A catastrophic storm has hit Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city and home to the largest refining and petrochemical complex in the United States. The crisis began on Friday when Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Rockport, Texas. It was the most powerful hurricane to strike the state in more than 50 years. Much of the damage has been caused by the massive rainfall, with parts of Texas already receiving 30 inches of rain. That could top 50 inches in the coming days. Entire highways in Houston are now underwater. The storm has caused five reported deaths, but the death toll is expected to rise. Thousands of people are still stranded in their homes, waiting to be rescued. Meanwhile, the city of Dallas prepares to turn its convention center into a mega-shelter to host 5,000 evacuees.
Bryan Parras talking:
Buffalo Bayou, let’s start there. That is one of the—the iconic bayou of Houston, Texas. And it crosses from the west side of Houston to the east side of Houston, and then becomes the Houston Ship Channel as it empties out into Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. But we have seen already extensive flooding along the bayous on the west side. And my concern is where I live on the east side, because of the many, many petrochemical facilities, storage tanks, and other hazardous sites that line that same bayou for 30 or 40 miles.
So, on normal rain events, we know that these facilities, which are decades old, have situations where they have to shut down to prevent and avoid these catastrophic explosions and events. Unfortunately, it happens time and time again. So we are very vigilant about keeping an eye on these facilities because they are often not penalized for doing that either, and do nothing to mitigate these situations from happening over and over and over again.
So Friday, we were out just checking some of these facilities and other sites that we are also concerned about. And there was an event, at Texas Petrochemical, I believe, where there was a flare event happening. And later that night, there were for hours, really, really strong chemical odors from East Houston all the way to even the downtown area. And this was something that was discussed and talked about on social media, and not talked about, not discussed on the news here in Houston.
Now, we did hear later that all of the facilities, all of the refineries went into voluntary shutdown mode. And when that happens, they often have to go through the process of burning off these excess chemicals. But it is a dirty burn. So you can see actually the black smoke, and that’s what we captured in the pictures and the video. Unfortunately, that adds thousands of pounds of cancer-causing chemicals to the air.
So there’s a very well-known Superfund site underwater with dioxin.
It is the San Jacinto Waste Pits. And a good friend of ours, Jackie, has been doing some work in that area. It is near Baytown, near one of the largest refineries in the country owned by Exxon. There is also Chevron down the road. And this bayou, the San Jacinto bayou, is just another vein of water that pushes out into Galveston Bay.
And there was this old legacy pollutants from a paper mill that has sort of just left their toxins in the ground. And eventually, it was flooded. And there it remains. And the EPA and other agencies are in the process of cleaning that up. But as they go through their long, lengthy process of doing that, we have had several rain events. And each time we have a rain event, this contamination is being spread into communities, homes, neighborhoods, and further exposing more and more people.
And we know that we have elevated levels of cancers all along these areas. There have been many reports to show increased rates of childhood leukemia if you live within 2 miles of the Houston Ship Channel, for example. So the information is out there. We know that these chemicals are causing cancers and other life-debilitating ailments to the people who live adjacent to them.
– ExxonMobil evacuating their workers from the region’s offshore oil drilling platforms in the Gulf, right there off the coast of Houston in Texas, in Galveston and surrounding areas. During Hurricane Katrina and Rita, these drilling platforms that have now been evacuated, spilled more than 700,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf there.
I haven’t heard of any leak yet. But we do know that they did evacuate all of the offshore workers that were in the path of the storm. And we know there has been less production here in the region. Houston is a huge, huge center for producing oil and gas for the rest of the country.
the Houston Ship Channel and refining area receives oil and gas from as far away as the Dakotas. But we also have production in our own state—Permian Basin, where my parents are from. So there is oil coming from West Texas. A lot of new fracked oil coming into the area. And of course, there is even oil imported from different parts of the world.
And we have been looking at and concerned about even increased plans of bringing oil from places like Alberta, Canada, with the tar sands, and more recently, the Dakota Access Pipeline, sort of helping aid that. We have got so much here already. And I don’t think that they’re doing enough, dealing with the impacts that we already have seen, which is evident right now. There is no reason why we should be having these flaring events that are literally gassing communities along the Ship Channel.
In New Orleans, after Katrina, there was a very, very big lesson learned that the issues of injustice intersected so many different ways. These catastrophes and disasters are not just environmental disasters. They are housing disasters. They are access to services. They are immigration issues of injustice. And so many worker injustices—wage theft—you know, I could go on and on. And so what we’re doing is keeping an eye on all of these very important issues that impact vulnerable and often unheard communities that are exploited in these disasters.
And I know you have talked to Naomi Klein about disaster capitalism. These are sorts of events where predators come in and prey on vulnerable communities. So the elderly, the homeless, even prison populations that are evacuated, not before the storm comes, but as the water is rising in the jail cells. And so, these are the reasons we’re using the hashtag, so that folks can contribute and make aware these vulnerable populations and communities as the storm unfolds.
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Bryan Parras
organizer for the “Beyond Dirty Fuels” campaign with the Sierra Club in Houston, Texas. He is the co-founder of environmental justice group t.e.j.a.s.
— source democracynow.org 2017-08-28