Sicknesses stop cleanup work at former refinery
COMANCHE — One night in mid-April, Chris Jones drove to his small trailer home, stepped out of his car and was taken aback by an overpowering odor. Believing it to be a gas leak, he called police.
When an officer arrived at the property Jones shares with Monique Timmons, Timmons opened her front door. As she recalls, “it was like being hit in the face.” She struggled to catch her breath.
“It rolls in like a cloud. Then, when the wind blows, it gets worse,” Timmons said of the odorous gas that she and her neighbors blame for their sudden onset of troubled breathing, headaches, nausea and stomach pains over the last several weeks. One nearby resident was rushed to an emergency room with a burning sensation in his lungs.
The source of the odor is no secret: a former oil refinery that spans 466 acres north of town and once employed hundreds of people before its closure in 1983. Thirty-five years later, environmental cleanup continues. Phillips 66 has been leading those efforts and the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality has been providing oversight.
Tuesday, Phillips 66 temporarily suspended its environmental work “out of an abundance of caution,” according to a company spokesman. It will now collect air quality data to determine the safety of its actions. It may be weeks before work resumes.
“Once the data has been analyzed, we will provide an update regarding the results of the testing and work with the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality to determine next steps for our remediation activities,” said Phillips 66 spokesman
Dennis Nuss.
“No additional work will be performed until the results are available and we have reaffirmed that workers at the site and the community are safe.”
The symptoms
To some, it smells like lacquer. To others, crude oil or acetone. Some smell garlic or onions or burning rubber. A former mayor smells rotten eggs and sulfur. One day it had the vinegary aroma of pickles.
Soon after the smell moves past the refinery walls and into homes, symptoms follow. Not surprisingly, they’re worse in those who remain home during the day, such as Donna Burton’s husband, Calvin.
“He felt his lungs burning,” she said.
They went to a crowded emergency room one night but, facing a long wait, left before he could be diagnosed. Others in this working-class town, where the average annual income is $13,612, say they have no money for medical treatment and no means to leave Comanche any time soon.
“It’s really, really bad,” said Cindy Ward, who lives north of the refinery.
Her husband began noticing a crude oil odor seven weeks ago. She says it sometimes smells like garbage.
Headaches are the most common symptom, residents told The Oklahoman.
Stomachaches and nausea are also prevalent after the odor rolls in. For Timmons, who has the lung condition COPD, symptoms can be debilitating, rendering her too weak to move.
“It can smell pungent to the point that it makes you sick one hour and the next hour it is gone,” Jones said.
The absence of an immediate explanation for the sicknesses led to the proliferation of anxiety in residents last week as they shared the latest rumors at the Meridian Kwik Mart, where the odor was pungent, and on social media, where rumors became more dire by the day. By Tuesday, a prevalent — and, experts say, entirely false — rumor claimed the odor is hydrogen sulfide, a highly toxic and deadly gas sometimes found in oil drilling.
“Our county commissioner was concerned because he had not even been (informed of) it until someone told him to look at Facebook,” said Gary Curtis, deputy director of the Stephens County emergency management department. “Sure enough, on Facebook there was a lot of stuff. That’s when I got the call and went out there to check it out.”
The cause
In 2008, Phillips 66 began collecting environmental data to understand the six decades of damage that had been done to the environment around the old refinery, once operated by DXSunray, later by Tosco. Its cleanup plan was approved the next year and work began the year after that, in 2010.
Refinery waste sits in old ponds and pits at the site, according to DEQ. Water below ground and in nearby Claridy Creek is contaminated. Timmons, who runs an animal rescue operation, claims she witnessed strange deformities — chicken eggs laid without shells, unusually high rates of leukemia — before her water well was capped years ago.
The latest environmental work, which was expected to last several months before last week’s stoppage, is aimed at cleaning old ponds on the property’s north side. That is done by mixing waste with Portland cement and hauling it far from Comanche. Unearthing decades-old pits has proved pungent.
“It is very pungent,” said Curtis, who toured the site last week. “In fact, it even had my eyes watering and a little sick in the stomach before I got out of there.”
Five gas markers monitor air quality at the plant and on surrounding roads. Local and state officials remain confident those monitors have not found anything hazardous to human health.
“In spite of the odors, levels of chemicals known to cause human health issues have not been exceeded,” said Erin Hatfield, DEQ’s spokeswoman.
Before the project was paused last week, workers had begun using misters to spray water and an odor suppressant. Crews halted work when strong easterly winds were prevalent. The company has established a hotline number for concerned residents: 800-6337922.
The town
Drive south from Oklahoma City to Comanche and you will pass through Duncan, the self-proclaimed “Buckle on the Oil Belt” and the birthplace of Halliburton. Its welcome signs display oil derricks. Across the street from City Hall in Comanche is an oil derrick.
Residents in this town of 1,663 people have fond memories of the old refinery, which employed 375 people before it closed 35 years ago. It was a defense plant during the second world war, a fixture in the town and a source of well-paying jobs for decades.
“You’d drive down the side streets and there were families with brand-new homes being built,” said former mayor Jeanne McGowen.
Comanche schoolswere flush with cash and affluent when compared to other districts in the area, said Steve Bolton, who, along with his wife, has edited and published the Comanche Times for a quarter century.
That, however, has changed since the closure.
Comanche’s population was 19 percent lower in 2010 than it was in 1980. Forty-five percent of its children under the age of 5 now live in poverty, according to census data. In its dilapidated downtown, some buildings have burned down and others are vacant.
It is not unlike other workaday Oklahoma towns and neighborhoods that have watched their prosperity dissipate when a plant closes, replaced only by decades of cleanup.
It can feel like an insult added to injury for longtime residents. Mining in northeast Oklahoma left behind lead poisoning and ghost towns. Industrial operations east of downtown Oklahoma City left behind asbestos. Eagle Industries, a Midwest City shop, left behind toxic groundwater when it closed in 2010.
In Comanche, the odor that has sickened some residents in recent weeks is not altogether new.
It was here before, back when the refinery was fully operational. McGowen recalls it from her childhood.
It was familiar then, though not nearly as strong.
“Back then, they didn’t even think about it causing problems,” the former mayor said of Comanche residents in the 1970s and before. “They were making a livelihood and everybody was just kind of used to the smell.
“That’s just what the refinery smelled like. Back then, nobody thought anything about it. They just lived with it.”