Worried about air quality, Pleasantville goes own way
Residents build monitoring network of seven community-owned devices
The warehouse fire of 1995. That’s the first thing many in Pleasantville point to when asked about air quality in the historic neighborhood east of downtown Houston.
It was June 24, 1995, when warehouses stacked with drums of chemicals caught fire, sending thick, black smoke thousands of feet into the sky and forcing residents to evacuate. The fire reignited three times over the next month.
“At one time, there were rumors that you shouldn’t grow anything in your garden because of the fire,” said Bridgette Murray, executive director of a community-based organization called Achieving Community Tasks Successfully, or ACTS. “But we don’t know what are rumors and what are facts.”
Pleasantville residents hope that will change soon. The neighborhood is launching its own community-owned air monitor network, one of the first of its kind in Texas, they say.
The nearest state-regulated monitor is 2 miles away. Beyond the lack of air monitors, there’s a lack of confidence in the government, said Robert Bullard, a Texas Southern University professor
known as the “father of environmental justice.”
“There’s still a lot of mistrust when the state says there’s no problem and you find out six months later that the emissions that happened during (Hurricane) Harvey were underreported,” he said, “and people are saying, ‘We need to have our own monitors and have something we can compare with.’ ”
The project, made possible with a $10,000 grant from the Environmental Defense Fund and through a partnership with Texas Southern University, consists of seven solarpowered air monitors designed to detect a range of airborne toxic substances, including fine particles that can travel and lodge deep inside the lungs or even the blood.
The initiative, Murray said, “gives us that opportunity to become involved with what we are actually breathing, the frequency, the levels,” she said, so residents are not in the dark.
Living next to industry
Pleasantville, one of Houston’s first planned developments for African Americans, is today made up of about 3,000 people — predominantly black and Hispanic and mostly of low wealth.
With two schools, a recreation center and a library, Pleasantville, located about 7 miles east of downtown Houston, is surrounded by warehouses, metal recyclers, salvage yards and the freeway. To the north, there’s an Anheuser-Busch brewery, and a few miles south is the Houston Ship Channel, the largest petrochemical complex in the country.
“There’s quite a bit this community can point to as to why this community has concerns,” said Murray, whose family moved to Pleasantville in 1957, years before industry’s arrival.
Communities along the Gulf Coast all grapple with air-quality concerns, said Deane King, a researcher with Texas Southern University who is involved with the collaboration known as the Gulf Coast Equity Consortium, established to address issues affecting vulnerable children and families by working with community-based organizations such as ACTS.
“People of color, and who often live in low-wealth communities, have a tendency to have sources of pollution in their communities that they deal with on a daily basis,” she said, and they are all fighting to prevent more facilities from coming or expanding in their neighborhoods.
Due to Houston’s lack of zoning requirements, many communities of color are located next to or close to industry, which a recent federal government watchdog said contributed to elevated health risks.
The national average cancer risk from long-term exposure to toxic air pollutants in the United States is about 30 in 1 million, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In Pleasantville, that is about 50 in 1 million, slightly higher than the Houston average.
According to the UT School of Public Health, children living within 2 miles of the ship channel face a 56 percent greater risk of contracting leukemia.
Cleophus Sharpe, whose family moved to Pleasantville in the 1950s, suffered from asthma growing up, but he said he didn’t realize it was triggered by pollution.
“Every time I drove by (Texas) 225 over the Houston Ship Channel or there was a big gush of wind blowing over us, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t play outside,” he said. “But I wasn’t aware of what it was. We didn’t know how to fight it or where it was coming from.”
Pollution illnesses
Annette Jordan, who moved to Pleasantville in 1956, attended all of the community meetings, from discussions about what kind of monitors residents wanted to where they were going to be placed.
“I don’t think it can hurt us to find out what we are breathing,” she said.
She still remembers what she calls the “black rain,” the ashes falling from the sky over residents’ manicured lawns, and having to evacuate with her then-13-year-old son.
Her son also had severe allergy problems growing up that diminished once he moved away.
“Looking back,” she said, “I always related (pollution) to him having allergies.”
She recently went to the doctor because she was feeling weak and couldn’t breathe well.
“I stumbled and had to catch a wall,” she said, her soft voice coming in and out.
Turns out she had a severe sinus infection and high blood pressure.
“It really did scare me,” she said. The doctor said it could have been many things, including the environment, which immediately took her back to a day she had driven by the ship channel and had noticed the flaring and big clouds stemming from the stacks.
She doesn’t know if it’s related, she said, but wonders.
“I don’t know what gases are being released,” she said. And from all her work in what she described as vessel-traffic control, she said she’s all too familiar with the pollution stemming from the industry not far from her home.
While Jordan worries about the quality of the air, she hasn’t considered leaving. For one, she said, she inherited her house.
Beyond that, Pleasantville is a tight-knit community where she was raised and where she raised her son. It’s like a big family, she said.
It’s the type of place where those who had left would come back just to vote.
“It was like a big reunion on voting day,” Murray said.
Over the years, residents have come together to get street lights, to make sure the city covered open ditches, to make sure they have a library and schools.
It’s that same community involvement they are now counting on to ensure the air-monitoring network works, they say.
‘Long race, not a sprint’
Residents hope that this initiative will lead to more conversations and collaboration with local governments and that it becomes a model for other communities.
“The fact is the government has not lived up to its mandate of assessing air quality,” said Bullard, who also co-directs the Gulf Coast consortium working with community groups such as ACTS.
“Since they have not done it, communities have said, ‘We are going to do this on our own and make sure the community is protected,’ ” he added.
Murray said they are working on developing a plan for long-term management as well as ways to better communicate with the community, including the possible use of flags to use as alerts.
“We are a low-tech community without full access to the internet,” Murray said. “It’s going to take a number of approaches to ensure the majority of the community is aware.”
So far, data from late October through early December show about a dozen days when the air quality index was above 150, or unhealthy, according to the EPA. There were even more when it rose above 100, which is considered unhealthy for sensitive groups, including the elderly and children, a large share of Pleasantville residents.
“It’s a surprise, honestly,” said Grace Lewis, a health scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund working with Pleasantville.
But it’s still too early to make any conclusions, she added. “It’s a great piece of information to start understanding what the air quality is like.”
Lewis sees the data collected from the four monitors up so far as a snapshot of what’s happening.
“If we start to consistently see a pattern… (for example) certain days or times, it helps understand when its happening for the community to advocate on their own behalf,” she said.
But Lewis warned, “it’s a long race, not a sprint.”