Part of the problem is that, for all the agencies and laws that we have created, the petrochemical industry remains essentially self-regulated—and poorly at that. One of the refineries' chief methods of self-regulation is "flaring"—a procedure in which potentially dangerous accumulations of vapors are diverted and burned off. It can be effective if the vapors burn at 99 percent efficiency. But if a refinery has to flare too often or burn flares for too long or under windy conditions—so-called smoking flares—more noxious chemicals can get into the air. "A couple of weeks ago, we had this 'accident' at Motiva, up the road from here," Kelley tells me. "The plant must've had five smoking flares out there on one day, with all that black smoke. The company offered me a free car wash! I thought, 'How 'bout a lung wash?'" (When asked about the flares, Purves told me that such large accidents are rare and that the plant always did its best to bring them under control.)

Kelley was grandstanding a bit there, but such upsets—potentially dangerous build-ups of certain kinds of vapors, which then need to be burned off—aren't that unusual in the region. A study by former EPA watchdog Schaeffer discovered almost one "upset" or shutdown a day at six Port Arthur facilities during 2002 that were followed by smoking flares and resulted in the emission of 1,700 tons of ozone-forming, volatile organic compounds, including 150 tons of the carcinogens benzene and butadiene. Even though smoking flares are against the law, the EPA or the TCEQ can't be "sitting behind a billboard," as Schaeffer puts it, waiting to nab the refineries. As long as the plant reports such accidents promptly, files the proper paperwork, and promises that it remedied the problem as quickly as possible, it faces no more than a minor fine.

This is nothing new. As lofty as the phrase "environmental protection" sounds, in practice it's always been less about policing than passive monitoring, record-keeping, standards-setting, and trying to schmooze or threaten refineries or other commercial concerns into following the latest set of guidelines. Author Devra Davis is probably right when she suggests in her provocative history of the environmental movement, When Smoke Ran Like Water, that the high point of the movement may well have been the creation of the EPA in the seventies. By one estimate, there are 34,000 sources of pollution in the U.S. and only three hundred EPA employees to monitor them.

"It comes down to money and . . . how many inspectors you have and what kind of equipment they have," laments Neil Carman, a former TCEQ inspector who now works with the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club.

This is probably why, even though emissions from refineries here are relatively lower than they were twenty years ago, the Cancer Belt counties remain ranked among the dirtiest 20 percent of all counties in the nation in terms of total environmental releases, cancer risk, air releases of recognized carcinogens, and more.

But it's not fair to simply write this off to bureaucratic inadequacies. Part of the reason that a laissez-faire attitude has become so entrenched in this area is that, amazingly, science still can't make a firm case for the pollution-cancer nexus. "My grandson died two years ago of a rare brain cancer that they say mainly comes from environmental exposures," said Ann Tillery, a Beaumont woman who works with a Golden Triangle-area anti-pollution group, Clean Air and Water, Inc. "But you try proving it."

Some specific links have been made, such as that between exposure to benzene and leukemia. But generally speaking, an environmental version of reasonable doubt continues to cloud the air when it comes to pollution and cancer. The Cancer Belt may have more releases of suspected carcinogens into its air and more cancer-cluster investigations than any other part of the state, but since cancer is so slow-developing and so complex in its pathogenesis, and because so much of it is simply the result of aging, smoking, or heredity, it's difficult to prove that pollution causes any more than 4 to 6 percent of cancer deaths. Tillery's grandson may have developed cancer from pollution; then again, both his parents smoked, so who can really say?

"We still really haven't done the research we need to," says Melanie Williams, of the Texas Department of Health's cancer registry, which tracks cancer statistics for the state. They were saying that back in the early eighties too. And what little has been done is amazingly inconclusive. A 1976 study of cancer mortalities in different sections of Houston by Eleanor Macdonald, of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, for example, seemed to show that "exposure over time to air and industrial pollutants has a demonstrable effect on increasing regional mortality from cancer of the respiratory tract." But a 1994 study supported by the petroleum industry concluded that "the chemical and petroleum refining industries made no appreciable contribution to the cancer burden of Texas."

Proof may yet be on the way, but in the meantime, one final reason for the lack of progress is that pollution's health hazards are seen as just part of life here, kind of like the risk of hurricanes. After all, ExxonMobil and Motiva and DuPont and Huntsman didn't invade the upper Gulf Coast a century ago like some band of plundering pirates. They were welcomed and embraced as vital cogs of an economic dynamo that enabled these unlikely towns to flourish in the middle of what was otherwise a big, fetid swamp. People here like them: A recent survey showed that a staggering 84 percent of residents of the area trust the petrochemical industry here and want it to grow.

You can't really understand the degree of this hegemony until you take the refinery tour by night. Tillery took me up to the crest of the bridge to Treasure Island, where we gazed out over industrial southeast Texas in all its soaring, sprawling, smoking, stinking glory. In the dark and mist, the towering smokestacks that were strung almost gaily with lights were reminiscent of great Gothic cathedrals: scary, inspiring, and very, very permanent. I rolled down the window and took a whiff of air that smelled of gasoline fumes and rotten eggs. There was a disturbing sense that, as in the Big Bend—albeit for altogether different reasons—man was out of place here.