by Summer-Solstice Thomas, CHEJ Science & Tech Intern
On Wednesday July 31st, 2019, the morning air in Baytown, Texas filled with black smoke after an explosion the Exxon Mobil Olefins Plant. Nearby residents described the blast as so powerful that their houses shook and their windows rattled. Residents downwind of the plant were notified of a voluntary shelter-in-place, advising them to stay inside with their windows and doors shut. It was lifted four hours later after air monitoring had found no contaminant concentrations large enough to be “of concern.”
As one of the United State’s largest petrochemical facilities, the Baytown Olefins Plant, is one of three Exxon Mobil plants all around one mile from each other, forming a triangle of chemical processing and refining. The air cancer toxics risk, as reported by the 2014 National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA), for a three mile radius zone with its center equidistant from these three facilities is 62 in a million. This means that if a million people were chronically exposed over a lifetime to the concentrations of air contaminants in this zone, 62 of them would contract cancer as a direct result of such exposure. This high level of cancer risk falls within the 99th percentile for the state of Texas and the 95th-100 percentile nationally, which means that the cancer risk for Baytown, Texas is some of the highest in the entire nation. Meanwhile, the NATA respiratory hazard index for the same zone is 3.3, indicating that the estimated long-term exposure to respiratory irritants is, on average, 3.3 times greater than the corresponding health-based reference concentration. This high level of respiratory hazard is also some of the highest in the nation: it falls within the 97th state percentile and 90-95th national percentile.
Here at CHEJ, we see Baytown as an example of a “sacrifice zone,” a region especially concentrated with intensive industry operations, leading to levels of chemical exposures that threaten the health of the community’s residents. Due to the phenomenon of white flight from metropolitan industrial centers in the 1960s, and the pattern of siting industrial facilities in areas with low property values, sacrifice zones are often communities of color and/or low socioeconomic status. The health burden experienced by these residents living near numerous chemical facilities is often compounded by limited access to healthcare and other wellness resources. Current regulatory policies don’t take into account the clustering pattern common to chemical facilities, leaving such communities disproportionately exposed to high levels of toxic chemicals.
Other examples of sacrifice zones are Detroit, Michigan, where 48217 has been dubbed “the most toxic zip code in the US,” or St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana where the NATA air toxics cancer risk is 500 in a million, over 15 times the national average. Unsurprisingly, these zones follow not only the pattern of extreme chemical exposure, but of this disparate burden falling on low-income communities of color. 48217 consists of predominately African-American residents, with an 89% minority population. Over half the population living within three miles of the largest facility in the area, a Marathon Petroleum refinery, falls below the poverty line. St. John the Baptist hosts another major Marathon refinery, where 34.1% of the people residing within three miles of the facility live below the poverty line. The parish itself is 63.6% minority. In 2017, this refinery emitted 79 tons, or 158,073lbs, of chemicals identified by the EPA as Hazardous Air Pollutants, defined as “those pollutants that are known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects, such as reproductive effects or birth defects.”
These, and other facilities across America, emit huge amounts of air toxics every day, endangering the communities around them. More comprehensive and effective regulatory legislation is clearly needed to ensure not only that residents of Baytown, Detroit, and St. John the Baptist, but that every American, has clean air to breathe.
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Author: Sharon Franklin
A petrochemical fire (one related to the chemicals used in processing petroleum and natural gas) burned at a storage facility outside of Texas last March. As the Washington Post reports, polluted water and waste are still being cleaned three months later. The fire and delayed cleanup call into question hazardous waste disposal policy: many companies and facilities aren’t following proper procedures. <Read more>
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Exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos has been linked to brain damage in infants and children. California banned it earlier this year, and last August a federal court ordered EPA to ban the chemical. EPA announced last week that it would not ban the pesticide, citing insufficient data. <Read more>
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This past month, Philadelphia was rocked by a massive refinery explosion that released smoke and toxic chemicals into the sky. The explosion occurred at 4am and was visible throughout the city, and residents were warned to shelter in place until the fire was more contained.
Luckily, reports indicate that no one was killed, but five workers were injured in the explosion. The refinery in question, Philadelphia Energy Solutions, has been responsible in the past for 72% of Philadelphia’s toxic emissions. After this explosion, the refinery will close.
However, the explosion was nearly deadly, as the fires could have moved to burn tanks containing Hydrogen Fluoride, an incredibly dangerous chemical that can be lethal even if inhaled in small doses. Hydrogen Fluoride is a commonly used in oil refineries across the US, and these refineries commonly burn— like the Husky Superior Refinery in the Twin Ports area of Wisconsin in April of last year. In the Husky Refinery explosion, the HF tanks were about 200 feet away from the fires and narrowly missed being hit by debris. If the HF tanks had been detonated in the Philadelphia Refinery explosion, hundreds of thousands of people’s lives would have been at risk.
While the Philadelphia refinery is closing, the Twin Ports Refinery is not, nor are many HF using refineries across the United States. Even though many citizens have demanded that these refineries remove the chemical from there practice, it is not currently banned in the United States. Why, then, are oil companies continuing to risk disaster? <Read More>
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As Laura M. Holson from the New York Times reports, as climate change dialogue is increasing across the country, be it through realistic portrayals or fictionalized Hollywood movies, children are increasingly nervous about the prospect of impending disaster. Children, especially, are feeling the impacts of our overall anxiety about climate change because much of the messaging is directed at them, explaining how our children are the ones that will feel the worst impacts of our warming planet.
As climate change becomes a very real issue weighing on our kids’ minds, here are some ways to explore the topic to help our kids feel as though they have agency over their futures. <Read more>
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On April 26th, 2018, a massive plume of black smoke exploded into the sky above Superior, Wisconsin. When Ginger Juel saw the ominous black cloud from her Duluth, Minnesota home across the water, and she immediately knew that something was wrong. However, when she turned on the news to see what was going on, there were no reports of any black smoke. Being a lifetime Twin Ports (Duluth, MN and Superior, WI) resident, she was especially concerned because she knew the smoke was billowing from Husky Refinery, and she knew that all five K-12 schools in Superior were located within 1-2 miles of the refinery.
So when the news failed to provide any information on the potential disaster, Juel turned to social media. As she began to comb through tweets about the area, she noticed that there was a Facebook live stream of the plume, warning people it was coming from the refinery. Even more alarming, the wife of a refinery worker had tweeted that there had been a fire at the refinery and all of the workers had been evacuated. Her husband had come home to tell her to pack up their kids and leave town.
Growing increasingly worried, Juel called her family members and advised that they leave town before preparing to leave the area herself. Her family was hesitant, because there were still no official evacuation orders from the city. They assumed that if there was any real danger, they would have heard about it, and that it would be okay.
As Juel learned later, Twin Ports was extremely lucky on April 26th. The tanks that exploded and caused the smoke plume on April 26th were a mere 200 feet from the tanks that contain Hydrogen Fluoride (HF), which is an incredibly dangerous compound that’s lethal even in small doses. Had the fires reached the tanks containing HF on April 26th, the death toll in Twin Ports could have been staggering— potentially upwards of 100,000.
Despite the immense danger posed by any fire or explosion at a refinery containing HF, Juel recounts an overall lack of leadership from local law enforcement and government in regards to the action. An official evacuation wasn’t ordered until 1:00 pm, even though the fires had been burning since the morning, and there weren’t clear instructions given on when it was safe for residents to return. Many returned early only to suffer from nosebleeds and headaches, and to notice that the air smelled strange. Juel remembers that a tweet she sent warning residents not to drink the water got over 10,000 retweets by Twin Ports residents. People were desperate for information, and official sources were not providing it.
Juel recalls spending the entire night of April 26th unable to sleep after the ordeal. The next morning, she had the conviction that she had to do something to ensure this never happened again.
When the ordeal began, Juel had already been wetting her toes in the world of activism. She first got involved with activism through attending a pipeline protest, and since then made sure to stay involved in issues in her community. However, she had never taken on leadership for a protest, let alone an entire community’s environmental justice movement. Before the explosion, she was planning on starting an organic mushroom farm, but the toxic fumes from the refinery ruined her chances of having a successful first crop.
“I always knew that I wanted to start a nonprofit, but I always assumed it would be about gardening or something,” Juel said. “I just kept thinking: if I don’t do this, who else will?”
So she began leading the charge to get HF banned from the Husky Refinery. She formed the nonprofit organization TPAA, or Twin Ports Action Alliance, who have been working tirelessly ever since. Some successes of TPAA include polling of residents regarding their opinions on HF, email campaigns to local legislators and a successful Chemical Safety Board (CSB) hearing resulting in the CSB calling for the EPA to investigate the use of HF at refineries across the United States.
After one year of hard work, Juel says she’s most proud of how her work has allowed the Twin Ports community to unite in raising awareness of the dangers of HF.
“I’m most proud of the relationships this community has built with each other. This group [/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][of people fighting against HF] hasn’t existed before in a genuine way,” Juel said.
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EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced last Friday that the EPA is strengthening standards for lead dust, especially in schools and work places, throughout the county. Their updates include reducing the amount of dust considered to be a hazard in an attempt to better reflect the amount of lead that can impact children. These new standards focus on lead dust on floors and on windowsills. <Read more>
Why isn’t the DNC holding a climate debate?
In the past two weeks, climate change activists have been furiously protesting after Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Tom Perez announced that he did not support the Democratic party having a climate specific debate for the 202o elections.
According to Perez, holding a climate debate would be putting too much focus on a single issue, especially when there are candidates like Jay Inslee who are focusing their entire campaign around climate change.
However, environmental organizations don’t see climate as only a single issue, rather the issue that will define everything in the coming decade. 314 Action pledged $100,000 to put on a climate debate, and 15 out of the 23 Democratic candidates want to see a climate-specific debate.
As Vox reports, many democratic voters want to make climate a central issue in the 2020 election, especially since it was hardly brought up in the 2016 election cycle. In Iowa, three quarters of Iowa Democratic caucus voters wanted to see climate change treated as the single most threatening risk to humanity. <Read more>
Sign the petition for the DNC to hold a climate debate!
Most specifically, Sunrise Movement is currently holding a sit in in the DNC protesting the organization’s lack of movement on the climate debate front. Sunrise Movement is a an organization building a network of young people to create an army fighting climate change.
In 2019, fighting climate change is more important than ever. The midwest is flooding, more temperature anomalies have been reported, and large chunks of the polar ice caps are breaking off. What’s even worse is that climate change has the potential to have impact marginalized communities the most. No matter your political affiliations, it’s important to discuss this issue across the aisle.
Sunrise Movement is circulating a petition to demand the DNC hold a climate debate. Click here to sign the petition.
Coal is dirty. That is an unsurprising fact of coal, every process involving coal is dirty. Mining coal is extremely energy intensive and can destroy whole ecosystems, burning coal produces millions of tons of carbon dioxide, but perhaps the dirtiest part of coal is disposing of coal ash.
The United States burns over 800 million tons of coal each year to produce 30% of its energy. This burning of coal produces 110 million tons of coal ash annually according to the EPA. Coal is really just ancient carbonized plants, burning it produces millions of tons of carbon dioxide annually and disrupts the Earth’s carbon cycle. Once the coal is burnt and has released all of its possible potential energy, the remanence is ash, just like you would find in your fireplace, only this ash has a deadly secret. It contains lead, arsenic, mercury, chlorine, chromium, barium, and selenium. Despite its toxic nature, coal ash is considered “non-hazardous waste”. That’s right, waste that contains toxic levels of lead and arsenic can be considered non-hazardous.
So, what does the United States do with this “non-hazardous”, yet very toxic coal ash? The ash is typically put into ditches and filling it with water, but these coal ash ponds are more than often unlined, so the toxic coal ash comes in direct contact with the surrounding environment. The coal ash in unlined ponds can easily leach into the ground and contaminate nearby water sources with its deadly toxins. Coal Ash is the second largest industrial waste stream and it only saw the first set of regulations in 2015. Only after there have been over 200 known coal ash spills and contamination events. The new regulation requires that all coal ash ponds must be lined and companies must regularly inspect their ponds, which is a step in the right direction, but the simple fact is that this waste is toxic and needs to be treated as such.
People living within one mile of an unlined coal ash pond have a 2,000 times greater risk of having cancer than what is deemed safe by the EPA. Communities near unlined coal ash ponds are drinking water poisoned by lead, arsenic, and other heavy metals. A coal ash pond in Tennessee failed in 2008 and flooded 3,000 acres and poisoned communities. Not regulating coal ash as the toxic and hazardous waste that it is doesn’t help families or communities, it only aids big coal industries. America, we deserve better, we deserve our government to put families and communities before big polluting corporations.
A 2013 lawsuit regarding the Bridgeton landfill finally reached a settlement in Missouri courts. The settlement holds Bridgeton accountable and is a step in the right direction according to Missouri’s Attorney General. Republic Services will still manage the site. Additionally, Bridgeton will create a$12.5 million restitution fund and pay $3.5 million in fines and damages.
Read More.