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ABOUT THE STUDY The Houston Chronicle tested the air in public…
ABOUT THE STUDY
The Houston Chronicle tested the air in public parks, playgrounds and neighborhoods bordering some of the state’s largest industrial plants and found the air in the Manchester area so laden with toxic chemicals that it was dangerous to breathe.
The Chronicle collected air samples on three days last summer in four communities in Houston, Baytown, Freeport and Port Neches. The test was carried out with the same equipment used by plant workers to detect hazardous chemicals in the air, and the samples were analyzed for 18 toxic substances by the University of Texas School of Public Health.
The results of the Chronicle’s investigation show that the region’s refining and petrochemical industries are in some places contributing to what leading experts on toxic air pollution would consider a risky load of “air toxics,” substances that can cause cancer, kidney and liver damage, or other serious health effects in places where people live and work, and where children play.
WHAT WE FOUND
In the study of four neighborhoods, the Chronicle found three air toxics – 1,3-butadiene, benzene and chloroform – in concentrations higher than the EPA’s screening level.
At 49 of the 100 locations where the newspaper hung air monitors, attaching them to structures such as windowsills, clotheslines, swing sets and Christmas light strands, the quantities of up to five different chemicals would have exceeded levels considered safe in other states with stricter guidelines for air toxics. Unlike the more well-known air pollutants that cause asthma and respiratory effects, the compounds found at elevated levels by the Chronicle have all been linked to cancer. More specifically:
· Levels of the human carcinogen benzene were so high in Manchester and Port Neches that one scientist said living there would be like “sitting in traffic 24-7.”
· Eighty-four readings measured by the Chronicle were high enough that they would trigger a full-scale federal investigation if these communities were hazardous waste sites.
· Some compounds detected by the Chronicle, such as the rubber ingredient 1,3-butadiene found at four homes in the Allendale area near Manchester, if inhaled over a lifetime at the concentrations found, could increase a person’s chances of contracting cancer, according to federally determined risk levels. Concentrations here were as much as 20 times higher than federal guidelines used for toxic waste dumps.
`The smell of money’
While industrial plants along the upper Texas coast release some air toxics in greater amounts than plants in any other part of the country, with Harris County leading the nation in benzene and butadiene releases, there has been little outcry.
Part of the reason is cultural. Residents who have lived with and sometimes worked in industry for decades learn to put up with pollution’s effects. Few know exactly what chemicals are in the air they breathe.
Many Houstonians proudly refer to the chemical odor as “the smell of money,” though most don’t have to live with it. Some of the chemicals released by these huge facilities dissipate as they travel away from the plants. Others quickly react with other chemicals in the atmosphere.
For years the risk posed by the fumes that spew from the region’s economic engine have been overshadowed by the region’s other high-profile air pollution problem — lung-damaging smog.
Finally, critics say, the hazards of air toxics are m the very system that Texas uses to protect citizens from the thousands of contaminants released by the state’s industry and traffic every day:
Despite a pollution-monitoring network that is larger than any other in the country, the state’s environmental agency cannot guarantee that at any given time air in specific neighborhoods is safe.
· The state conducts reviews for more than 1,000 air toxics, well over the number the federal government recognized in the 1990 Clean Air Act. But the piecemeal evaluation the state conducts when most companies apply for a permit to release pollution can allow some facilities to contribute to a level of pollution that would make living in the surrounding areas risky.
· And vagueness in the state Clean Air Act, which does not clearly define when air pollution becomes a threat to health, means state officials struggle to punish companies when conditions do become dangerous.
“The state is definitely obscuring the air toxics problems in Texas,” said Jim Tarr, who was an engineer at the Texas Air Control Board when the state system to evaluate risks from air toxics was being developed.
The Chronicle’s study
The Chronicle’s study took place over four consecutive weeks in July and August. Monitors were hung at each location for roughly 72 hours.
The substances that exceeded standards the most often were the chemical building blocks chloroform and benzene, which are used in industrial processes to make dyes, detergents and plastics, and can also come from sewage treatment (chloroform) and traffic and cigarette smoke (benzene).
These two chemicals were found at levels above federal guidelines at nearly half of the 100 sites the newspaper monitored. But only at some locations in Port Neches and Manchester were levels high enough that if breathed over a lifetime, one additional person in 100,000 would get cancer.
POLLUTION CHECK
All four communities had levels of chemicals above standards in other states and above levels used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
to determine whether to thoroughly investigate hazardous waste sites.
The concentrations were also higher than those the EPA estimated in the county in 1996 based solely on industrial emissions. The Chronicle did not count as potential health hazards those sites where measurements were below these so-called background levels, although it doesn’t mean that people weren’t exposed to toxic substances.
“There isn’t really a difference between a benzene molecule that comes off a hazardous waste site, a refinery or a car tailpipe,” said Mark Hansen, chief of the EPA’s toxics enforcement section in Dallas.
Nowhere were the levels higher or more widespread, or the industry connection more clear, than in Manchester and Allendale, two predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods that are located close together in southeast Houston. They are surrounded by industrial plants that release the same air toxics the newspaper found at elevated levels around people’s homes.
For example, at houses on Gober Street in Allendale that back up to the fence of Texas Petrochemicals and Goodyear, concentrations of 1,3-butadiene ranged from 1.11 micrograms per cubic meter to 13.45 micrograms per cubic meter over the three days the Chronicle measured air quality.
The worst air
Of the 23 houses and one park where the Chronicle measured for pollution in the Manchester area, all but three had concentrations of at least one chemical that would raise concern in other states — the most of any area studied.
A dozen houses had more than one chemical that exceeded guidelines used elsewhere to evaluate the risks of air toxics — more homes than in Freeport, Port Neches and Baytown combined.
The levels measured were also higher. In Manchester, the median concentration, or the middle reading for all results, for chloroform was double what it was in Port Neches and Freeport. For benzene, the levels were six times higher along Gober Street than in Freeport and 10 times higher than the average concentration in Baytown. When compared with the benzene standard considered acceptable in New Jersey, the median concentration in Manchester would exceed it by more than 12 times.
The companies respond
The Davila house, one of four in the area with high concentrations of 1,3-butadiene, is next to Texas Petrochemicals, which released the third-largest amount of the rubber-making chemical into the air in Texas in 2002.
Industries in ZIP code 77017, which includes Gober Street, were responsible for 32 percent of all 1,3-butadiene emissions in Harris County that year, according to federal data.
Goodyear, which is next to Texas Petrochemicals, also emits butadiene, but the Chronicle’s research was unable to determine the source of the chemical detected on the monitors.
“The data provided is consistent with what we know, what we communicate to the public and within permitted emissions levels,” read a written statement from Texas Petrochemicals provided to the Chronicle.
Goodyear, Mobil Chemical and Valero Refining, all possible sources of the chemicals detected in the area, had similar responses. Lyondell-Citgo, which operates a refinery that releases large amounts of benzene just to the north of these houses, had much the same reaction when it was told that chemicals were found in high concentrations along the street.
“The … data in your report appears to be similar with that obtained from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality monitors and consistent with our understanding and message we communicate to the public,” read the Lyondell-Citgo letter, which was faxed in October.
But the company said the state agency in charge of enforcing Texas and federal pollution laws found nothing wrong.
“A recent TCEQ fence-line monitoring study at our facility showed no adverse health effects from any of the chemicals monitored, including benzene,” it said.
Plant managers in Baytown sent a letter to local officials, in advance of the Chronicle’s publishing its report, touting pollution reductions.
Some scientists who reviewed the data said industry played a role in the elevated concentrations and were surprised that the levels were not higher, given the number of plants in the area and how much pollution they release. State data collected nearby in recent years has shown that they can be worse.
“There’s no doubt that there is an industrial connection in my mind,” said Tarr, who owns a private environmental consulting firm in California. “The predominant direction of the wind was out of the north-northeast, right across the Lyondell-Citgo refinery.”
Other researchers were more cautious and said the elevated levels detected by the newspaper were only a snapshot that warranted further study.
State admits shortcomings
Internal documents obtained by the Chronicle, and numerous research papers, including one commissioned by the TCEQ, show that the state has known about the system’s imperfections. It has admitted some of its levels are wrong, given new research on the chemicals’ effects.
“We built a system and sort of lived with it,” said TCEQ Commissioner Ralph Marquez. “Perhaps we waited too long to say there is enough new science out there to do things a little different.”
The problems became apparent after the TCEQ accused several oil and chemical companies of contributing to unhealthy levels of air pollution. Letters drafted by the companies in 1997 and 2001 argued that the state couldn’t punish them because they had gotten approval to release these quantities. The agency’s internal counsel then sought outside legal help.
Critics blast loopholes
When the state reviews the potential for air toxics to affect health and property, it is usually considering the impact of only one smokestack, boiler or unit, not what the emissions of an entire plant, or multiple plants, can do to an area, according to state environmental officials.
The Question
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