Houston must learn from our year of chemical disasters
These catastrophes are preventable; it comes down to effective enforcement
Fred Vernon’s 4-month-old daughter was sleeping. It was the day before Thanksgiving. His wife and mother were in the kitchen. He stopped at the bank with his father when he said they heard a “big boom.”
The night before, the first explosion at the TPC Group plant in Port Neches near their home had created a “gray haze.” Now, he saw it turn into “a dark disgusting something that’s just spewing into the air.”
He knew they had to evacuate. He and his father rushed back. “I got out of the car,” Vernon said, “and it just hit you in the face.”
Nauseated, he put his hand against the house and started to throw up. He told his wife, “We’ve got to go now.” As they scrambled to load the car, Vernon wrapped his daughter in a blanket and covered her mouth. But, with the front door open, she was exposed to the air and started throwing up, too.
“It’s an image you don’t forget,” he said. “It does something to you.”
Usually, the images we embrace as a community are ones of bravery. It’s a first responder carrying a child through floodwaters, a man in a raincoat rescuing a family pet. The inspiration is important. But outrage is, too. What parent wouldn’t demand change once he’d gone through what Vernon has? What parent wouldn’t do whatever she could to prevent her family from going through that?
It’s been a bad year. We’ve gone through at least six major chemical disasters in our region. Last March, thousands of gallons of naphtha, a liquid that is used to make gasoline, started leaking at Intercontinental Terminals Company in Deer Park. Most of us had never heard of ITC. Then, all that naphtha ignited.
The U.S. Chemical Safety
Board would find later that the tank farm lacked an emergency remote shutoff valve and alarms that would have alerted workers. The fires burned for four days, shutting down the Ship Channel, filling the air with dangerous levels of cancer-causing benzene, forcing communities to shelter in place.
Our skies — and our newsfeeds — were dominated by the plume from those fires. I remember waiting for the bus on Kirby Drive, some 20 miles away, and seeing it hanging over Rice Village. That’s an image you don’t forget, either.
Marco Garcia, who studies and works at the University of Houston, saw the plume rising as he walked to a Starbucks in South Pasadena. Months before, he’d joined the Sunrise Movement and met with Rep. Sylvia Garcia to ask her to support the Green New Deal and decarbonize the economy.
“To have nothing change and have a chemical fire erupt in my community,” he said, “was infuriating.”
It was only the beginning. Just 16 days later, in April, an explosion at KMCO in Crosby injured 30 workers and killed one. KMCO, like ITC, had dozens of workplace safety and environmental violations going back years. In July, the Exxon Mobil Olefins plant in Baytown blew up and injured 37 workers. (It also blew up one day before ITC.)
The series of explosions at TPC followed in late November. After the first explosion, John Beard, Jr., who lives with his wife and daughter in Port Arthur, said, “One of the lights in our house was swinging, and we’re a good seven to eight miles away.”
Then, in January, the explosion at Watson Grinding and Manufacturing in Houston killed three more people and damaged 450 buildings.
Why does this keep happening? What do we have to do to keep it from happening again? As I’ve started working this year alongside community advocates and organizers, toxicologists, epidemiologists and environmental lawyers, I’ve learned that these disasters are preventable. It comes down to effective enforcement. The state is going to have to cooperate with the city and county. As a first step, leaders must commit to reducing air pollution from unauthorized releases by 50 percent in five years.
But neither industry nor the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality seems up to the task. The Environmental Integrity Project found that TCEQ’s budget for pollution control has been decimated by 35 percent since 2008, as industry has expanded dramatically. Beard, Jr., was a petrochemical worker for decades. His plant “gave employees all the tools they need to be safe,” but he saw larger issues with maintenance deferred until it was forgotten and legal loopholes that allowed plants to postpone other needed repairs. “The bottom line was dollars and cents.”
“My family, we’re not strangers to industry,” Vernon said. “It put me through college. But it becomes a problem when it’s irresponsible.”
That irresponsibility has been plain this year. The disasters have had impacts we are just beginning to understand.
“I still don’t know to what degree my daughter’s affected, or we’re affected,” Vernon said.
Dr. Brett Perkison, a physician with a practice in the Clear Lake and Pasadena area, cautions that it’s difficult to attribute the development of cancer and most other chronic diseases to the shortterm releases that happen during chemical disasters like ITC. But, he said, the air pollutants can exacerbate an existing pulmonary disease, like asthma. Even six months after the ITC fires had been extinguished, he said, one patient was still reporting “breathing difficulty that began when he inhaled smoke that was released by the ITC fires.” And he was in his own home.
“We are still an oil and gas community, and we live with the burden that entails,” Garcia said.
“Every day, I wake up with the recognition that another ITC fire could happen.”
Why should we live with that? Why should we live with an industry that waddles out a friendly mascot teaching children how to shelter in place instead of preventing the disasters from happening? Why should we live with a state environmental agency taking recommendations about the safety of cancer-causing chemicals from the largest producer of those chemicals? We shouldn’t. We should be outraged.
Just as the devastation of Hurricane Harvey led to a before and an after for our region, I want to believe that our year of disasters will, too. We have seen images that we shouldn’t see. After Harvey, we decided that we couldn’t go through it again. We wouldn’t. And it has led to stronger policies and a much more sober understanding of the risks we face. It has changed our region physically and emotionally.
There’s no reason why we shouldn’t change after this year of disasters. There’s no reason why these images should be any less forgettable.