About a year ago, on the John Edwards Blog, I wrote about the appalling lot of the citizens of Port Arthur, Texas. Unfortunately, that post is lost (with the campaign) and I have been unable to locate the source article that provoked my post.
More unfortunately, there is no shortage of material on these citizens' plight - including several reports from earlier this month.
From the New York Times:
PORT ARTHUR, Tex. — This downtrodden chemical town on the Gulf of Mexico has no shortage of nicknames: Cancer Alley, the Armpit of Texas, Ring of Fire.
Built on a gush of oil wealth, Port Arthur eventually wooed chemical and waste plants as well. But since the 1970s, this city, which is majority African-American, has complained that it has become a dumping ground for the nation’s toxic waste.
Now, if a French-owned waste management company has its way, the Port Arthur area will be the final destination for 40 million pounds of toxins from Mexico.
“Bring it all to southeast Texas,” Hilton Kelley, a community activist, said wryly. “Who’s next? Germany? Finland? England? Aren’t our oil refineries and chemical plants enough? We have a right to a clean environment, and the nation sees us as expendable in the name of big business.”
Despite a federal ban on importing PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, the company, Veolia Environmental Services, has asked the Environmental Protection Agency for an exemption to move the chemicals by truck from Mexico and to burn them at its incinerator just outside Port Arthur. The incinerator has been disposing of the United States’ PCB waste since 1992.
In March, the E.P.A. gave tentative approval to the proposal. A final decision is expected after August.
And the Houston Chronicle:
Jun. 13--PORT ARTHUR -- The west end of this Gulf Coast refinery town is a weedy pocket of poverty, with blocks of shuttered storefronts and blue tarps still covering the rooftops of houses damaged by Hurricane Rita nearly three years ago.
Hilton Kelley, 47, sees his neighborhood's commercial activity moribund, its residents sick, its children with nothing to do, and he blames the fire-and-fume-belching cluster of oil and petrochemical plants around Port Arthur.
Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is poised to grant a request by the operator of a Port Arthur incinerator to import up to 20,000 tons of highly toxic PCBs from Mexico for their disposal. To many people living on the city's predominantly black west end, the proposal is the ultimate affront.
"This adds insult to injury," said Kelley, who heads the Community In-Power and Development Association. "Enough is enough already."
Veolia Environmental Services' petition comes nearly 30 years after legislation that banned the manufacture of PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, also prohibited bringing them into the United States. The EPA ruled in 1996 that the chemical compounds may be brought into the country for incineration, but a federal appeals court overturned the decision.
Agency officials, echoing the reasons for reversing the ban a decade ago, argue that the destruction of PCBs in this country is safer than allowing stockpiles to fester in Mexico and other nations.
But critics contend that there are cleaner, safer disposal methods for PCBs. When burned, they produce dioxin, which is linked to cancer, brain damage, reproductive problems and other ailments in humans.
And if that wasn't enough, The Chronicle states later on in the article:
Oh, and for some historical perspective (from Rachael's HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #274---February 26, 1992---)Refinery to expand
The health problem is part of the plight of Port Arthur, where the median household income is about $35,000 a year, less than half of Sugar Land. While there isn't much left of downtown, new houses, restaurants and big-box stores are sprouting along the corridor leading to Beaumont and away from the biggest plants.
Last year Motiva began an expansion that will more than double the capacity of its Port Arthur refinery to 600,000 barrels a day by 2010 and make it the largest in the country. The plant is across the street from the Carver Terrace public housing project.
The Army also began shipping 1.7 million gallons of a nerve gas byproduct called hydrolysate from Indiana to Veolia's incinerator, located about five miles west of downtown on Texas 73. The contract is worth $49 million. Veolia applied to import PCBs in November 2006 before receiving the Army contract. Under the proposal, the company would ship the compounds by truck through Houston to Port Arthur -- a distance of about 460 miles from entry points in Brownsville and Laredo.
Mexico now sends PCBs to Europe for incineration, exposing the compounds to loss at sea. The transportation cost for overseas shipment is at least three times more expensive than moving the waste from Monterrey, Mexico, to Port Arthur, according to the company.
When citizens attend public hearings to learn about a new dump planned for their neighborhood, they often encounter a hired consultant with a college degree in science or engineering who ridicules the idea that chemicals harm humans. Such a person, wearing an expensive three-piece suit, will stand at the microphone and look over the top of his spectacles, putting on his best "expert" look, and say something like, "We know you little ladies are concerned, and you have a right to be, but if you could just study the scientific literature, as I have done, you would realize that there is no evidence of harm to humans from chemical exposures."
The question to ask such a person is, "Are you merely uninformed or are you lying?" for in reality there are numerous scientific studies showing that exposure to chemicals harms humans. Last week we reviewed 10 such studies. This week we briefly report on nine more.
The dozen chemicals found most often at toxic waste sites are trichloroethylene (TCE), lead, chromium, toluene, benzene, tetrachloroethene, trichloroethane, chloroform, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), cadmium, and zinc. [1] If you look at a list of the top 200 chemicals found at hazardous waste sites, you quickly see that these dozen are representative: a few metals, and many chlorinated compounds made from petroleum. Petroleum products and chlorine can be combined in a host of interesting ways to make "chlorinated hydrocarbons," which do not ordinarily occur in nature, which tend to be toxic, which tend to persist in the environment once they are created, and which enter food chains and concentrate as they move from small plants to small animals and then into bigger animals. In general, the bigger the animal (fish, bird, or mammal), the more chlorinated hydrocarbons can be found in its flesh.Coming soon, to a neighborhood near you!
1 comments:
as much as this story bothers me...if it was set in crawford, i might see it a lot differently.
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