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Best veiw with
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Toxic School Children
Three Petrochemical manufacturers are nestled into the neighborhood
where their settlements seem to be a free ride to abuse the local
environment at the cost of others. Their settlements are with the elite
who secretly work behind the scenes to fool the public about money
handling, and health contamination.
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Separate But Toxic
23 March 2007 - By Dave Mann - texasobserver.org
The Houston environmental magnet school that's an
environmental catastrophe
Climb into Juan Parras’ rickety Jeep Cherokee, and he’ll show you
around the neighborhood. He calls it his “toxic tour.” Parras lives in
Houston’s East End, the poorer, predominantly minority side of town
that borders the Houston Ship Channel. A former union rep, he now
heads an environmental nonprofit in the East End called Texas
Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS) that wants the roughly
30 refineries and chemical plants in the East End to reduce their
emissions. Clad in a green vest and cap, Parras steers the Jeep
through a maze of back streets and overpasses to the environmental hot
spots that worry him the most: two federal Superfund sites—one with
chemicals still leaking from barrels; the bayous flooded with trash;
an elementary school three blocks from the steaming Valero Energy
Corp. refinery the kids call “the cloud maker”; and of course, the
acrid-smelling Ship Channel, where supertankers sidle next to
refineries and factories. “All the things nobody wants in their
neighborhood, we got here,” Parras says as we drive past a house
bracketed on three sides by freight rail lines. The tour’s final stop
is the site that angers him most of all—Cesar Chavez High School.
Opened in 2000, Chavez is one of Houston’s newest and biggest high
schools, a state-of-the-art building the community desperately needed
for nearly 3,000 kids. Parras was all in favor of a new school. But
he’s troubled by where the school district built it. Chavez sits
within a quarter-mile of three large petrochemical plants.
Parras parks the Jeep and leads the way on to the school grounds. He
walks around the football field and climbs to the top of the metal
bleachers for a prime view of the closest plant, owned by Texas
Petrochemicals Inc. “Pretty darn close, huh?” he says with a nod.
Indeed, it’s almost shocking to see the plant’s flame tower loom
directly over the school, separated by a sliver of woods and a narrow
bayou. From the baseball field, you could probably reach the plant’s
fence line with a long home run. To Parras, it’s no coincidence that
the student body is almost entirely Latino and black. This, he says,
is environmental racism at its most extreme.
The Texas Petrochemicals plant is one of the oldest and most polluting
in Harris County. Built in the mid 1940s, the facility was, until
recently, one of the nation’s top producers of the controversial fuel
additive MTBE. The plant is also one of the largest emitters in the
Houston area of 1,3 butadiene, a known carcinogen used in rubber
production. Next door sits a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant, and
next to that, an Exxon Mobil Corp. chemical facility. These two both
spew tens of thousands of pounds of benzene and 1,3 butadiene into the
air each year. Butadiene is especially nasty. The chemical contributes
to ground-level ozone, and studies have linked long-term exposure to
leukemia and infertility.
The health effects of these toxins received new attention in January
when the University of Texas School of Public Health released results
from an 18-month study that for the first time linked benzene and
butadiene exposure to increased cancer risk. The study reported that
children living within 2 miles of the Ship Channel had a 56 percent
greater chance of developing lymphocytic leukemia, a form of cancer
that attacks white blood cells.
Standing on the top bleachers, Parras says physical safety also is a
major concern, with students so close to three petrochemical
facilities, including the rusting, World War II-era Texas
Petrochemicals plant. Natural gas and petroleum pipelines run beneath
Chavez’s football field. “It’s pretty hard to evacuate 3,000 kids out
of here if you had to,” Parras says. “You can’t get them out.” A major
accident at any of the three plants, by the industry’s own estimates,
would injure or kill many Chavez students.
It might seem impossible that a district could build a new school in
such a place. Lawmakers have tried to protect school children from
every conceivable danger: There are added criminal offenses for
selling drugs near schools, and sex-offenders can’t live near schools.
In fact, the state can deny air permits to a petrochemical facility
built within 3,000 feet of a school. Strangely, no regulation prevents
the reverse: A city can build a school as close to a chemical plant as
it wants. In Houston, which lacks zoning laws, the school district
found cheap land and did just that.
Parras says that after he complained about air quality at the site,
the school district responded by designating Chavez an environmental
magnet school. A small number of kids from other parts of Houston
attend Chavez to complete an environmental-studies curriculum replete
with an “outdoor classroom,” where students study plant life and the
nearby bayou, but not air quality.
It appears the Houston Independent School District hasn’t studied the
air quality much either. District officials have maintained for years
that the site is safe for kids. Yet documents obtained by the Observer
reveal that HISD performed only one cursory air-quality study before
it built Chavez.
Still, for many years after the school opened, Parras and his family
were the lone voices to complain. Parras has long advocated that the
district move the school. “I told them they should put an
administration building there,” he says with a devious smile. He hopes
that moving Chavez would set a precedent for other schools in Texas
and around the nation located in polluted areas. Though Chavez is a
startling example, many other schools are near chemical facilities.
The Refinery Reform Campaign, a national environmental group, says
that roughly 200,000 kids attend Texas schools within 2 miles of a
chemical plant. In West Virginia, a school sits directly below a
leaking coal-sludge dam.
HISD and city officials long dismissed the idea of moving the
school as impractical and too costly. Now environmental politics in
Houston are changing. Dogged reporting by the Houston Chronicle and
other media helped spur Mayor Bill White’s administration to crack
down on industrial emissions along the Ship Channel. The recent
leukemia study brought home the importance of clean air in Houston.
Even the Greater Houston Partnership, the nexus of the city’s
big-business community, recently formed an air-quality task force.
Most everyone—local residents, teachers, and even some city
officials—concedes that, in retrospect, the school shouldn’t have been
built beside three chemical plants (although an HISD spokesman did
defend the location of the school, saying “We build schools where
people live”). Yet the community seems resigned to it. Chavez offers a
stern test of the city’s new environmental ethos. Moving the school
seems unlikely. Parras acknowledges it won’t be easy, but he hopes the
city will soon gather the political will to rectify what he calls one
of Houston’s worst environmental injustices.
The decision to build Chavez High at its present site was made in
1992, when the school district purchased the property. The district
bought the more than 36-acre site for a bargain price, $4 million
cash. Nearby neighborhoods needed a new high school to relieve
overcrowded Milby High, which has educated East End kids for decades.
The district decided to place the new school on the largest patch of
land available in the area. Once the process began, no public official
or community leader could muster the will to stop it. Parras and other
activists were continually told it was a “done deal.”
For years, HISD maintained the school was safe. In the few news
stories written about Chavez, district spokesman Terry Abbott rebuffed
criticism of the air quality. He said the district performed two
independent studies of the air and soil that turned up no
environmental problems.
That’s not entirely accurate. The district completed at least three
environmental assessments of the site, only one of which examined air
quality, according to documents obtained by the Observer through
open-records laws. HISD contracted for an initial environmental
assessment in January 1992. The report concluded that the site
contained numerous instances of industrial ground contamination,
including possibly leaking storage tanks. That report didn’t mention
air pollution.
HISD performed its only air-quality study of the site in spring 1992,
according to district records. A consulting firm took air samples
every other day for three weeks—eight years before the school opened.
The study compared air samples from the Chavez site with samples from
J.R. Harris Elementary School, which sits several miles away and is
three blocks from a refinery. (Both the school and refinery were built
decades ago.) The report concluded that the air at Harris was slightly
more polluted, so the Chavez site posed little danger. The report
noted that few toxics were detected in the air at the Chavez
location—just a whiff of benzene. (Oddly, butadiene isn’t mentioned in
the report.) The study did find elevated levels in the air of
1,1,1,2-tetrachloroethane, a toxic chemical used in degreasers and
paint removers that’s rarely produced in the United States anymore. |
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Comment: Oh my, just a chem quickie is
ok?
HISD conducted one more study, in early 1998, before construction
began on the school. The report focused almost exclusively on ground
contamination, or lack thereof. It found no measurable toxins in the
soil—the lingering ground pollution found in 1992 had presumably been
removed. Air quality wasn’t addressed. In fact, the report doesn’t
even mention the three chemical facilities nearby, not even in the
section titled, “Current and Past Surrounding Land Use.” At the time,
the Texas Petrochemicals plant, according to state data, was releasing
108,000 pounds of butadiene a year.
HISD concluded that air at Chavez was safe. In 1996, the district
moved forward with plans to build two new high schools: one on the
west side, one on the east side. The west-side school, bordering the
Anglo suburb of Katy, would soon be surrounded by tony new
subdivisions with nary a smokestack in sight. The east-side school
wouldn’t be so fortunate.
Parras grew up in West Texas—his mother still lives in Big Spring. He
moved to Houston in 1969 and served as an organizer and rep for the
American Federation of State and Municipal Employees for many years.
His affable nature makes him a natural organizer. After brief sojourns
to New Mexico (for union work) and Louisiana (for environmental
activism), Parras returned to the East End in 1997 to teach in the
environmental law and justice program at Texas Southern University,
and to advocate for reduced pollution along the Ship Channel. On his
drive to work, Parras sometimes passed the sign announcing the site of
soon-to-be-built Chavez High School. Like many in the community, he
didn’t take much notice. His wife, Ana, finally asked him why he
wasn’t upset about the location of the new school. Parras began to
investigate and soon was one of the school’s most vocal opponents.
Parras found a handful of other east-side community leaders who
were equally upset. Working with a nonprofit called Mothers for Clean
Air, a fledgling coalition began protesting the school site, printing
T-shirts, writing letters, and calling district officials to complain.
The going was tough. The communities in the East End have long been
apathetic to environmental pollution, and everybody acknowledged the
need for a new school. In July 1998, HISD broke ground on Chavez.
“High School Groundbreaking fulfills 30-year Wish,” read the Chronicle
headline the next day. The story recounted the area’s long fight for a
new school, but made no mention of air pollution.
Parras couldn’t get help from national Latino rights groups. He says
the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the League
of United Latin American Citizens both refused, saying they weren’t
focused on environmental issues. When the district announced it would
name the school after Cesar Chavez, Parras reached out to the group
Chavez famously founded, the United Farm Workers. They wouldn’t get
involved either, Parras says. He found the refusal ironic, since
Chavez led the fight to ban certain pesticides and other dangerous
toxins.
For their part, school district officials have long argued that they
had no other place to put Chavez. HISD contends there was a dearth of
available land close enough to the community the school serves. (HISD
Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra’s office didn’t respond to several
interview requests for this story.) Parras thinks that’s nonsense. He
even has another site picked out—an old bus depot owned by the
district a few miles to the southwest. Parras suggested—and still
hopes—that HISD move the bus depot to the Chavez site and place the
high school a few miles farther away from the Ship Channel. “They
always try to say it’s no big deal because everyone lives there, too,”
Parras says. “My point has always been: [The kids] don’t have to be
there—you put them there. People can buy houses wherever they want.
But you put [the kids] there.”
After Chavez opened in 2000, sentiment finally stirred in the
community to relocate the school, or at least do something about the
air pollution. In 2000 and early 2001, Parras and Mothers for Clean
Air began hosting well-attended community meetings. Officials from the
Environmental Protection Agency attended some meetings to tell
residents how to spot chemical releases and gather their own air
samples. For a brief moment, Parras thought, a community that had
traditionally reacted to air quality with a shrug was about to effect
change.
Then the area’s congressman, Democrat Gene Green, stepped in. He wrote
a scathing letter dated September 20, 2001, to EPA Region 6 officials.
Green was especially irate that EPA had aided Mothers for Clean Air.
“[I]t is my understanding that your office has been providing
technical and financial assistance to non-community groups who believe
there is some type of emissions problem,” Green wrote. “I find the
actions of your office both outrageous and disturbing from a
public
health stand point.... Too many people worked for too many years to
get this school built to now have it damaged by uninformed,
non-community groups.” |
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Comment: Her action do scathe public
health with twisted words.
Asked about the letter, Green says, “I met with their group a number
of times, and I said, ‘The problem you have is that the community
supports this school.’ And that’s what generated that letter. The
neighborhoods around where Cesar Chavez is now were very supportive of
the school. At that time, except for Juan, they didn’t bring in any of
the local community.” Green says he’s asked that the House Committee
on Energy and Commerce to hold a field hearing in Houston on the
health effects of toxins in the air. He was reluctant to endorse
moving the school without more air pollution data. “Is there some way
we can mitigate [the air pollution] without closing the school? I’m
not big on closing the school because it took literally decades to get
a new school in East End,” he says. |
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Comment: Twist their minds and add
gobbygook.
After Green’s letter, though, EPA folks stopped coming to meetings.
Support for Parras’ coalition began to melt away, and as kids began
attending school at Chavez, apathy once again settled over the
community. “I would go to people and ask, ‘How come you’re not
fighting this anymore?’” Parras says. “They’d say, ‘It’s a done
deal.’”
Building a school next to petrochemical facilities does offer one
possible advantage—you can get the companies to pay for it. At least
that’s what HISD tried to do. The city set up a Tax Increment
Reinvestment Zone around the school and chemical facilities.
Typically, governments use these zones to spur growth in poor or
undeveloped areas. A municipality will build public infrastructure—a
park or trail or, in this case, a school. If land values rise, the
increase in property taxes the city earns is reinvested in the area to
spark development. In this case, whatever increased property taxes the
city earned from the chemical plants would pay off the nearly $90
million debt for the school.
That was the plan. Problem was, with just the school and petrochemical
plants in the zone, there was no place for development. Worse yet,
beginning in 1997, the property values of the chemical facilities
began a steady decline. The three companies successfully appealed to
the Harris County Appraisal District at least eight times to have
their land value reduced, sometimes as much as 40 to 50 percent,
according to county records. Their combined taxable value fell from
$391 million to nearly $190 million. In seven years, the zone around
Chavez hasn’t earned the school district any money. It’s the only one
of Houston’s 22 tax reinvestment zones that hasn’t brought in a single
cent. |
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Comment: Unfair advantages to corporation
that affect the people directly in this manner should be illegal and
liable.
Seven years after Chavez opened, the effect of airborne toxins on
students’ health is difficult to ascertain. The school nurse refuses
to discuss student health, citing privacy concerns. Several teachers
are hesitant to talk with a reporter, and Principal Dan DeLeon
declined an interview request. But mounting evidence suggests that
exposure to high levels of butadiene and benzene can have debilitating
long-term effects on developing bodies.
A block away from Chavez, a short residential street dead-ends into
the Texas Petrochemicals plant fence line. Huge, golf-ball shaped
chemical storage tanks rise behind the houses. Residents say releases
from the plant occur several times a week from the nearby flame
tower’s burn-offs that rattle windows and light up the night sky. “You
see that flame, it’s like daylight here,” says Juan M. Amaya, 70,
who’s lived next to the plants for 10 years. Every morning, Amaya
washes a layer of bright brown dust off his pickup. He says his wife
has developed a terrible cough since they’ve lived on the street. His
neighbors describe respiratory and skin problems, including psoriasis.
Across the street, Jose Rodriguez wakes in the early morning to begin
his route as a dump-truck driver. The smells early in the morning are
almost unbearable, he says. Since they moved here 14 years ago,
Rodriguez says, his wife, Sandra, has developed asthma. There are
other stories of leukemia in the area. (The best-documented case is
that of Valentin Marroquin, who developed leukemia after attending J.R.
Harris Elementary. He’s now in remission.)
It’s difficult to determine exactly how much benzene and butadiene
lurks in the air near Chavez. The three plants next to the school
spewed 114,806 pounds of butadiene in 2005, according to the EPA’s
Toxic Release Inventory. Texas Petrochemicals, the closest plant to
the school, emitted 104,540 pounds of butadiene. Houston’s Bureau of
Air Quality Control consistently measures concentrations of butadiene
around the Texas Petrochemicals plant above 1 part per billion over
the course of a year. Those levels could be dangerous. A 2002 EPA
study on mice found that extended respiratory exposure to butadiene
above 0.9 ppb can cause serious health problems.
It’s worth noting that releases of butadiene can begin to dissipate
within two hours on clear days, and how much exposure kids at Chavez
receive on a given day depends on wind direction. The recent
University of Texas study, however, offers stark warnings. The report
found that children living in areas with heavy butadiene
concentrations saw a 40 percent higher risk for all forms of leukemia.
The city health department will soon begin a door-to-door health study
in the East End that may better document the prevalence of leukemia
and other forms of cancer. |
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Comment: Implementation of treatment
plan.
In 2005, the Chronicle published an investigative series by reporter
Dina Cappiello called “In Harm’s Way.” The paper set up its own air
monitors in some of Houston’s most polluted neighborhoods and found
dangerous levels of toxins with potentially devastating health
effects. While East End communities remain apathetic, the series and
subsequent articles by Cappiello did have an effect at City Hall. The
depth of the series’ political impact was such that, when interviewed
for this story, City Council member Carol Alvarado, who represents the
East End and Chavez High School, even invokes the series’ name. “The
debate is over. We’re in harm’s way,” she says. With little
enforcement coming from the state, Mayor White’s administration has
used what legal remedies it has to crack down on industrial emissions
along the Ship Channel.
In late 2005, the city convinced Texas Petrochemicals to sign a
butadiene-reduction agreement for its plant beside Chavez. After the
agreement, the plant reduced butadiene emissions by 58 percent,
according to city officials. Several recent releases at the plant,
including a major upset last September, undid much of that progress.
Under the agreement, Texas Petrochemicals has until the end of 2007 to
bring its butadiene air concentrations below 1 ppb.
Meanwhile, the politics of air pollution in Houston continues to
shift. The city is working to pass a benzene-reduction plan that would
target Harris County’s top seven benzene producers. (The plan has come
under attack from mayors and
state lawmakers outside Houston.)
Alvarado says she, too, is serious about the problem. Alvarado grew up
not far from the future site of Chavez High, but Parras and others in
the community have long been frustrated with what they say is her
inaction on air pollution. Parras says Alvarado refused to help him
fight the location of Chavez High. Asked about the school after a
recent council meeting, she says, “[Air quality] does need to be a
criteria in the future for new schools. In the future, schools should
not be in a 2-mile proximity of a chemical facility.” She has no
legislation pending on the subject and says she would have to research
whether the city or state or district can determine placement of
schools. Asked if she thinks the school should be moved, she hedges,
“That’s a discussion we have to have with HISD. You have to look at
who pays for it.” |
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Comment: She says it all, stall them
while telling them money talks. She's all self service or this school
would have been moved long ago, or better yet, the three factories
closed down and moved. As much damage as they are doing, they should
pay for all of it including all the harm they have done in
retribution.
For Parras, it’s obvious—or should be obvious—that schools shouldn’t
be built in such places. Late on a crisp February afternoon, Parras
wraps up his toxic tour. He walks down off the Chavez bleachers and
heads toward the parking lot. Before leaving, he points out one of the
new additions to the Chavez campus—a course for the cross-country
team. The trail cuts through the woods and leads north from the
school, above the pipeline easement, and toward the flame towers,
where students run along the fence line. |
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