Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  “My campaign has always been, it could be cleaner,” he said. “It could be done safer. Our health could be protected. The companies should open up. Let us know what’s going on. Let us make informed decisions.” We made a pair of right turns onto roads flanked by pipelines.

  “In fairness,” he said, “they’re doing a little better.”

  He stopped the truck. We had come to the Carver Terrace housing projects, a set of two-story brick buildings facing the Motiva refinery. Kelley pointed down a pathway.

  “I was born right in there,” he told me. “First floor.”

  He twisted around in his seat and pointed at a small, deserted playground across the street. “That old swing is the one I used,” he said.

  Several hundred yards beyond the playground were the storage tanks of the Motiva refinery, and beyond them the refinery itself, a jungle of pipes and towers, steam plumes and winking flares. The breeze carried a rancid aftertaste.

  “We would breathe this air,” said Kelley, staring at the refinery. “We used to joke about it. My mother would say, ‘That’s money you smell.’ And we’d say, ‘No, that’s death!’”

  “I guess it’s both,” I said.

  He sighed. “Yeah. It’s both. But it wasn’t our money.”

  It was an irony of Kelley’s work. With one breath he called the refineries a “cancer” that needed to be cut out of the city, and with the next he lobbied for their owners to hire more locals.

  “Look which way all the traffic’s going,” he said as we passed the gate of the Motiva plant. It was the end of the shift, and all the cars were headed out of town. “These people work here, but they don’t live here.” Kelley wanted jobs for West Port Arthur. If it was going to suffer the refineries’ effects, shouldn’t it also share in the wealth? In an area so dominated by industry, half the point of environmental activism was just to get a piece of the action.

  On a bright weekend afternoon, I went for a run. Valero shone in the sun as I approached it at a blistering saunter. Seen like this, with time to look, it was somehow hypnotic in its tangles of silver and rust, its smokestacks and flares and steam plumes. Deep inside its chambers and towers, the entire roster of hydrocarbons was dividing itself into fractions of kerosene, gasoline, and jet fuel, and being cracked and catalyzed, cousin by cousin. I peered sweatily at the atmospheric distillation unit and the vacuum distillation unit as I passed, at the catalytic cracker and the hydrocracker, at the hydrotreater and the coker, at the catalytic reformer—not that I knew which was which.

  No less than with Chernobyl, it is excruciatingly difficult to make definitive statements about the health effects of Port Arthur’s environment. But there is at least one clear effect, which is that many people here—not just the environmental activists—simply assume the worst.

  A taco truck was parked at the southeast corner of the Valero plant, just outside the fence from the resplendent steel sphere of a storage tank. The truck’s owner was a genial Mexican immigrant who told me he had seen the plant release flares so large that he could feel the heat on his back, even here outside the fence. Through the window in the truck, I asked him if he thought the air from the plant was bad.

  Of course it’s bad, he said. It smells terrible. Feo was the word he used—Spanish for “ugly.” You get all kinds of things from that air, he said. Cancer.

  When I suggested that he find some other place than the Valero fence line to park his taco truck, he laughed.

  You’ve got to make a living, he said, and handed me a taco, al pastor, on the house.

  Then there was Ray, a refinery worker who struck up a conversation with me at a bar downtown. He had worked at the BASF petrochemical plant for twenty-two years.

  “Lemme tell you something,” he said, drunkenly waving a plastic cup of Boone’s Farm. “By the time I’m fifty, I know—I don’t guess, I know—I’m gonna have some kind of cancer. Everybody at that plant knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt.” Ray was also of the opinion that a terrorist attack on one refinery could lead to a catastrophic chain reaction that would level fifteen plants between BASF and downtown. “This place is a time bomb,” he said with some joviality.

  In Port Arthur even the most ardent civic booster may shift seamlessly onto such topics. Five miles north of downtown, at the convention center, I met Peggy and Laura, two friendly ladies in charge of the Majestic Krewe of Aurora’s annual Mardi Gras Ball. Peggy was such a loyal daughter of Port Arthur that she was still nursing a grudge against Janis Joplin (who grew up here) for once having talked trash about the local high school. But I barely had to let it drop that I was a writer interested in the environment before Peggy took up the cudgel.

  “Cancer!” she exclaimed. “We’ve got lots of cancer around here. It’s the refineries. And the incinerator. You know about the incinerator, out by the highway? Where they’re burning all that nerve gas? Why, they burn all kinds of horrible things out there. That stuff is going to get into the aquifer,” she said. She sounded almost proud.

  But I wasn’t here to follow cancer down the rabbit hole. I could have spent a lifetime trying to nail down what portion of the city’s elevated cancer load was real and what was merely assumed—not to mention the health effects of a citywide assumption of cancer. Leave it to the epidemiologists. What I wanted to see was how the landscape and culture of Southeast Texas had been shaped by more than a century spent as Big Oil’s ground zero. An economic and cultural ecosystem of sorts had been created when the Lucas Gusher spat itself onto the earth, one that persisted to this day.

  “Would you like to come to the ball?” Laura asked. She had tickets in her hand.

  By the time I returned to the convention center the following night, it had been transformed into a fantasy of glitter and noise. Smiling men and women wearing tuxedos and evening gowns flowed by in a cackling stream, bringing a palpable enthusiasm to the project of getting drunk.

  My friends Scott and Lorena had come out from Houston for the occasion, and although we had tried to spruce ourselves up, we stuck out. It turns out there is no way not to stick out in a convention center full of people dressed as harlequins and playing cards. This year’s theme was “The Games People Play.”

  It was a party fueled by beer and oil. The projected logos of its sponsors bejeweled the ballroom walls. Both Budweiser and Bud Light were represented, as well as the Valero Port Arthur Refinery, Total Petrochemicals, BASF, Sabina Petrochemicals—all the major players. They were here to celebrate with the city’s upper crust, the inheritors of the economy created on Spindletop. People who I doubted lived in West Port Arthur. Dance music pounded from speakers hanging overhead. Green lasers shot out over the crowd from the stage, tracing twitching planes in the fog-machine atmosphere. It was hard not to think of the “feverish and excited” scene described by Beaumont’s Daily Enterprise in the first weeks of 1901. I turned around to see a young woman in an elaborate Cinderella costume. The Queen of Diamonds? Then Scott was there, holding three aluminum bottles of Bud Select.

  “You must not miss the tableau,” Laura had told us. And now it had begun, an elaborate ceremony that was most likely descended from pre-Columbian human sacrifice rituals, and that had now been retasked for the apportionment of social standing among high-status members of the Krewe. To validate this status, chosen individuals would appear in male-female pairs, draped in gaudy costumes conforming to the ball’s theme—in this case, games. Duly announced, the couple would then parade around the ballroom on small chariots pulled by young men in maroon vests.

  The first couple appeared. I don’t recall whether they were dressed as Yahtzee or as craps, only that the man was equipped with a large, feathery headdress and a suit of blazing sequins, and the woman with a massive corona of flowered ruffles. The couples kept coming, each dressed as a board game or a card game or a game show. It took hours. The crowd thronged around them, a riot in formal wear, waving madly to catch the plastic beads and party favors being thrown by the couple of the moment, who
would eventually ascend to side stages where they would pose for the remaining duration of the tableau, feathery demigods on display.

  Motiva was in the house. Soon to be the largest refinery in North America, it had sponsored a couple dressed as the board game Mousetrap. After seeing the snaking insanity of the refinery itself, it seemed almost too good to be true that Motiva would come to a party dressed as a Rube Goldberg machine. I got up from our table to get a closer look. Lady Gaga beat her fist against my chest. A quartet of dancers gyrated across the stage in the distance. Small Frisbees with blinking LED lights flew in parabolas over the crowd. The Motiva queen showed her teeth to the ceiling. Beads exploded from her hands, filling the air with plastic shrapnel. Through the haze, I saw the silhouette of a young man in a perfect cowboy hat, his profile seething in the flare of a spotlight.

  Scott and I found Laura on one of the side stages, utterly transformed from the day before. Then, she had been a short, unprepossessing woman in jeans and sensible shoes. Now she was dressed as Wheel of Fortune, a Pat Sajak fever dream of sequins and feathers, with an enormous model of the wheel rising from her shoulders. She was ten feet tall, an Aztec high priestess of TV game shows, with a floppy BANKRUPT wedge running down her leg. One of the first out of the gate, she had been standing in presentation for upward of an hour, next to a nebula of plumage that was a woman dressed as Monopoly.

  Beneath her towering outfit, Laura’s smile had frozen into a rictus of determination. I was concerned she might collapse.

  “You look amazing!” I shouted over the music.

  “Thank you!” she screamed.

  “I don’t know how you can stay on your feet with that costume!” I said.

  “It’s much lighter than it looks!” she warbled, and took a swig from a bottle of water.

  The tableau was reaching its climax. Shafts of light exploded from a giant mirror ball. Laser-light unicorns galloped across the back wall of the ballroom. A king and queen were announced, and all hell broke loose. Confetti swirled in drifts. A conga line fought its way through the hurricane. An elderly woman danced alone in circles, her arms raised in triumph, or surrender.

  Within two years of the Lucas Gusher, overdrilling bled Spindletop dry. The rush was over—or rather it moved on, spreading out to new oil strikes elsewhere in the state and country. Later, in the 1920s, a new wave of exploration led to a second boom on Spindletop. Then, in the 1950s and ’60s, the land was mined for sulfur and salt brine, causing the ground to subside in broad depressions, as if letting out a great sigh of geological exhaustion. The forest of derricks was long gone. The place was left empty. Today it is a range of sand and scrub, dotted with the wreckage of oil production past.

  On the south side of Beaumont, between Highway 287 and the Lamar University driving range, I went looking for Lucas No. 1. It was raining when I got there. On a wide, soggy lawn, a stone obelisk stood cold and lonely in the damp. I read the engraving on its base:

  ON THIS SPOT, ON THE TENTH DAY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, A NEW ERA IN CIVILIZATION BEGAN.

  But someone should carve that obelisk a footnote. This was not, in fact, the spot where it all happened. The obelisk had been moved from the original site when the ground began to subside. This was merely the front lawn of the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum.

  It’s not a bad museum, otherwise. They have built an entire replica boomtown village, and next to the obelisk, there is a life-size replica of the Lucas No. 1 oil derrick, fitted with a large nozzle, as if from a fire hose. For a hundred dollars, I was told, you can have this nozzle turned on, and it will spray water at the same pressure and to the same height as the original Lucas Gusher. Oil companies sometimes bring new hires there to celebrate.

  As for the actual Lucas Gusher, it’s about a mile south of here, on private land. The Spindletop oil field has been designated a national historic landmark, but it’s also designated Authorized Personnel Only.

  The oil that once came from Spindletop now comes from more remote oilfields, or from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico, or is imported by tanker from overseas. One day it may come, by pipeline, from Alberta. In any case, the refineries of Port Arthur are tied less to the people living outside their fence lines than they are to the distant sources that keep them humming.

  But in Southeast Texas, oil sustains more than refineries. Its nourishment spreads out through circle upon circle of lesser players that cluster and compete at the oasis of its wealth, living off its power and success—and even off its disasters.

  On January 23, 2010, an oil tanker called the Eagle Otome entered Port Arthur’s ship channel, the Sabine-Neches Waterway, with 570,000 barrels of crude oil on board, destined for the ExxonMobil refinery in Beaumont. To make its delivery, the tanker would have to transit the length of the ship channel, a thin, man-made strait that runs inland from the Gulf, along the frontage of downtown Port Arthur, and then up toward Beaumont. The channel measures not even three hundred yards wide at points, and the navigable waterway—the part deep enough for ships—is even narrower. It is a hard needle for any large vessel to thread, and the Eagle Otome was more than eight hundred feet long.

  While the age of gushers is long past, there is still occasion in Port Arthur for the unplanned flow of petroleum. As the Eagle Otome came around a mild bend in the channel, it swerved off course, fishtailing slowly down the channel as it approached the wharf in downtown Port Arthur. The tanker—nearly as long as the channel was wide—skewed across the waterway, colliding with a vessel tied up at the wharf and obstructing the path of an oncoming towboat. The towboat, pushing a pair of 250-foot-long barges, had no choice but to plow directly into the Eagle Otome, ripping open a neat gash in the oil tanker’s hull. In what seems like a great stroke of luck, though, only 2 percent of the tanker’s oil spilled through the opening.

  On the other hand, we’re talking about 2 percent of more than 23 million gallons of cargo. It was the largest oil spill Texas had seen in two decades.

  As with an oil find, so with an oil spill: for as long as it lasts, it is a source of work. On Spindletop, that meant on and off for decades. In the case of the Eagle Otome, it meant a little over two weeks. There were cleanup companies to deal with the spilled oil, and tugs to tow the damaged ships away for repairs. There was the media, trying to puzzle out the causes of the accident and covering the closure of the channel. A more catastrophic incident might have sustained them for a month or more. (As for me, it was just dumb luck that I happened to show up in Port Arthur only a couple of weeks after it happened.)

  An oil spill is a boon of sorts even to environmental activists, whether as additional motivation or as convincing, public proof of an issue’s importance. The threat of poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas from the spill prompted a short evacuation of downtown Port Arthur—a fact that had already become another arrow for Hilton Kelley to shoot at the refinery companies.

  It might not be the most efficient way to extract value from oil, but the fact remains that a spill is not only a spill. It’s a massive carcass, which we gather around to eat.

  At my hotel, the parking lot was crowded with trucks bearing the logos of companies like Clean Harbors and Oil Mop LLC. I was not the only one who had chosen the Ramada: the Coast Guard had set up its spill response headquarters in one of the conference rooms. Khaki-wearing men strode in and out of the lobby with an air of can-do seriousness. At its height, the cleanup had put something like two thousand people to work, but now things were winding down, and the mood was almost festive.

  “I hear you’re leaving us,” said the hotel manager to a passing cleanup contractor.

  “Well, maybe we’ll be back,” said the contractor.

  “For the next oil spill?” called a woman from behind the check-in desk.

  In the empty hotel restaurant, I met with Jeremy Hansen and Bryan Markland, two well-scrubbed Coast Guard officials working on the cleanup effort. “You’ve got all these local cleanup contractors poised to jump,” Hansen said.
“It’s cutthroat.”

  Markland told me that cleanup contractors often begin their work even without being hired, confident that if they do the work, someone will have to pay for it. And so skimmer boats materialize, hungry for oil, and lines of floating containment boom sprout to cordon it off, and the cleanup’s economics bloom.

  It is discouraging, though, to reflect on how little even an effective cleanup can achieve. “Most oil spills, if you get more than 15 percent of the oil recovered, you’re doing good,” Markland said. “We think we’re up in the 30 percent range on this.” The rest of a spill, he told me, simply evaporates or disperses to what he called an unnoticeable sheen. Which is to say, most of the cleanup is actually done by nature—or isn’t done at all.

  Hansen was sitting back, his arms crossed. He looked a little mischievous.

  “Did you see the Port Arthur slogan?” he asked.

  I laughed. I had seen it, on the website of the Port Arthur Chamber of Commerce. It might have been the most ill-advised civic motto of all time:

  Port Arthur: Where Oil and Water Do Mix. Beautifully.

  Hansen smiled and shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a good thing they don’t,” he said. “Or it would be a lot harder to clean up.”

  Then there was Rhonda, the grumpy pelican lady. She was in charge of rescuing and rehabilitating birds oiled by the spill. A bustling woman in a salmon-colored shirt exploding with pockets, she struck me as deeply unsentimental about her work, and she didn’t hide her annoyance that I was interested in it. Had I been naive to imagine that the bird savior of record would share a little enthusiasm for bird saving? But Rhonda was no simple bird lover. She was the director of Wildlife Response Services LLC—just one more contractor providing post-spill services.