Some residents worry while others work on their golf game
On Sunday night in her Deer Park home, 29-year-old Brittany Sifuentes couldn’t sleep. Chemical storage tanks were burning at the Intercontinental Terminals Co. 2.5 miles from her house.
Sifuentes grew up in the area, where petrochemical plants are as familiar as the house next door, and she knew emergencies could arise. Kids in school learn to shelter in place. Test sirens blare weekly.
Usually, Sifuentes could push thoughts of danger from her mind — but now, with an emergency actually happening, the mother of three worried. She wondered: “What the heck is going on?”
That was one perspective: fear. And yet, as a cloud of smoke trailed across the sky
for a third straight day, some residents chose simply to go about their daily lives.
Bill Patterson, 75, a councilman in the city of some 34,000, on Tuesday played golf.
“It is a horrific catastrophe, no doubt about that,” Patterson said between holes. “You just come to trust the local authorities.”
On some level, attitudes hinged on whether people trusted the official line that — no matter how scary the plume looked — the air was safe to breathe.
Some, like 31-year-old Veronica Southern, found another place to sleep Sunday night. She kept her son out of school when class resumed Tuesday.
“It’s terrifying just to know that we’re this close,” Southern said.
Another mother, Rebecca Rodriguez, waited for her 14-year-old daughter after school Tuesday with the windows halfway down. But she, too, worried there might be more risk than she knew.
Her daughter, also Rebecca, was full of tough-to-answer questions that morning: What if there’s an explosion? What if the wind changes direction? What if she got stuck at school?
Such anxiety was not in evidence at Battleground Golf Course, where several dozen cars filled the parking lot Tuesday morning. The giant plume of smoke in the distance was impossible to ignore.
No one liked to see that, of course, Patterson said. It was money burning. It was the environment affected. But the risk was something many locals had learned to accept.
One employee at the course, declining to give his name, said that on Sunday he finished out his last three holes during the shelter-inplace. Others in town ran errands.
“I’ve been around that crap for 37 years,” the employee said.
Patterson tapped his club on the ground three times and stepped up to swing.
A cool breeze blew. Birds chirped. It could have been a nice day.
“We’re used to this kind of stuff,” said Sonny Barker, 74, golfing with the councilman.
Here they were, at ground zero of a crisis, and it almost seemed fun. Some people drove with the windows down. Others drank coffee outside in the sun.
Jodie Thompson, 60, stopped Monday to photograph the flames. She said she largely trusted that the authorities knew what they were doing.
“You can’t fret about it,” she said. “What are you going to do? You choose to live here.”
The golfers moved on to the next hole.
Paul Gulski, 54, sauntered into Ken’s Restaurant on the main drag, where the staff has dished up items like beef tips and chickenfried-chicken for 49 years.
“We heard y’all are having a special on smoked ham,” Gulski joked.
Gulski works down the road, at Deer Park Automotive. He sat, waited for his waffle and observed that everyone
has to die of something someday.
All along the Houston Ship Channel, people know: Things burn and things explode. If you take it too seriously, it’s too scary
Much of the diner’s business is tied to industry. Employees deliver dinners after hours. Some customers at Tuesday lunch — fewer than usual — wore plant uniforms.
The night before, restaurant owner Randy Voltz, 60, delivered 100 hamburgers to workers at the flaming company.
In the back of the restaurant, an employee of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality rested after having fried fish. He had been up all night.
Jesse Goodnight, 60, who works in construction at plants, ate fried pork chops and fried okra in a booth. He knew what came with the territory — the flares, the pipeline leaks, the things the public never learned about.
Some were scared to be at work. To him, this was a little fire.
“Nobody’s been hurt,”
he said.
Goodnight faced a mural on the wall telling the story of Deer Park, where the median income is $78,000 and most residents are Hispanic or white. At the center of the mural was the Shell logo.
Lifelong resident Christy Hill, 46, rang up customers at the cash register. She looked out the window at the cloud that somehow still snaked by.
Her grandson had gone to stay somewhere else. She remembered an explosion that rattled the house when she was a girl.
This couldn’t be healthy, she thought.
“We know what we live next to,” she said. “We live next to the plants.”
She was ready for the burning to stop.