Living and breathing on the front line of a toxic chemical zone
Families worry about long-term health effects
DEER PARK, Texas — Juan López had just returned home from his job supervising the cleaning of giant tanks that hold toxic chemicals produced along the Houston Ship Channel, one of the largest petrochemical complexes in the world.
He was ready to sit down to dinner with his wife, Pamela López, and their four school-age children at their small house across the highway from the plants.
But as the family gathered, the facilities were still burning off chemical emissions, sending clouds of leftover toxics toward their two-bedroom home, hitting them on some days with distinct and worrisome smells — and leaving López concerned about the health of their children.
“I make good money where I’m at,” he said. “But I always felt like it was only me that was getting exposed, because I am working in the tanks with the chemicals. When the smell comes, all we can really do is try to keep everyone inside. Is that enough? I just don’t know.”
He has reason to worry. Two recent assessments, by the Environmental Protection Agency and city officials in Houston, found that residents were at higher risk of developing leukemia and other cancers than people who lived farther from the chemical plants.
These same worries afflict households in Illinois, Louisiana, West Virginia, and other spots around the United States where families live near manufacturing facilities that make or use these cancer-causing chemicals.
“Sacrifice zones — that’s what we call them,” said Ana Parras, a founder of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, which sued the EPA starting in 2020 to push for tighter rules on toxics. “These areas here are paying the price for the rest of the nation, really.”
After years of only intermittent action by the federal government and opposition from the industry, the Biden administration is racing to impose restrictions on certain toxic air releases of the sort that plague Deer Park, while also moving to ban or restrict some of the most hazardous chemicals entirely.
The proposed measures would significantly cut releases of a number of cancer-causing chemicals from plants in Texas, including four of those across the highway from the López family.
Companies from a variety of industries, including those that produce the substances and those that use them, are pressuring the administration to water down some of the rules, saying the repercussions of a ban or new restrictions could be economically crippling.
Fe w communities are at greater risk than Deer Park.
On Friday, a huge fire broke out at one of the petrochemical plants across the highway from their home. “That is a lot of smoke,” Pamela López said in a phone interview, as she looked out at the blaze. “I don’t know exactly what is in the tank that exploded.” The wind, at least, was blowing east, away from the home.
Texas records examined by The New York Times show that toxic releases are happening regularly in the area, sometimes even without notifications to residents.
That includes carcinogens spewed from the OxyVinyls plastics manufacturing plant across the highway when air pollution control equipment temporarily went down before dawn in midJuly, state records show. The discharge included three known or suspected carcinogens that the EPA is cracking down on.
When a tornado touched down in the neighborhood in January, the power went out, disrupting pollution control equipment in at least seven refineries and chemical plants in the area and resulting in the discharge of known toxins that were visible in the form of black clouds of smoke.
Mixed in with these discharges, state records show, were an estimated 32,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide, an air pollutant that can cause respiratory ailments, as well as smaller amounts of 1,3-butadiene and benzine, known carcinogens.
Other records obtained by the Times show that nearby plants have released into the air over the past two years other chemicals — a kind of who’s who list of the most toxic chemicals in use in the United States — the same substances the Biden administration is preparing to impose new restrictions on.
An analysis prepared by the advocacy group Earthjustice based on federal records shows more than 1 million pounds of these so-called high-priority chemicals, including the carcinogens 1,3-butadiene and formaldehyde, have been released over the past decade in the Deer Park neighborhood.
One goal of the policies the EPA has recently issued or proposed is to remove a loophole that allows toxic chemical discharges during bad storms, plant malfunctions, or when they start up or shut down. The agency will separately require, for the first time, that many of these chemical plants monitor air at their fence lines for six key toxics to ensure they are complying with the rules.
“Communities don’t stop breathing during a hurricane,” Michael Regan, the EPA administrator, said last month, standing in front of a plastics plant in St. John the Baptist Parish, in Louisiana, as he announced some of the proposed rules.
In the Houston area, many neighbors of the López family in Deer Park work at the plants or have relatives who do. They say they appreciate all that the corporations have done for the community, such as donating money to expand playgrounds and supporting local schools.
Candace Dray, 43, has lived in the Deer Park area all her life. She remembers growing up when her father used to play football outside with the neighbors, the night sky lit up by flares from the plants. Her son Joshua Howard Jr., 6, still plays in the front yard, as the flares burn on the other side of the highway.
“I’ve got the VIP seats, absolutely,” Dray joked, looking across from her house at the endless line of plants that turn crude oil into gasoline and produce chemicals needed to manufacture plastics and sanitize drinking water. “But these plants have to be somewhere. Somebody has got to do the work. You have to have these products.”
But the threats are at times overwhelming. A fire in March 2019 spread to almost a dozen chemical tanks, forming a plume of smoke that lingered over the area for three days and prompting a formal shelter-in-place warning from the local authorities. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of hazardous waste spilled on the ground and leaked into the water.